Sir Augustus Frazer's Waterloo Letters

Since we are heading towards a certain bicentennial, it seems appropriate to publish this. These are scans taken from the Christmas 1945 issue of the Illustrated London News, featuring letters extracted from the Journal of the Campaign in 1815 by Sir Augustus Frazer, who commanded the Royal Horse Artillery at Waterloo.

The full Journal has now been republished, though it existed only in manuscript form in 1945, I believe. Whatever, I thought the 70-year-old article was rather nice, complete with the map and the artwork.

Background Artillery Project - A Gift for Timing

Having only very recently scratched together a more-or-less complete set of limbers for my French artillery - after a great many years spent getting around to it - I am somewhat shaken to receive notification today that Franznap are about to produce artillery train teams and personnel in 1/72 white metal. I had mobilised various cut-and-shut Scruby horses and drivers, refurbished Hinton Hunts - all sorts of things. As you might expect, the Franznap offerings are so beautiful it hurts, certainly blow my limber teams out of the water and into the neighbouring bushes, and - in the numbers that I would have needed - not so very expensive.

Oh well. At least mine are Old School [sniff].

Background Artillery Project - Further Progress

Five more French limbers completed and in the boxes - 3 foot artillery and 2 horse. I've kept the size and detail of the photo down, and left the flash switched off, to avoid another roasting from my new chums at TMP.

For the train spotters, the horses and drivers are from Art Miniaturen and Scruby, the limbers from Hinchliffe 20mm, Minifigs S-Range and early Lamming, and the guns - the ones I can identify - are from NapoleoN, Hinchliffe 20 and Scruby.

This expansion necessitated a reorganisation of the artillery box files - I now have a new box labelled MULES & CARTS. Guess what's in that one?

Background Artillery Project - Surprise Landmark

Yesterday I finished off another British artillery caisson, and was very surprised to find that I had one more caisson than I thought, so I have now reached the target of one limber plus one caisson per battery rather earlier than I expected. Here's the contents of the Anglo-Portuguese artillery boxes, as of this morning. The target organisation of my battlefield artillery is: each battery has 2 model guns, 1 limber (with gun attached permanently - no more dropping spare guns on the floor for me), 1 caisson; horse artillery limbers have 4 horses, all other vehicles have 2 horses - it cuts down on the space requirement (and the horse painting!) and you get used to the look of the thing.

Allied Box 1 - 6 British artillery batteries (3 horse, 3 foot), plus a Portuguese howitzer
battery on an odd-sized base (can't remember why), plus the recently-added British
howitzer battery, which is in here only because I ran out of room in Box 3

Box 2 - a limber and a caisson for each of the British batteries (note 4-horse teams
 for RHA limbers), plus a limber (with mules) for the Portuguese howitzers, plus the new
(weird) spare wheel wagon

Box 3 - mostly siege stuff - 3 heavy (18/24pdr) siege batteries, 2 of the iron M1800 10" howitzers,
2 of mortars, 1 rocket battery, plus a couple of those strange S-Range shot-carts

Siege equipment has no limber provision (sieges are chaotic enough without a car park), and all (most?) of the siege pieces have mud-brown bases, with slightly modified sizes and crew sizes.

This is indeed a small and fleeting landmark - the Allies are now a bit ahead in the Infrastructure Race - the French and their Confederation chums have some 8 or 9 half-painted limbers, so there's lots to do. Idle hands are, as we know, the Devil's wassname. However, this has been a quick squint inside some of my boxes; if I am spared, I'll show inside the French boxes when the time is right.

I realise that organised is not the same as good, but it helps a lot. Note to myself: ECW campaign notwithstanding, I really must do some more Peninsular sieges...

In passing, I was reading my Carl Franklin book on artillery last night, and started working out the column length of a RHA troop on the march, with all the guns, ammo carts, service equipment, supply vehicles and animals plus mounted gunners - I didn't finish the calculation, but the numbers were getting very big. If an RHA troop marched past your house, it would be passing by for quite a while.

Background Artillery Project - Spare Wheel Cart

Some more progress in the BAP - no works of art here, certainly, but a pleasing further little shift from the lead mountain into the "infrastructure" box-files.

First item is a little unusual - I'm not sure how such a thing could feature in a game, but it's interesting anyway; no, it's not an early support vehicle for the Tour de France, it is a Napoleonic British Artillery Spare Wheel Cart. Odd contraption comprises a standard gun carriage, adorned with spare wheels and towed behind a standard limber - enough bits and pieces to repair just about anything that might break in an artillery battery on campaign. A British example of the benefits of standardisation in the field. Vehicles here are Hinchliffe 20mm, and the draught team and driver are recognisably Lamming. If you are dubious about the authenticity of such a device, you'll find all the details in Carl Franklin's fine book on the subject.


I also finished off another ammo caisson for the French horse artillery - Lamming caisson with Hinton Hunt motive power this time.

All in the box-files and out of sight now - as I have observed before, sometimes this seems a peculiar end-state for a hobby collection, but no matter.

Background Artillery Project - 5.5" Howitzers

The guns aren't really as blue as the flash makes them appear

I seem to be back to painting my own troops again, so I've been picking away at a few odd things in the queue. Here's a battery of British 5.5" howitzers, ready for the Peninsular siege train. Guns are Hinchliffe 20mm, and the crew are Kennington, who are smart and fit for purpose, and a better match with their NapoleoN colleagues than I expected.

The mud-brown bases for siege units seem a bit drab, but it seemed a good idea once, and it's become a siege-train standard, as has the 4-gunners-per-gun-plus-an-officer-for-the-battery and the reduced-footprint 45mm x 90mm bases. Tradition is everything...

Next up for the Background Artillery Project (BAP) are a British spare wheel cart and yet another British caisson, both with Lamming horses and drivers. Don't hold your breath.

Background Artillery Project - More Siege Guns

Just the thing to rattle the roof-tiles - the brown bases are my house standard for
siege equipment and engineers. I can't remember why, but it's a standard, isn't it?

A little more progress - the British 10-inch howitzers mentioned here back in February have now been painted and have met up with some gunners. The howitzers themselves are from the old Hinchliffe 20mm range, the gunners are mostly by NapoleoN, with a couple of Falcata castings thrown in (including the officer in the bicorn, who might be Captain William "Beefy" Tonkiss of the Royal Artillery).

This little lot represents 2 x 6-gun batteries, which is rather more 10-inch howitzers than the British had available in the Peninsula, but they look nice. The real things were given up as a bad job after the gunners ignored a "maximum elevation" instruction and wrecked the gun carriages at the First Siege of Badajoz - as far as we know, they went into storage until the Crimean War…

A small, sadly routine tale of dommage from the preparation of these: the howitzers are on hybrid carriages, which have little garrison wheels at the rear. One of these little wheels escaped while I was gluing things together, fell on the carpet and disappeared without trace. Remarkable. After the necessary amount of swearing, I cut my losses and assembled the batteries with a gunner standing right in front of the missing wheel, so you can't see that it is not present. I know it's not there, and the gunners probably know, but we won't tell anyone else, will we?

Another step towards getting the fortress out for another siege game; still need a better set of trench sections and a revamp of the rules. I've been sort of hoping that the Picquet-related "Vauban's War" would have appeared by now, but no sign of it yet. I shall hash on with my own ex-Chris Duffy efforts.

A Useful Oddity – the Scruby Artillery Horse

More on the Ongoing Background Artillery Project (OBAP)

I’m working away to get a bit more progress on my dreadful backlog of Napoleonic limbers -  especially those of the French and their allies – which always nags away at me, and takes up space in the project boxes which could be used for something more pleasing.

Having said which, the limbers and other artillery and logistical vehicles are pleasing enough when they do get completed, but since they are not a priority (i.e. my rules mostly don’t strictly require them to be present) this is a very rare event indeed.

This last week I’ve been preparing some French limber teams for painting. Some of these castings are very small "25mm" from Jack Scruby Miniatures (these days, that means Historifigs), and their artillery horses are strange objects – I rather like them, not least because for many years they were really all you could get in metal 1/72-ish apart from vintage Hinton Hunt (which got prohibitively expensive) and Kennington (whose artillery horse is one of their “Pantomime” jobs, with short shins and an odd gait).

Your hoof-bone's connected to your knee-bone

Note the cunningly twisted draught lines, to simplify casting

Working with the Scruby horse is a bit of a challenge – the master is sculpted with the left front hoof attached to the right knee, and the draught lines twisted through a surprising angle and attached to the tail and the right rear leg – all in the interests of simplifying the mould lines. In its starting configuration the horse does not look very promising, but a bit of fiddling and sawing and twisting and it sort of works. This is not made any easier by Historifigs’ insistence on using an unusually hard, brittle alloy which neither bends nor files very easily, and is known to snap in moments of stress.

The four pairs and drivers nearest the camera are Scrubies - my lacerated
fingers will recover, please don't send flowers

Some I prepared earlier - some French caissons from my last big push on the OBAP
- as always with Scruby 25mm, they paint up better than you think they are going to

I’ve managed to produce another 4 pairs of Scruby horses with drivers this time, and it took me some time to achieve this. They should start getting painted next week. Next batch of painting is (I think) 4 British limber horse pairs (Lamming), 8 French (4 Scruby and 4 of the lovely, but expensive, Art Miniaturen), complete with limbers and cannon (mostly Hinchliffe 20, but some of the guns are of obscure origin – they may be Rose with wheel swaps) and a bunch of Peninsular, stovepipe-hatted Royal Artillery gunners for the Allied siege train (these are NapoleoN castings, but may also include some Kenningtons if SHQ send me some in time).

The gunners are for a series of 3 batteries of 10” howitzers – which is far more than the real Royal Artillery had available in the Peninsular War, but they look good.

Anyway, more of all this sometime in the future. This morning’s excitement is merely a glimpse of the Chinese puzzle which is the Scruby artillery horse. A casting which was designed to be converted before it could be used.

The Scales of Injustice? – figure sizes, yet again

This is going to get me dangerously close to obscure worlds such as railway modelling, of which I know nothing, and where I am likely to get slapped down mightily if I use the wrong terminology, or offend the international standards (whether they are universally obeyed or not).

I’ve always been puzzled by the mapping of modelling scales like 20mm, 25mm, 28mm, 40mm and so on against  the more intuitively scientific (and understandable) concepts like 1/72, 1/64, 1/300 and similar. I have moaned on about this at some length before, so will try not to waste too much time going over the same ground.

Basic problem is that figure manufacturers call visibly unequal figure scales by the same name. If we discount the possibility of different sized millimetres being in use simultaneously (although it might happen), the matter boils down to

(a) which bit of the man do you measure? – there are disciples of soles-to-scalp (i.e. how high is a figure), sole-to-eye (which sounds like a convention, but which generates a lot of passionate support – most of the lectures I get from the bearers of wisdom seem to follow this doctrine) and even bottom-of-base-to-eye (which just seems plain daft).

(b) (and this makes a bit of a nonsense of (a)) how tall is this man anyway?  

In response to a previous post, I was directed to this diagram from Jack Scruby, no less, which would appear to be authoritative unless you happen to disagree with it.

What has brought this to mind of late is that I have been involved in purchasing and studying some of the old Hinchliffe 20mm equipment range – the non-WW2 bits of which vanished without trace many years ago. It says on the packet that these are manufactured to a scale of 4mm to the foot, which is near enough 1/76 scale, which is the OO model railway scale. I’m not sure, but I think this scale is widely used for WW2 models. 4mm to the foot would make a 6-foot man 24mm tall, and a 5-foot man 20mm, so where does the “20mm” nomenclature come in?

As far as Hinchliffe are/were concerned, I also have some of their 25mm artillery range, and in there is an information sheet, which explains that their 25mm range uses a scale of 4.75mm to a foot (which I reckon is 1/64), and goes on to state that the human figures in this range are designed to represent men 5 foot 8 inches tall, which means that (assuming Hinchliffe’s manufacturing standards complied with their own house rules), those strange ectomorphic soldiers that turned the wargaming market upside down in the early 1970s must have been 27mm from sole to scalp. Does this mean 25mm to the eye? – whatever it means, this is the official lowdown on how Hinchliffe interpreted “25mm”, and we know for a fact that this is different from what Miniature Figurines and Les Higgins were doing. The information sheet I have, by the way, appears to date from September 1971 – I’m not sure if it is still the same sheet which goes out with the 25mm equipment today – this range, of course, is still in production.

OK – back to Hinchliffe’s 1/76 “20mm” men – assuming the same logic applied, a 5 foot 8 man would be around 22.5mm tall – which is consistent with Hinton Hunt and current Kennington figures – would he be 20mm to the eye? Could it be that the eye-measurers have been right all along?

I don’t buy many plastics – I’m not at all hostile to them, but I have grown accustomed to not buying them, to being concerned about paint-shedding, and discouraged by the proportion of useable wargame poses in a box, considering these are no longer the pocket-money option they once were. At this point someone may feel urged to miss the point of my post, and put me straight about the merits of plastics – please don’t bother – I’ll take your word for it. Honestly, I will.

The relevance of plastic figures here is that 1/72 is the universal standard – how well it is observed and how the manufacturers compare is not the point. No-one can argue about what 1/72 means in mathematical terms, and thus, over the years, I have got used to regarding my Napoleonic collection as being “approximately 1/72” – some  of my figures are described by the makers as 20mm (Hinton Hunt, Kennington, early Lammings, early Garrison, very early Minifigs), some of them are old 25mm (Higgins, Scruby, some S-Range), from before the world got bigger, and some of them are explicitly 1/72 (NapoleoN, Falcata and Art Miniaturen). My in-house rule is that if the hats match, they are the same size. Ideally, my chaps should be around 22-23mm tall (without headgear), though a taller man might be OK if his hat looks right!

25mm Soldiers, as purveyed by Hinchliffe (L) and Scruby

I have now confirmed that the much sought-after 1/76 Hinchliffe artillery are a tad underscale for plastic figures, while their 1/64 cousins are visibly too big. Confusingly, considering the precision which went into the research and sculpting, Hinton Hunt artillery appear to be even smaller than the Hinch 20s, so maybe there was an internal inconsistency there too.

I’ve always tended to avoid Newline 20mm figures – too small for me, though they are lovely – I have no idea what the official scale is, but I have it on good authority that some of their artillery pieces are a good fit with Hinton Hunt, for example, which is useful, but, again, a bit confusing. RSM and Irregular have an even smaller interpretation of 20mm, but at this point I am getting well outside my area of knowledge.

It looks as though my target Napoleonic recruit is somewhere in a ball park between 1/72 and 1/76, with guns and wagons to match. And the devil take the decimal places.

Napoleonic Heavy Hardware – British 10-inch Howitzers

Once painted, these will be British 10 inch iron howitzers

Yesterday I finally got around to one of those open-ended refurb projects that seem to hang about for years. There’s always higher-priority stuff to be getting on with – you know the sort of thing.

This follows from a sort of minor-league New Year resolution I made, to get back to some Napoleonic siege games. There are a number of things I need to do for this – one is to arrange for some more satisfactory representation of trenches than my current unpainted wooden blocks. The Really Good Excuse for not doing anything about this at present is that I want to be sure the game is working properly before I commit to a mass of specialized terrain equipment. OK – can’t do anything with that one – put a sort of half-tick in the box.

Next thing I wanted was a hex-free table for sieges (and other things) – well I’ve done that one – the reverse side of my main warboards is now plain green, and sufficiently free of geometric cells of any type to satisfy even the most contemptuous of my correspondents. Tick in box – good.

The third, and most fiddly, thing is to make some sense of the pile of artillery equipment I’ve picked up from eBay and charitable donations, and either make it into proper batteries or get rid of it. Yesterday’s target was a small stock of Hinchliffe 20mm scale British 10” howitzers which I have managed to collect. Some were in poor shape as the result of many years of lying around in someone’s spares boxes, some needed attention because they were acquired from a well-known British eBay seller of whom I haven’t seen any trace for a while, who used to be famous for offering some real gun and wagon rarities, but always with the axles untrimmed (which gives something of the appearance of a pre-war Morgan 3-wheeler), always buried hub-deep in a bed of Evil Tetrion, and always finished in some astonishing industrial varnish which could withstand nuclear attack.

I spent an amusing evening levering things out of Tetrion, snipping and sawing axles to the right length, scraping grunge off wheels, and replacing a few wheels from the spares box if they couldn’t be rescued. A bit of superglue and we are making progress. Now they just need to be painted correctly (iron barrels, please), but there’s no immediate rush for that since I have to paint gun crews for them. Good so far, though – that’s pretty much a tick as well.

The M1800 Bromefield 10” iron howitzer is a bit of a shadowy fellow. If Frank Hinchliffe hadn’t included one in his celebrated 20mm horse-&-musket period artillery equipment (you know – the range that famously vanished – not only did they disappear, but some would have us believe they had never existed) then we might all be happily unaware of the things. Some years ago, with a bit of poking around, I learned that these guns were used at the British siege of Flushing, and then went into store and never saw the light of day until the Crimean War.

A shame for the 20mm Peninsular War enthusiast who would like some for his siege train; it’s an interesting model, with the gun mounted on what is obviously a garrison-type carriage with large wheels mounted at the muzzle end for road travel. Apart from the 18pdr gun available from Finescale Factory (now, heaven be praised, available from SHQ as part of the Kennington range) and also as part of the current Hinchliffe 25mm catalogue (explain the presence of an exact 1/72 model in this range, in your own words…), there is not a lot available for people like me who are weird enough to  wish to try tabletop sieges, so a model of a 10” howitzer – albeit rarer than hen’s teeth – would be a real help.

Well, as a result of further poking about, I have some good news on this front. They were used in the Peninsular. So there. Only a bit, but they were there.

My sources are Major-General John T Jones’ Journal of Sieges (Vol.1) and the appropriate volume of the Dickson Manuscript – both of these gentlemen were present when the Allied siege train at the (unsuccessful) first British siege of Badajoz in May 1811 included, I believe, 4 of these howitzers.

They were not very successful. Their lack of success was rather overshadowed by the failure of the vintage heavy brass guns provided from Lisbon, which drooped badly when they were required to provide continuous bombardment, but they failed nonetheless. Jones notes that two of the howitzers were included in the batteries attacking the fort of San Christobal, and two were in Battery no.5 (I think) attacking Badajoz Castle. He explains that they were removed from the transport carriages when mounted in battery, and were to be used at a maximum elevation of 30 degrees. He also observes that the Portuguese officer in charge of the battery confronting the castle failed to observe the maximum elevation instruction, as a result of which the guns broke their carriages. They are recorded as “damaged by own fire”.

Portuguese officer or not, they did not make any further appearance during the Peninsular War as far as I can tell, so presumably were stored away for 40 years until the Crimean War.

As you will see, I seem to have more of these howitzers than did the Allied army in 1811, but that’s near enough for me. If I am going to enact sieges which did not actually happen, it does not constitute much more of an offence against authenticity if the besiegers have equipment which they could have used if only they had chosen to do so.

You’ll see more of these once I have painted them and recruited gunners.

Pictures from Dawson, Dawson & Summerfield's excellent "Napoleonic
Artillery" (Crowood, 2007) of a 19th Century model of the 10-inch howitzer.
The photos are used without permission - please buy the book!

Hortillery & Articulture...

...or something like that.

Big 'uns

Little 'uns

It's taken a while to get everything ready (because artillery is fiddly), but my ECW armies finally have guns. In fact they are rather over-supplied now, but there is an element of future planning in there (he lied). I still need to get a couple of big bombarding guns and a couple of mortars, since you can't do the ECW without sieges, but this will certainly keep me going in the meantime. A dozen new guns with crews are going into the boxes tonight - very good.

Topic 2

In the garden, Nature rears her formidable head once again. Last October I posted here to express our astonishment that our half-hearted attempt to grow Edelweiss from seed produced a single fine bloom. This year we didn't know what to expect. Are they annuals? We had no idea.

Well they have come up fine and strong, and we have the beginnings of a marvellous show. Unbelievable - and this is despite the environment in our garden being wrong in a number of ways:

1. Next to the sea - salty air and high humidity

2. Wrong type of soil

3. About 1000 metres lower than their preferred habitat

4. Permanently overcast, near-Arctic climate

We can only assume our Edelweiss don't know any better. Here they are, anyway - alive and well and living in entirely the wrong country. We hope our experiment is not endangering our Scottish ecosystem...

Bless my homeland for ever - erm - just a minute...

Late Edit...

Thanks to John P and Ross for comments - here is a relevant clip I found, which shows how the Sappers might have looked in action. It is a surprisingly long clip...

Strangely, all suitable clips I could find apart from this one were filmed in Oregon. Cultures obviously can be transplanted, like wildflowers.

The Ongoing Artillery Background Project (OABP)

First off, Happy New Year to everyone who is kind enough to drop in here. I hope your year is good – in my own case, I am hoping for a rather more satisfying year than 2012, which was a kind of not-quite year – a lot of minor things that didn’t go too well, and then there was the weather, which I have decided to take as a personal affront. However – I’m still here and still fighting, and each day is the start of the rest of your life, as a former work-colleague used to have written on a poster above his desk for a while. Come to think of it, that same fellow is no longer with us – he drowned himself in a freezing Scottish loch not long after he retired, so let’s gloss over that quickly – inappropriate recollection.

This morning, Amazon emailed me to ask me if I would care to rate my recent purchase of a pot of red GW paint – did it meet my expectations? Pretty much, yes. They also suggested that, since I recently purchased CDs of the Esbjorn Svensson Trio and some concerti by Telemann, I obviously like music and thus might be interested in a new album from One Direction. Now that is impressive lateral thinking, but no.

Last night I spent 40 minutes on the static exercise bike, in the interests of getting the blood thinned down a bit after Cholesterolfest. Went OK – backed off a bit towards the end to keep my pulse under 140bpm, but no problems, and it was good for the first of a new series. To avoid spending my time on the bike thinking “Good grief – still 29 minutes to go....”, I watched one of my library of approved exo-bike movies. Last night I watched the first half of The Charge of the Light Brigade – that’s the 1968 one with David Hemmings. I haven’t watched it for ages, and it’s a bit dated now, but still pretty good. The relationship between Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave and the other fellow is what I would describe as uninterestingly soppy – not very engaging, and I couldn’t really care much about the characters themselves. The military bits are nicely done, but what really compromises it for me is that it comes from a period when all British films used the same short list of actors, and I find it distracting to keep noticing that the sergeant major used to be in The Onedin Line on TV, for example.

It may have been a "brilliant moment of madness" - it could even have been

a "mad moment of brilliance" - but such moments are fairly commonplace

on my tabletop, I think 

The whole thing is rescued by Trevor Howard as Lord Cardigan, who presents the most wonderful portrayal of a pure bastard it is possible to imagine. I know it’s all going to end in tears, but I’ll watch the rest of the story on my next pedalling session tonight. After the Crimean unpleasantness, I think I’ll watch Tom Berenger as Longstreet again – yes – haven’t seen that for a while either.

In this rather disjointed not-quite-holiday period as the world gets revved up again, there is an opportunity to revisit all those wargaming background projects which seem to grind on forever. One such is the box of bits which I have earmarked to complete my collection of limbers and logistics vehicles for my Napoleonic armies. Although it comes under the general heading of Mucking About, every so often I open up all the little margarine boxes and switch things around to make sure I have the best combinations of parts for the various units. I still have to paint up limbers, teams and drivers and pulled guns for all the French artillery – which is 3 foot batteries at 2 horses each and 2 horse batteries at 4 horses each. I also have outstanding limber teams for one Italian foot battery, three Spanish regular, a Spanish volunteer one and one for the Duchy of Stralsund-Ruegen.

Then there’s two more British caissons and two French ditto to finish off, a couple of odd wagons and a bunch of pack mules to paint up. It’ll all get done in time – maybe this year – I got a fair amount of this stuff completed last year, so there’s no stress!

The bits are all-sorts – limbers are a mixture of Hinchliffe 20, early Lamming and some Minifigs 20mm, cannons are similar, plus a few Les Higgins. Horses and drivers are Lamming, Scruby, S-Range and Alberken, and I even have a few rather posh Art Miniaturen teams for the French line. The mules and oxen are mostly Jacklex, and the Spanish muleteers are Hinton Hunts. Should be fine.

Going through the boxes reminded me (not  that I had forgotten, of course) that I have a couple of really nice Minifigs kits to make up – a general’s carriage and a French flying ambulance – I really must get on with those – I’ll enjoy that.

General's carriage - all bits present

Ambulance-in-a-bag

And,  of course, having counted, examined, swapped and generally fiddled with all the bits, they all went back into the plastic tubs and back into the big box marked Napoleonics until next time....

Good fun though, and it avoids doing anything really useful. Also, I have a vague feeling that talking about it here makes it more likely I will do something about it soon, but don’t hold your breath.

Happy New Year, in case I didn't mention it.

Just Can't Rush These Things

I'm currently doing some conversion work and painting to get a supply of command figures for my next lot of Spanish line infantry, and in the breaks - since I have the brushes and the tools out - I am taking the opportunity to do a few other bits and pieces. Tidying up, finishing things off - that sort of stuff.

Here is an example. This, you will see, is a British artillery caisson. I have a few such caissons, and there are still a couple more to be finished. Most of them are models by Lamming - the older the better, to get the scale right. This one is slightly different - the limber and the caisson (actually, I think it is officially an Ammunition Car) are both from  the lovely old Hinchliffe 20mm series - long gone; the horses are Hinton Hunt, the driver is a converted Minifigs S-Range RHA gunner. Nothing particularly notable in the mix, I think you will agree - all the castings date from the 1970s. If you were to be a little fussy, you might suggest that the horses are a tad small for the rest of the kit, but that is certainly my fault for removing them from their bases in 1972. Anyway, you wouldn't suggest it out loud.

That is the point - the horses and the limber have been attached to this plywood base since late 1972. When I switched my house standard from 2 gun limbers per battery to just one, I had a few spare limbers like this kicking around the place. Last year I got hold of a matching caisson from the same maker and the same vintage, and added a suitable driver. Some very slight freshening of the paint on the original bits and here you are - a brand new addition to my Allied artillery which has only been 40 years in the completion.

That must be a house record, I think.

British Artillery Caissons, and Some Very Big Guns

Delayed by a late decision to strip the limbers, here are two examples of what Carl Franklin, in his lovely book, describes as the British Two-Wheeled Ammunition Car. A quick glance, of course, will confirm that the car is hooked up behind a standard limber, so it is in fact a four-wheeled vehicle, but articulated, which was regarded as a big advance over the earlier rigid 4-wheeler. These are the carts which accompanied the individual batteries into action, to provide an immediate reserve of ammunition.

The models are Lamming throughout - equipment and horses, and also the drivers, as evidenced by their Easter Island profiles and the trademark Lamming elephant whip. My thanks and compliments to Clive and to Dave Watson, who somehow came up with yet more supplies of extinct artillery kit.

Since I am deep in the artillery projects box at present, I think I may take the opportunity to make up and paint some more siege guns. As these may be of some interest, here are a couple I prepared earlier. I included a more normal 9pdr gun to give an idea of scale, and you will see that these siege guns are very bad boys indeed. These are 18pdrs from Hinchliffe's (current) 25mm scale range, which should make them way too big for the Minifigs gunners. Before you laugh (and I laughed myself before I checked the sizes), be assured that I have measured these castings and they are spot-on for 1/72 of the official weapon dimensions for an iron 18pdr. Further, Clive and I once put these same Hinch 25 castings alongside a Finescale Factory model of an 18pdr, and they were exactly the same size - I am not even prepared to consider that FSF would ever make anything which was not perfect 1/72, so let's just assume this is what they were like.

Big.

Anyway, I have 2 or 3 more of these to prepare, and a 10" howitzer, so I may take a short break from painting vehicles. Note also that my Allied Siege Train and associated engineering chaps have their bases painted a fetching shade of mud brown. It seemed a good idea at the time.

Royal Horse Artillery - Limber Teams

More vehicles ready - in this case, they are well overdue. I sold my old (Airfix) limbers around 7 years ago, and they'd been kind of decommissioned for a while prior to that. Since then I've been hoarding the bits for the replacements in my spares boxes, and systematically playing leapfrog with the painting queue so that they never actually got done.

Well, no longer - here are three RHA limbers, ready to go. Although I like to use 2 model guns for a battery, I use only a single limber when they are travelling, so this group represents all my three horse artillery troops on the road. I used to like the idea of having loose, "deployable" guns, so that I could actually move the ordnance pieces between the limber and the gun crew, but I have decided it is not one of my greatest ideas. I have dropped more cannons than enough, so I've saved up enough extra guns to be able to have some permanently attached to the limbers, and everything is now safely glued in place.

The horses and riders are all S-Range Minifigs, the limbers are Hinchliffe 20mm, and one of the guns is also Hinch 20, while the other two are (I think) Rose Miniatures. It stands to reason that the actual gunners get first choice of the Hinch 20 artillery...

British caissons will be along next, in a day or two - a couple of the limbers allocated to them are in the bleach at the moment.

British Ammunition Carts

On a vehicle-painting kick again this weekend, all British stuff. Two ammo carts finished last night - they have just to get the mag sheet on the underside of the bases for storage in the official Artillery Boxes.

The carts are S-Range Minifigs, horses and drivers are by Lamming. There will/should be some caissons in a day or so, and three 4-horse RHA limber teams.

Good fun. I wouldn't like to be hit by one of those whips, though.

Catching Up with the Mainstream

Box 1 of the French Artillery - the two armies require six such boxes

Sometimes I surprise myself with my own stupidity. Of course, I realise that everyone in the known universe uses magnetic basing materials to transport their wargames figures, but somehow this particular technological advance has evaded me. Partly because my soldiers live in a big static cupboard, but mostly because I never take them anywhere - except when I move house, of course.

I bought in some mag sheets a couple of years ago as part of a fleetingly brilliant idea connected with deployable skirmishers, but the idea proved to be a poor one. Recent army expansions and my big push to get more limbers completed have meant that The Cupboard is now officially full, and some reorganisation is needed. With thanks to all who reassured me and offered advice on the subject, I have now fitted out half a dozen A4 box files with steel paper and fitted mag sheet to the bases of my artillery, engineering and wheeled impedimenta, and am delighted with the results. Everything cosy and secure.

Allosaurus makes a discovery

I am a little shamefaced that it took so long for me to get to this point, but here I am. Yes - I know that everyone uses this stuff all the time, but there's an act of faith required when it comes to risking precious figures and guns - my experience has been that old Sir Isaac Newton will get you in the end, especially if you are as clumsy as I am. Anyway, Allosaurus has discovered that it is no longer necessary to kill something everyday to stay alive - you just go to the supermarket like everyone else.

My thanks to Trevor Holland at Coritani for helpful, quick service and supplying me with the mag sheets. Excellent.

Portuguese Artillery

Another new vehicle takes its place in the cupboard. This is a Portuguese howitzer on the march, circa 1811. Mules are by Jacklex, limber is Lamming, the gun is (I think) S-Range Minifigs, and the driver is from Kennington.

The British caisson which is officially next in the queue is on hold while I sort out my stock of horses; it is painted but awaiting final assembly while I put together a sensibly-scaled team.

This morning I finally lost patience with my collection of brushes, and weeded out the ones I don't use any more. I've never understood paintbrushes. In the days of Humbrol, I used to wash them out in Polyclens and similar - I realise I was supposed to use an exotic patent thinner, or turpentine, but neither of these ever seemed to work properly. Polyclens was very like using battery acid to wash your brushes, and I just got into the habit of replacing them frequently. Mostly I used cheap, short-handled brushes from the model shop - sometimes Humbrol's own brand, sometimes unnamed products at half the price, which may well have come from the same factory. Maybe even from the same cat...

In these enlightened days of acrylics, the whole operation is much more like watercolour, and - possibly incorrectly - I have developed the idea that I should pay the extra and obtain good brushes - even buying the posh stuff from my local art shop. The results have not been brilliant. At any given moment, I probably have about 2 dozen brushes in total, of which about one quarter will currently be behaving nicely. I tend to have a few brushes - a couple of size 0's and some larger ones - which are producing a decent point today. I try to look after them correctly, periodically curing them in hot water and lipping the points like a good chap, but it is a haphazard regime. This morning my favourite lining brush decided to start misbehaving, and it is almost like losing a close friend - very disconcerting.

I don't think I have ever noticed a reliable correlation between the marketed "quality" of a brush and its performance. Top of the range sables from the art shop often have a mind of their own as soon as they get wet, while I have had years of good service from the occasional 2nd quality cheapo from Modelworld.

Biggest disappointment of the lot was a load of unused squirrel brushes which we found amongst my late father's painting paraphenalia (he was a very capable amateur watercolourist, and only ever bought the best of everything) - admittedly they must have been 20 years old, but they disintegrated into dust as soon as they were touched, so maybe squirrel brushes have a definite shelf life. Or maybe this batch came from squirrels which suffered from mange.

Things with Wheels

Here are the first two completed vehicles from the current surge of activity.

The ox cart, previously photographed in bits, now complete - S-Range Minifigs with Hinton Hunt driver. I was going to caption this picture Moo!, since my son and I, both being silly, always shout this whenever we see cattle, or even pictures of cattle, but it occurs to me that in this case the noise of the animals would be drowned out by the screech of the wooden axles.

More S-Range, with a driver recruited from the very last of the spare NapoleoN infantry fusiliers. Jean-Marie appears to be wondering how those two little horses can pull that dirty big pontoon cart. Well, they can - so there you have it. And not only that, but his uniform is correct as well (according to my consultancy support team of Ray Roussel, De Vries and Knoetel & Elting). Thank you, chaps.

My next two efforts will be a Portuguese howitzer and limber, pulled by mules (see Alexander Dickson, vol.2, page ........), which should be fun, plus a British caisson. One small piece of bad news for the caisson is that the Lamming draught horses I was going to use seem to be a bit big. Well, maybe they're not strictly too big, but they make all the other horses look small, which is the same thing. Rethink required - by the way, if anyone has spares of the old S-Range or Alberken or Minifig 20mm artillery horses like the ones shown attached to the pontoon, please just let me know - I can use any number of these.

One final discovery today is that my wizard wheeze of putting steel paper on the underside of the bases of the carts and magnetic material on the floor of a box file to hold them firmly does not look promising. The carts are too heavy. I may as well save the expense and not bother with the magnetic sheet. Curses. Back to the laboratory.

A Time for Transport

What follows is not in any way a suggestion as to how anyone else should organise the building of a wargames army - far from it - it might be an example of how not to go about it. This is simply a brief illustration of how I have done it myself. I could no doubt have done it better, or in ways which I would have found easier.

I have a number of boxes in which I keep my figures for painting. To the casual observer it may look like chaos, but there is a kind of mad system at work. At the very bottom of the food chain, heaps of spares and things-which-might-come-in-useful are just bagged into approximately generic lots ("Scruby horses", "Broken Higgins for Heads" etc) and kept in shoe boxes somewhere up on the top shelf in my den/office. Things which have been sorted into potential units go into small, labelled plastic freezer-packs - "Garde de Paris - need colonel" etc. These packs live in a couple of boxes of the sort which used to hold bulk copier paper, and these are labelled, respectively, "Skirmishers, Command, Infantry & Odd Bits" and "Artillery & Cavalry", and kept on a lower shelf.

These last two are the boxes which used to cause me some stress. The bags on the top shelf were so informal that I had only an approximate idea what was in there - rootling through them from time to time was quite an adventure. By the time stuff was sorted into the freezer packs I could see exactly how much I had still to paint - exactly which units would have been fighting on the tabletop if it were not for my awful laziness. As my liking for painting complete units tailed off, and especially at times when I was tired or under pressure elsewhere, this bit of the hobby began to irk me quite seriously!

Since then I have discovered the advantages of contracting out the paintwork to professionals, and I now happily maintain a final box, which is "Projects in Hand", where units get their final fettling before being shipped off for painting. I do, of course, still do a fair amount of painting myself, but these days I pick and choose what I am going to do - a special general with a silly hat and a big nose is fun, 22 identical fusiliers is less so. A lot of this is down to my ageing eyeballs.

I'd rather not examine just why or when the lead mountain stopped being a hobby and become something of a threat - it probably had a lot to do with what was going on in my life at various times - it may even have something to do with noticing that I was getting older faster than I was painting, and that I probably would never get to finish my planned armies. Who can say? - whatever, it's OK now. Even if the Grand Plan keeps changing and sprouting heads, I am no longer afraid! I can go into the office cupboard without flinching...

I am almost getting to the point of this post. The contents of the "Artillery & Cavalry" box have gradually evolved. Because fighting units have always had priority for precious painting time, things like limbers and ammunition carts have kept falling back down the queue. There was a potential worsening of this situation with the arrival of the Commands & Colors rules, since limbers are not really needed. Well, I've made a decision - last night I sat down and worked through that box, and actually counted how many horses and drivers I am short of for a full complement of limbers, and labelled up the boxes. There will be a lot of limbers, also some caissons, a couple of pontoon wagons, some supply carts (mostly ox-drawn) and a mule train. There is also a general's carriage. The intention - and it has survived to this morning, so it might be serious - is that, while the production of infantry units and so on continues, it is time to get working on the vehicles.

There's some excellent raw material in the freezer packs - limbers from the exquisite old Hinchliffe 20mm range and from Lamming, Lamming caissons, S-Range Minifigs wagons and carts, oxen and mules by Jacklex, and horses by all sorts of people, but all vintage stuff. I also have a number of boxes of Italeri, HaT and Zvezda equipment, all of which is certainly very good, but my intention is to use metal as far as possible - exclusively if I can. Shortage of drivers is problematic - a fair amount of conversion work will be needed, and some people are going to be quite surprised to find themselves in the Corps of Transport after all this time. For reasons of space and stinginess, I use 2-horse teams for foot artillery and all wagons - normally with a driver on foot. I find that a mounted driver on a 2-horse team looks a little odd, and draws attention to the unrealistic number of horses. My horse artillery have 4-horse teams and mounted drivers. Such limbers as do already exist in finished form use Hinton Hunt horses and Hinchliffe equipment, so the pedigree is good thus far.

My standard base size for foot artillery teams on the march is 45mm x 110mm including the gun. The horse artillery base size isn't fixed yet, but I'd like to keep it as small as possible. The guns themselves require a decision. I've always assumed that I should keep the cannons loose, so they can be deployed with the gun crews for action as required. This has a pleasing, Old School feel about it - actually bringing the guns into action. There are two reasons why this is not a great idea:

(1) My artillery batteries have 2 gun crews, but only a single representative limber

(2) However hard I try to remember to keep everything horizontal, the loose-mounted guns always finish up falling on the floor, which is bad all round.

Thus - since I have enough guns to do it - my current idea is that I'll glue cannons permanently into position behind the limbers. I can use some of the cannon which I don't like as much (or which are a bit flimsy) for this job - Rose, Hinton Hunt, the odd Kennington etc - and concentate the Hinchliffe and NapoleoN equipment for the gun crews. Commands & Colors rules have batteries with a strength of 3 "blocks" (sub-units), so I hope to be able eventually to use a standard unit of 2 deployed guns + 1 limber as my 3 "blocks".

How to get them painted? I think I might quite enjoy painting wagons and so on, but lots of draught horses sounds like a job for a painter. Some of the limbers start life as a small cloud of bits, so some assembly is necessary before painting. My first thought on this was to assemble complete units, mount them on MDF bases and send them off for painting. I've gone off this idea a bit because the inner sides of the horses would be hard to paint well without the involvement of trained fleas, and because fully assembled units would be heavy and fragile in the post. I think that shipping out packs of unattached horses for painting and building up the units when they come back would be better. I have come to believe that almost anything is possible, using superglue for component assembly, PVA for gluing onto bases, and touch-up and copious matt acrylic varnish to cover up the proverbial multitude of sins.

I'm not sure how quickly this will progress, but at least I now know my enemy - I have counted the horses and drivers...   If I pick away at this, and do limbers and transport vehicles as opportunity arises, I can keep it moving without holding anything up - the battles don't actually need limbers. Which, now I come to think of it, is exactly the sort of thinking that got me to my present position.