Not in the Plan at All

Classic Old School 20mm? - everyone has their own favourite figures - this is certainly
one of mine. Bill Lamming's Royal Scots Greys trooper, circa 1970. Off-hand, I
would also list the Minifigs/Alberken Brunswick-Oels, the early (20mm) Garrison
French infantry with the bayonet stuck up high in the air, and any number of Hinton
Hunts - the Old Guard and some of the OPC cavalry, especially the charging
French lancer. This must have a lot to do with all those hours spent gazing at the
pictures in the Featherstone and Charles Grant books...

I’ve got a lot to do to get my Spanish Army back on schedule, but, to my surprise, I find I suddenly have a distraction I really didn’t expect. However, I’m pleased with it.

A couple of weeks ago there was a batch of unpainted, vintage Lamming French dragoons up for auction on eBay, and I put in a bid, though I most certainly have more than enough French dragoons. It wasn’t a very serious bid, and it quickly became obvious that someone wanted these more than I did, so I watched the price rise away past what I would have paid for them – I was calm and not troubled at all, but it got me thinking about Lamming figures.

Lamming are an enigma – the early figures are very pleasing, and right on the old “true 25mm” scale, but later much of the range was remodelled, bigger and often uglier. Normally I shy away from Lamming lots in auctions because you never know quite what you’re getting – I’ve called a few wrong, to my cost. Then, this week, there were some painted Lamming Scots Greys on eBay, and I liked the look of them – the photo showed that the listing also include some Miniature Figurines cavalry, and confirmed that the Lamming Greys were OK for size for my armies.

I decided what I thought they were worth, put in a moderate bid, and was very surprised to get an email telling me I had won them. They arrived within about 48 hours, nicely packed.

Now let’s be clear about this – I used to have a unit of Scots Greys. They were lovely, they were Phoenix Model Developments figures, I converted the officer and the trumpeter from PMD helmeted British Dragoons, and – apart from the standard, silly Les Higgins horses – they really were most attractive. Problem was that I had no wish to fight Waterloo, the Greys were no use at all for my Peninsular OOB, and – as part of my commitment to replacing my heavy dragoons with proper, bicorne-wearing fellows, I was persuaded to put them up for sale on eBay – this must be 6 or 7 years ago, I guess. I was confident they would go for a decent price, but it all went a bit wrong. Maybe it was the week everyone was watching the cricket on TV or something, but my Gorgeous Greys went out with a whimper - sold for the opening bid of £11.99, to a lady in Sussex who had a gift shop.

I was upset! I never quite got over it – I didn’t really want the figures, but the low selling price was somehow insulting. Serves me right, anyway – a fool and his soldiers are soon parted – if Confucius didn’t say that then he should have.

So, as from Wednesday, I have a replacement for my unnecessary Scots Greys, and I am pleased with them, though I’m not sure when they will get into action, and for the time being they will live in the Allied Odd Bods box. I had several attempts to decide what to do with them – stick them in the spares box, and one day strip them and repaint them? – that was my first idea.

But you know what? – these are old figures, they have been together since about 1970, and someone painted them a long time ago, rather better than I could ever have painted them. I decided to keep them as they are – clean them up a bit and retouch here and there – in particular, put fresh white paint on the crossbelts and gloves and plumes. I even chose to repair a couple of damaged swords and keep them at the original strength of 12, which is contrary to all known house standards (all my other cavalry regiments have 10).

Here they are - some toys from another age - a little weathered, and a couple of
S-Range command interlopers, but they are the business, aren't they?

Twelve cavalry in two rows, on a heavy cavalry frontage of 25mm per figure, will fit nicely on one of my standard sized light cavalry sabots, as it happens, and I can decide later whether the extra figures will gain them any additional clout in action – I suspect not.

They are ready for a temporary home in the Odd Bods box now – the officer and the trumpeter are Miniature Figurines S-Range, though Lamming had both of these in his range – in fact the cornet with the flag is a converted Lamming officer (BC/6) – all the rest are Lamming’s RSG trooper (BC/2), as illustrated in the Gallery on the VINTAGE20MIL website. They are not beautiful, but I’m pleased to have them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And Those Caissons Keep Rolling Along

More wagons ready. Two Lamming French caissons, horses and riders are Scruby. Heavy powder wagon in the background is Minifigs, waiting for a suitable seated driver.

Lamming

Lamming are one of the great figure makers from the classic 1960s-70s period, so, if this seems like an inappropriately sketchy treatment of them, it is entirely because I have never really bought much of their stuff.


Lamming British infantry, with giant mounted colonel and Minifigs ensigns

For one thing, rightly or wrongly, I always regarded them as specialists in medieval subjects. For another, my local shop (Archie Alexander's Toytub in Edinburgh) didn't stock Lamming - certainly they didn't do the Napoleonics, so it wasn't untill the eBay Age that I got to see any. For a sensible presentation of Lamming's output, visit VINTAGE20MIL or The Old Metal Detector - this is just going to be a peek through the keyhole, which about sums up my experience of this manufacturer.

For reasons which I can't quite put my finger on, I subconsciously group Lamming with Garrison. Apart from the fact that I actually had some Garrison figures about 30 years before I had any Lamming (though they were roughly contemporary in anyone else's real world), there is the scale creep thing which was quite similar for both. Later Garrisons, from about 1975 on, got bigger and bigger, presumably to cope with the general inflation of the Wargame Millimetre, as 25mm came to mean something entirely different. Lamming appear to have done the same thing, only their later figures got fatter as well (there is a nice pictorial demonstration of this aspect of Lamming's history in Lazy-Limey's blog). I tend to avoid the two makes, not because there is anything fundamentally wrong with them, but because I don't understand the ranges well enough to be able to predict whether a specific model is going to be of a suitable size. I have made a few blunders on eBay.


53rd Foot, with ensigns and mounted officer by Art Miniaturen

I like Lamming's very early 25mm Napoleonics - the French have hats which are too big for me, but the advancing British infantryman is a nice little, ectomorphic figure which stands nicely alongside Les Higgins men in stature. I have, I think, 3 battalions of these chaps. I don't care much for the very tall standing officer that goes with them, but the drummer is fine, and it seems right to keep them together where possible. Right from the outset, there is a recognisable facial style - thin faces with high cheekbones. As time passed, this family characteristic (because they are clearly all related) developed into the full, and very distinctive, "Easter Island" look. My cousin used to say that the early figures reminded him of the Treens, from the Dan Dare stories in the old Eagle comic - it goes without saying that my cousin must have been far, far older than me.


Apart from the infantry, I once had a (now rare) mounted officer to go with them, but he was far too big, and a couple of batteries of RHA, which were very nice but so obviously different from everything else I had that I sold them on.



That's about all for Lamming, really - I very much like the look of their cavalry (nice horses!), but fear of the unknown and my eBay experiences have prevented any closer acquaintance - thus far, anyway.