Hooptedoodle #172 - Uncle Harold

Lanchester 10 - Harold's was dark green

Another inconsequential tale of long-dead friends and relations. Unlike my so-called Uncle Arthur, who was featured in a previous Hooptedoodle, my Uncle Harold was a real uncle – in fact he was my dad’s eldest brother, a position he took very seriously. When I was a youngster he was very much the head of the family (or considered himself to be so), and he would take it upon himself to try to mend any feuds which had broken out between his siblings (and there were many such) and to impose his Solomon-like decisions on family matters, often with disastrous or hilarious results.

Problem was, Harold was a likeable fellow, and meant well, but he was not the brightest bulb in the candelabra, to be honest. His most celebrated attribute was the amount of bad luck he had, though much of this was undoubtedly due to clumsiness and poor judgement.

Some tales of Harold, then.

His motoring exploits were the stuff of legend. He learned to drive, like many of his generation, long before there was a competence test. Thus he held a driving licence for many years before he could actually afford to own a car, and those years had done little for his skill, or for the relevance of what he had learned to contemporary traffic laws and conditions. His driving reflected this - he was once in an accident – fortunately without injuring anyone – caused by his travelling around a roundabout the wrong way. He was charged by the police, but for some reason the matter was dropped – the law clearly had better things to do than oppress pillars of society.

Preselector "Quadrant" on a Lanchester - to the right of the steering wheel

He had a series of misfortunes in the first car he owned – a Lanchester 10 – a design which was noted for its weight and strength (Lanchester were eventually swallowed by Daimler, and were also manufacturers of armoured cars and light tanks, which anyone who had ridden in Uncle Harold’s car would understand) and for the fact that it had a preselector gearbox. For those who are unfamiliar with preselector boxes, they were regarded as very exciting in their day from a technical point of view – ERA and Connaught racing cars used them, for example (though they were rather heavy) – a forerunner of fully automatic transmission. The system required that the driver would move a sequential lever to indicate the next gear he would require (preselect it, in fact) and then – when he required that gear – he would depress the pedal which took the place of the usual clutch and – zoom – a very quick and smooth change would take place, enhanced by a special fluid drive and all sorts of neat features.

One potential downside, of course, was that the position of the lever did not necessarily correspond to the gear that the car was in at that moment. This was particularly serious in the hands of Uncle Harold. He would reverse into the parking space in front of his house, next to the kerb, switch off the engine and then move the lever from Reverse into Neutral. If you have been following my rather feeble technical description, you will realise that the gearbox would not actually be in neutral until next time he pressed the pedal. He was caught out a number of times by this, starting the engine when the gearbox was actually still in reverse, and leaping backwards.

Eventually, of course, he leaped backwards into the neighbour’s car. Mrs Preston had a nice VW beetle – a lovely red one – and it was no match at all in such an impact for the Lanchester. Mrs Preston’s car was taken away to have the front end rebuilt and a complete respray, and after some weeks it was returned by the works, on a Saturday morning, I recall. Within an hour of the VW’s shiny return, Harold reversed into it again, once more doing extensive damage to the front end. At this point Harold’s insurers became more than a little stroppy about the matter, and when he did the exact same trick yet again six months later (this time with my grandmother sitting in the back seat of his car), they put their corporate foot down and said that they would settle the claim this last time, but would not insure him any more in any car with a preselector box.

Riley 1.5 - Harold's was just like this one

The Lanchester was duly replaced by a new car. Harold bought a Riley 1.5, which was the twin carb version of BMC’s Wolseley 1500 – for its time, this was quite a sporty saloon, and Harold was surprised that he had to replace the rear tyres quite frequently – he kept finding they were worn smooth. The idea of anyone quite as incompetent as Uncle H driving a sporty saloon on the public roads is unattractive, and it has to be said that if the insurance company unintentionally encouraged this situation by banning the trusty Lanchester then they should be ashamed of themselves. At least the Lanchester, for all its majestic weight, had a top speed of about 55. Inevitably, there followed further misfortunes – at higher speed. The most memorable event happened on an autostrada in Northern Italy (tremble, o reader, at the prospect of Harold’s driving circus on tour), when he passed a serious accident in which he was not involved, and which was in fact on the other side of a dual carriageway. Travelling at some fairly high velocity, he passed through a cloud of glass splinters, each of which pierced the paintwork of his car and slid some millimetres in the direction of travel, underneath the paint, as a result of which Harold’s car had to be completely stripped and repainted, at very considerable cost.

He was outraged when his insurer refused to have any further dealings with him, declaring him officially to be “accident prone”, though this final accident was no fault of his at all. One can only sympathise, though it is, admittedly, easier from a safe distance of 50 years or so.

Harold had a misunderstanding with a local builder which I recall with some fondness. He had bought some lovely little Spanish wrought-iron window frames when on holiday one year, and the next Summer he took the opportunity to get the builder to work on a small extension to his living room while the family were going to be away. He talked through the drawings with the builder – in one side of this extension would be one of the Spanish windows – glazed. Since the other side faced directly into his neighbour’s garden (not Mrs Preston – the other side), Harold’s plan was that a dummy window should be sunk into the wall on that side, featuring the matching frame but “glazed” with a mirror. The builder had great difficulty with this – he even came back for a second look at the task, and went away shaking his head. When Harold came back from his holiday, he found his extension complete, but the dummy window was not there – there was just a plain wall. The builder, it seems, had been so confused by Harold’s instructions that he had assumed it was a joke, so had just ignored that bit of the spec. Harold didn’t seem too bothered, in fact, but I remember that the extra window frame lay in the garden shed for years afterwards, like a sad, sacred relic.

Late edit: I checked this strange story with my mother, and she tells me my version of it is not quite correct - the builder did think the design was bizarre, but while Harold was away on vacation the "dummy" second window was, in fact, installed, complete with mirror, in the wall opposite the genuine window, but it was countersunk into the outside of the extension wall, where it was only visible from the next door neighbour's garden. The extra window frame in the shed was, it seems, a spare one. I think accuracy is important in these things...

There are a number of treasured family tales concerning the poor organisation of outings and picnics – including a group visit to Birkenhead docks to watch the firework display for the Festival of Britain which, by oversight, did not include provision for transport home afterwards – and there is a shadowy legend of how he once fired a shotgun out of the bedroom window (at a rabbit) at 5am, while his wife was asleep in the same room.

Birkenhead bus of appropriate vintage - note the rail on the platform

However, my last Harold story comes from his long saga of ill-fated DIY projects. He converted some bedroom cupboards into wardrobes, and one Saturday he went into Birkenhead to get some suitable clothes-rails – and he bought a seven-foot length of chromium-plated brass tube of the appropriate section, which would cut up nicely to provide an excellent set of rails. Pleased with his purchase, Harold got on the bus with it, but the conductor would not allow it inside the bus, and Harold had to stand on the open platform at the rear. You may imagine him, like Horatius, standing with his pole. Sadly, in the busy Saturday traffic, a passenger missed the bus at a stop, and ran after it to jump aboard, taking hold of Uncle Harold’s prize pole in the mistaken belief that it was a part of the vehicle. In his surprise, Harold let go of it, and the bus drove off, with the newcomer left standing in the street, holding the pole, the pair of them staring at each other in bewilderment as they faded into the distance. He never saw it again, of course, and had to go and buy another.

Hooptedoodle #167 - More Buses for the Non-Collection

The original scope for this ad hoc collection was that they had to be real buses, with some relevance to my childhood years on Merseyside. In the wider interests of personal nostalgia, the range has increased a little, I guess, but I am still fighting off any suspicion that I may have become a bus enthusiast.

Here are three more - two which arrived this morning and one which I received a while ago, but never got around to photographing.

Another Crosville, this one a little later than the previous photos, but still 1960s -
Route H16, Elizabeth Rd, Huyton to Liverpool Pier Head. This picture is
dedicated to the bold Mr Front, whose dad used to drive Crosvilles out of their
West Kirby depot.

Eastern Scottish service bus from Edinburgh to my present home village, 1970s
period. Route 124 survives to this day, but the buses, of course, don't look like proper
buses. In those days, on the rare occasions I journeyed to North Berwick I'd have
used the train.

This is a real nostalgia feast for me. Edinburgh Corporation service 16, Oxgangs
to Silverknowes; for many years, I travelled to work on this route every day
- South Morningside School to St Andrew Square. I remember that at one time
I read the whole of Loraine Petre's book about the 1813 campaign on my bus
journeys. Tricky unfolding the maps on the bus, I recall.

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.

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.

Painting - Mules...

In response to emails from Ludovico, Martin P, Martin S, Louis and Francis, here is the new mule train.  Not hugely attractive, but potentially useful. They are versatile, since they are capable of representing any nation in the Peninsula, or of splitting into smaller trains.

I would prefer it if they weren't all in step, but this is only a toy army, after all.

Hooptedoodle #136 – Just One More Bus

All right, all right – I said there would be no more, but I’d already secretly made up my mind to get one of these if one came up in the right livery. I know it isn’t a proper, real bus in my traditional terms, but these were being introduced when I was still at school, so it squeaks in.

This is a Leyland Atlantean in the colours of Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport, on route 82, which travelled between Speke and the Pier Head, and was a familiar sight on Aigburth Road, in my old stomping ground. These must have been introduced around 1962 or so, I would guess, and were the first buses Liverpool acquired which were designed for single-man operation, though the conductors were retained for a good while thereafter (negotiated union agreement?).

It was one of these – albeit on route 86, which had similar termini to the 82, but ran through Allerton – which caught out my racing cyclist chum, Kenny, who used to train by slipstreaming the buses along Mather Avenue on his way to and from school. He couldn’t cope with the automatic gearboxes and superior brakes of the new generation of buses, and he lost his teeth in a brief but decisive misunderstanding.

I am satisfied now that my collection is complete. Unless I spot a nice vintage Leyland in Wallasey colours…

Hooptedoodle #120 – Definitely the Last Bus from Birkenhead

The final couple of 1/76 buses for my non-collection.

This Liverpool Corporation Leyland “Titan” type PD2 is another common sight from my childhood. For some reason, LCPT is one of the few bus operators for which I can’t find sensible fleet information on the internet – I guess this model is of a mid-1950s vehicle.

The Birkenhead Corporation Guy “Arab” is another personal nostalgia bomb. This is a relative oldie - the original vehicle which this depicts was supplied to the Birkenhead fleet in 1946, and the old-style municipal paint job was officially updated in 1951, but in reality a great many of the older buses were left like this – a bit like military dress regulations, I suppose. Since it remained in service until 1957, this would still have been trundling along the New Chester Road and around Rock Ferry when I was a boy. Guy Motors were based in Wolverhampton, and the wartime utility-style coachwork for this particular vehicle was by Park Royal, of London. Once again, a bus that looks like a proper bus – would anyone dream of naming a bus an Arab now, I wonder?

Unless I come across a Wallasey bus from the right period in this scale, that’s all for now, folks.

I am quietly pleased to observe that the number of hits on this blog has crept over 200,000 – I wasn’t going to mention it, but felt it was only polite to thank anyone who has read any of my ramblings during the last few years for their time and patience! So – thank you.

Hooptedoodle #117 - more buses - still not a collection, though

Another couple of buses have arrived. Again, I am sticking firmly to specimens from dates and places that mean I would have seen them as a kid. Sorry the photos aren't better quality.

Birkenhead Corporation Leyland PD2 with MCW coachwork, early 1950s.
This is exactly the kind of bus we used to get from the Mersey Ferry terminal at
Woodside to my Uncle Ernie's house in Bromborough.

When I was five we went for a rare holiday in the Lake District. The local buses that
took us to places like Cartmel and Pooley Bridge were Ribble single deckers, just
like this Leyland Tiger

Hooptedoodle #116 – not quite a collection – someone else’s hobby

This is a modern photo of a preserved Liverpool Corporation bus from the
1950s - hence the modern car and the lack of flat caps on the passengers

I recently surprised myself by treating myself to some lovely little 1/76 (HO) scale buses. This is an odd thing to do – I was never a true bus enthusiast – at least not on my own behalf. My cousin, who was the same age as me, just lived and breathed buses from about age 7 onwards. He had all the Ian Allan books, and as a boy I spent many long days with him at exotic places like Preston bus depot, underlining the numbers of the vehicles we spotted in his books.

Simply by osmosis and exposure to his enthusiasm, I grew up knowing all sorts of nerdy things about specialist coachbuilders, and odd Liverpool Corporation buses which had aluminium bodies, built by Crossley on AEC chassis…

You get the idea. Cousin Dave and I even assembled a small fleet of Dinky Toy buses, but the available selection in those days was very poor – Dinky made one generic double-decker which might have been a Leyland (we did have one, rare pre-war Dinky casting, and that seemed to be a Guy), and it was available in badly-sprayed green and cream or badly-sprayed red and cream.

Our little fleet disappeared into the toy boxes of younger relatives ages ago, but for years I kept an eye open sufficiently to be casually aware that the only HO scale buses I ever saw in UK shops were red London Transport Routemasters – usually in a twin-pack with an out-of-scale London taxi for the tourist market.

My cousin died a good few years ago, so my model bus ogling days are long gone, but recently – when I was looking for old photos of the Crosville buses to Chester in the 1950s – for this blog, in fact – I accidentally discovered what is on the market for collectors now. Wow. Very largely because I couldn’t help thinking how Dave would have loved them, I spent a couple of days gazing at all sorts of provincial exotica on the Internet, and eventually bought a few, with the very firm resolve that this would not be the beginning of yet another unofficial collection. I have restricted myself to buses that I used to see as a kid in Liverpool area – this is what real buses will always look like for me, in the same way as the cigarette cards of childhood are how real footballers look. Inculcation – you can’t beat it.

I still have one coming in the mail – that is a 1950s Leyland single-decker in the colours of Ribble, such as I used to see on rare visits to the Lake District. The ones that have arrived thus far are set out here; welcome to the land of the Not-Quite Bus Nerd.

These weren't too common in Liverpool - Ribble used to run services between
Liverpool and towns in Darkest Lancashire. We used to visit the big Ribble
depot in Skelhorne Street - behind Lime Street railway station - and saw
a great many Leylands like this (the destination town of Leyland is where the chassis
were made)

Early 1950s Crosville-owned Bristol bus, route 116 from Huyton to Liverpool Pier Head.
You could get on a Crosville bus to travel between stops within the city of Liverpool,
but the services were primarily to places outside the city, and the fares were a little dearer than
the "Corpy" buses

The single decker Crosville service between Liverpool Pier Head and Caernarfon
ran through the Mersey Tunnel, and was the best way to get to Rhyl and the
other North Wales resorts. On a Tuesday, most of the women in Flintshire
seemed to come on this bus to visit Liverpool market 

This is the business - the real deal from the early 1950s - an AEC Regent III
in Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport livery, on route to Penny Lane.
Buses will always look like this to me. My cousin lived at my Nan's house,
in Briardale Road, which runs into Penny Lane - we knew the
Wavertree/Smithdown Road area served by this route very well.
Goodness me - I can stare at this for hours.

Hooptedoodle #103 – Saving the Planet – once again

My new car is not so new now, but I am still very pleased with the fuel economy compared with its predecessor. Like a lot of modern, “intelligent” cars, it has a display on the dashboard of how many miles it estimates you have left in the tank.

Now I know how this works – a sensor detects how much fuel is left, and a computer program works out your current rate of consumption based on the fuel metering, one number is divided by the other and there’s your answer.

It’s a funny thing. I know how meaningless is the instantaneous read-out, but it can have a most positive psychological effect. This morning I drove into the village, cruised fairly gently down to the station carpark, did my messages and drove gently back – Glenn Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations on the stereo and everything very mellow.

The mellowest bit of all was that the “miles before refuel” reading was 130 miles when I started off, but was up to 150 miles when I got back. What a brilliant feeling that gives you! – somehow, I’ve gained something for nothing. It’s almost as though someone has sneaked some additional fuel (free of charge!) into the tank while I was out.

I’m all in favour of this – however stupid it might be, it really feels like an achievement to have gained those extra miles, to have cheated the oil companies. I like it.

When I was a kid we had a standing joke about finding a circular bicycle route which was downhill all the way round. We knew it wasn’t possible, but it was a fun idea. This is somehow related – we could try to imagine driving gently enough so that we never needed to fill the tank again.

I’m working on 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drivers' Uniforms - any ideas?

True to my word, I am busily assembling and painting carts and caissons and suchlike - not very many of them, it is true, but by my normal standards 2 or 3 is a rush. This morning's effort is a French pontoon wagon, and I find that I am unsure how to paint the driver. This driver is on foot, so he could even be an actual pontonnier or engineering chap helping out by steering the horses.

I think class distinction would insist that the driver is, in fact, a specialist driver, so I am down to a shortlist of 3 possibilities, thus:

(1) pontoons are Engineering, which comes under the Artillery, so he can be an artillery driver, with grey-blue coat, faced dark blue.

(2) no they aren't - Engineering is a distinct department, and I believe that Engineering drivers wore pale grey faced black.

(3) or he could just be a general transport driver - grey-blue faced chestnut brown - this is my least favoured option, since I think these fellows really drove supply wagons and similar, and would not be allowed to go near anything as technical as a pontoon.

One of these? - something else? I'd welcome some guidance on this - left to myself, I think I'd go for (2) above, but I really don't know.

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.