Home Brewed Flags - Spain

One thing I enjoy very much is producing my own flags. There are a number of very useful sites on the Internet which offer excellent free flags, but in many instances these are low-res, or not sufficiently detailed, or incorrect in some way. Whatever, I often choose to go my own way.

These are my own work, developed using PaintShop and a few other tools, designed to be printed on good grade computer printer paper. You should use high-res paper treated on one side only (keeps the bulk down). You can also, of course, print them to whatever size you require to suit different figure scales.

Here's an image giving flags for the 5 battalions in Carlos de Espana's division at Salamanca (July 1812). Nothing here is copyright or borrowed from elsewhere. Of course, in a number of cases no-one (not even local museums) knows exactly what flags were carried, so there is a measure of informed guesswork in here - if you have a more reliable version of any of these, please let me know! [Note that the 2nd Princesa did not carry the same hybrid flag known to have been carried by the 1st Princesa...]


If you click on this image and copy the enlarged version, and print the whole thing 73mm high then the flags will be exactly correct for 1/72 or 20mm figures. The green borders are not part of the flags - they are there so you can see the edges (have you tried cutting out a white flag on a white background? - I have!), and the red line in the border is so you can see which way up they should be - red line at the bottom.

If this stuff is useful please let me know - I have plenty more.

Hooptedoodle #1 - Patapoufs et Filifers

“No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story came out.”

John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

This is not entirely an irrelevance. I have to say in my own defence that the inclusion of this piece comes straight from consideration of what happened to the proportions of the human form, as seen by wargame figure sculptors.

I have in my possession a very battered old copy of André Maurois’ lovely Patapoufs et Filifers. I believe the book is still available in some form or other, but sadly not with the original artwork by Jean Bruller. My copy was given to my mother for Christmas when she was 11, in 1936.

It is a children’s fantasy about two neighbouring nations, the Patapoufs (who are all fat and docile) and the Filifers (who are skinny and irritable), who are irreconcilable. They just can’t get along or agree on anything, and eventually they go to war. I won’t spoil the story by summarising it here, but their armies are very fine. The Patapoufs have small, rotund warships with sausages hanging conveniently so that the warriors can sustain themselves; the Filifers have long, thin tanks and wear pointy helmets. Excellent.

My favourite bit is the tribute to the heroic death of Commandant Tripouf, who died in the field as a result of getting stuck in a trench after overeating. You get the idea. Here is a view of their soldiers.

A few year ago I was going through my spare figures drawer and found a Hinchliffe model of Marshal Ney. He was so obviously a Filifer that I dug out the old Maurois book for reference.

As you will see, the late 1970s dividing of the wargame world into Hinchliffe and Minifigs fans was not entirely unforeseen.

Figures & Figure Scales - take what you can get

Here's a recent picture of my Allied army - that's Anglo/Portuguese/Spanish/Hanoverian etc. They are not quite all present, but it gives an idea of where I've got to. However, I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

So - as I was saying - I plumped for Les Higgins miniatures. I was introduced to them by Archie Alexander, who had The Toytub in Raeburn Place in Edinburgh. The speciality of the shop was really dolls' houses, but he stocked a vast range of wargames figures, which was just as well, since he was all we had locally. I spent many happy Saturday mornings trawling through huge boxes of mixed spares - I would usually go away with two buglers and a horse, or something. Sometimes Archie would get fed up and throw us all out. 

 

The 20mm size was kind of a standard then; the history of this hobby and the figures is documented excellently elsewhere, but I suspect that it was no coincidence that Airfix figures were about this size. Naturally there were things that Higgins did not do, so I used Hinton Hunt for staff figures, for highlanders and Portuguese, for example. I also used the old Garrison 20mm figures, which were pleasing though the range was limited. And the "intermediate" Minifigs (the ones which followed the S-range) were useful, though I didn't care for the oversized hats on the French troops (and still don't) - I used to graft Higgins heads onto Minifigs eaglebearers and gunners with good results. And - maybe best of all - I used Hinchliffe's wonderful 20mm artillery. 

 

Which brings us to a consideration of what the scales mean. I like my armies to be pretty homogeneous in this respect, but it's a hard thing to define. 1/72 scale makes an average man without a hat a little less than an inch tall - 22 to 24 mm is fine for me. This works out well for Higgins, and is OK for Hintons, though they are toward the shorter end of this range. This is a tricky subject - you'd think that, since it's numeric, it would be straightforward, but some figures just look wrong, even though in theory they are the right size. I've read numerous times over the years that it is perfectly acceptable to have figures of different sizes, since men are different sizes anyway. Well, I can't argue with that, but it's also evident that big men don't normally get supplied with big hats and big muskets, and that is the area where the mismatches are noticeable. I regularly see plastic figures which are exactly the right height, but the figures are slender and the hats are small and they just don't fit well with my metal troops.  

 

Which, in turn, brings us to Foy's Third Law: Never mind the millimetres, two figures are the same scale if their hats match. 

 

My armies grew nicely until something fell off the rails in the late 70s or so. For a start, the world was suddenly full of Ents and Wood Elves, but the other thing that happened was that Hinchliffe suddenly started making big skinny 28mm figures, and Minifigs started making big fat chaps like garden gnomes - and, of course, they did very well out of it - the market never looked back. The bad news for me was that some makers I relied on suddenly started making figures which were too big (notably Garrison, though if I'd been familiar with Lamming I would have noticed the same effect), while others (specifically Higgins/PMD) went out of business. 

 

Disaster. The Plan went on hold, I rationalised what I had, fought battles with the armies I had, but the collection was dead, and I was really rather bitter about the whole thing. I spent many years wishing I had just bought in loads of the figures I needed while they were still available - a strategy which is still tempting if you can stand the mountains of unpainted troops - in fact this came very close to getting put forward as another of Foy's Laws, but it would not always be a practical approach. Then came the years from 2005 to now - early retirement, eBay, a sudden (and brief) flowering of new 20mm manufacturers, and I was suddenly in business again. 

 

The armies are shaping up nicely, thank you very much. Over the next few weeks I'll do a short feature on each of the makers I have used. This is not going to be any kind of quality reference job - there are a good number of such things out there already, and some of them are excellent. What I shall do is give my own view of what the figures are like, their strengths and weaknesses (i.e. the things I like about them!), and illustrate them with examples from my collection. There will be some things that you don't see very much, and I'll include a few oddities such as conversions here and there.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To end, here's a picture of part of The Cupboard, which really speaks for itself.

Figures & Figure Scales - choice or accident?

I did think, once, of growing up, but I looked at the grown-ups around me and dropped the idea pretty quickly. I have never looked back.

My armies are based on the Peninsular War. I use 20mm, or "true 25mm", or 1/72 scale figures, and they are almost all white metal. There is a total of some 3500 painted figures now, which is not remarkable - quite humble compared with some of the wondrous collections I see every day on the Internet - but they are working armies, built to a Grand Plan (which has evolved over the years), and - though I delight as much as anyone in the odd rarity and the vintage figures, their prestige score and monetary value are really secondary matters. I'm still feeling my way into this blog business, so thought I would devote a couple of posts (and some thought) to just how and why I finished up with this period, this particular size of figures and the range of manufacturers who have provided them. On another occasion I'll get to things like painting styles and basing, which latter topic is necessarily related to the rules I use. As usual with my wiriting, the point of the journey is as much to do with the passing scenery as with the published destination!

Collecting seems to me to be a strange activity, though of course I can only comment with any authority on my own position. I have always collected stuff. In approximate chronological order, that includes Dinky Toys, cigarette cards of 1950s footballers, unbelievable numbers of books, records-then-cassettes-then-CDs, archtop guitars and, most relevant to the current posting, little model soldiers to fight battles.

In none of these cases have I set out to build a collection. I just get interested in something and obtain a few more, and then start identifying examples it would be nice to have, until - inevitably - the dreaded Completism Sickness sets in and I become uneasy and distracted if I don't have the full set. In the case of wargames figures, it makes some sort of sense, since it is necessary to produce a working representation of something which, in the real world, is (or was) itself a collection.

Foy's Second Law states:

If you can produce a logical justification for your hobby, then it almost certainly is just an obsession.

There you go - I've started with a digression. At least it's out of the way.

In about 1971 I borrowed Don Featherstone's "War Games" from my local public library and I was never the same again. To quote from the introduction to another classic wargames bible, Charlie Wesencraft's "Practical Wargaming", I had an odd feeling that this was something I had been searching for all my life. In a fever of blundering enthusiasm, I bought and mutilated and daubed boxes and boxes of Airfix ACW figures, bought some whacking great sheets of chipboard (which I still use) and had some truly wild battles using Featherstone's rules. I roped in a few mates to play against - it was really most exciting, though the games left too much scope for confusion and argument, and - on the rare occasions when they reached a conclusion - there was frequently a slight feeling of frustration that the rules were so lumpy. But we kept trying to improve the game. Though most of my erstwhile opponents have moved on to more useful ways of spending their lives, I guess I am still trying.

At this point I had never considered the possibility of these plastic armies becoming anything as significant as a collection, they were simply the playing pieces for the wargames. A visiting player smiled at my Stonewall Jackson figure - a crudely painted cowpoke from the Airfix Wagon Train set, and in self-defence I ordered up some metal generals from Hinton Hunt. They were a revelation. The ACW staff figures must have been in relatively low demand - the castings were exquisite, and these remarkable little, jewel-like figures became the showpiece of my armies. That is the point at which the collection probably started. So I ordered up a load of HH zouaves, which eventually arrived, wrapped in newspaper, from Camden Passage, and that is when the reality of collecting hit me. The castings were very rough - it took long, painful hours with needle files to get them into any sort of useable shape, and I took a long time and a lot of care over painting them. The Airfix figures moved to the back of the shelf.

So I was not a life-long military modeller or collector of Britain's soldiers, I simply got fired up in my early 20s by the possibility of producing a miniature simulation of warfare on a tabletop. The smart rows of soldiers were needed for the game, but had a great visual appeal as well. The ACW didn't last long for me, though I do regret not having made more of a go of it. It didn't take much reading to realise that most of the ACW was fought in woods, with troops in open order or dug in behind barricades. Whatever we were doing with Featherstone's rules, it wasn't really the ACW. Around this time I was also an occasional visitor to the South East Scotland Wargames Group, dominated by the formidable George Jeffrey, and it became obvious that Napoleonics were the thing to do. There was a good supply of figures, there was a huge wealth of literature, the uniforms were sumptuous, the tactics of the day were ideal for the tabletop, and there was a nice balance between the capabilities of infantry, cavalry and artillery. I had already been rather put off Ancients (and apologies to all their myriad devotees) because all the games I was involved in ended in a huge grinding match in the centre, which didn't seem to me to be worth all the dice throwing to sort out. I was also, I have to say, put off by the WRG rules of the day, which were frighteningly thorough but also seemed a bit high-handed; if a book of rules tells you exactly what shape of hills you should build, and prescribes which colour of counters you should use to indicate odd attributes of your units, then the phrase "control freak" forms in the back of my mind.

Quick digression on exactly this topic...

Recently I was reading a set of rules, and in the preface the author stated that games should be fun and should be playable (in which he has my wholehearted support), and that much of the pseudo-legal small print of rules sets can be eliminated if the players remember that it is a game, and that any areas of doubt in the rules, if they cannot be settled by reasoned discussion, should be decided by the roll of a dice. Strangely, I felt, he then went on to stipulate that this had to be a decimal dice. Bong! - paradox alert...

Back to the subject in hand.

I experimented with Rene North's little Almark books and some Airfix French, then took the plunge and made Les Higgins my manufacturer of choice. I have included a photo of the oldest identifiable unit I have - the 1st Battalion of the 6eme Leger; the colonel and the hornist are recent Kennington, the unit has been re-based several times, but otherwise the figures and the Humbrol paint job are original 1974. A testament to the protective power of acrylic varnish?

To be continued.

Foy's First Law

Foy's First Law is:

Nerdism is more easily detected in others.

If I had known two years ago how much time I would now be spending reading wargaming blogs - well, I would have been surprised, that's for sure. I have been fascinated by the effort and care that goes into these works; some of them are absolute treasures - illustrated tours of battlefields, comprehensive catalogues of defunct ranges of figures - just marvellous. Funds of information for which the readership is too sparse to justify a commercial venture.

I have had a faint hankering to have a go myself, but used to worry about a few things:

(1) Although I am frequently opinionated, I'm not sure I know very much that anyone would wish to hear about.

(2) I have a regrettable tendency to digress at huge length and with some venom about topics I can't even remember the following day (which may have something to do with the proportion of our dinner guests who never make it to a second visit).

However, on wider reading I see wargame blogs which include posts on sailing holidays and all sorts of flotsam, so I am reassured. If I find the need to complain occasionally about things like the British banking system or the value-for-money represented by my TV licence, I shall not be uniquely out of order in this repect. Or at least I will be able to point to precedents.

I've been wargaming for nearly 40 years now, with a couple of extended breaks. My interests have gradually boiled down to just Napoleonics (I sold my last Ancients a while ago to make more room in The Cupboard - a thing of which you will hear more), and I am unusual, I think, in that my armies (Peninsular War) are almost complete, and should be finished to plan within a few months.

If that in itself does not destroy all trace of credibility, I'm sure I'll come up with something else. I am pretty much my own man when it comes to wargaming, I think.

Welcome to anyone who is actually reading this - I hope to get some fun out of the exercise. If no-one ever reads it then I shall have lost nothing (and, obviously, neither will anyone else), and it should be a useful place to record my thoughts on my hobby, and to sound off about anything else which comes to mind. It will also save me unloading my thoughts on my poor wife or on email correspondents who probably deserve better.