Solo Campaign - Action at Peñausende

Weeks 9 and 10 of the solo Peninsular War campaign are now up to date, and have duly produced a division-sized battle, which I fought out yesterday. Notes on the current state and position of the armies will appear shortly, but I propose to cut down the level of detail in these weekly summaries - they are tedious reading, even to me!

In the meantime, here's an account of...

Action at Peñausende (Fri 27th Mar 1812)

General view of the Allied starting position, from their left flank. Portuguese at this end.

Unaware that General Cotton’s march over the hills to Orense had been aborted because of the weather, Clauzel was ordered to bring his force up from Salamanca to Zamora, the intention being to join with Marmont at Leon. This march caused some disquiet in his division, since it would take them across the battlefield of Corrales, the scene of their recent defeat at the hands of España’s little Spanish army. In fact, they did not get that far - patrols from Cavrois’ dragoons came upon Allied cavalry near Mayalde in the evening of 25th March, and it became clear that these troops were part of a larger body, though the only details established were the presence of two Portuguese cavalry units.

Cotton also had little knowledge of the force which was approaching him. Marching south toward the Arroyo de San Cristobal, his advanced guard came into contact with French troops near Peñausende on the 26th, and he decided to attack on the following morning. The area is hilly, with wooded areas. Cotton, with Clinton’s Sixth Division plus the cavalry brigades of Otway (Portuguese) and Le Marchant (British dragoons), had approximately 10,200 men, with 12 guns, and his scouts advised him that this gave him a significant numerical advantage. In reality, Clauzel had rather less than 8000 men, but the presence of part of the reserve artillery of the Armee de Portugal gave him a total of 24 guns, all of heavier calibre than the Allied artillery.

French position, from their right

Clauzel placed Berlier’s brigade of infantry in some woods on his right flank – a strong position [though perilously close to the table edge!], put the combined voltigeur companies of the Division in to the little town of Peñausende, and placed the brigade of Pinoteau (who had now arrived to replace the discredited Barbot) in the rear of the town. His two cavalry regiments were held in the rear, Picquet’s 6e Dragons being on the extreme left. His three foot batteries were all well sited on prominent ground.

Hinde's Brigade - chosen to make the main attack

Cotton’s plan was to demonstrate against the French right with Rezende’s Portuguese, thus preventing Clauzel from reinforcing his centre from this area, and to drive the main, central attack in through and past the town. Le Marchant’s heavy dragoons supported the extreme right.

French light troops hold the town at the outset

The assault started well – the 2nd (Queen’s) and 1/36th from Hinde’s brigade took advantage of the woods extending up to the workshops and sheds on the northern edge of the town, and made a vigorous assault on the town itself – the fighting there continued for about 45 minutes, but the French voltigeurs were driven out in fine style. Elsewhere, the Allied effort faltered badly. The French artillery – severely criticised for its poor performance at Corrales – produced a devastating weight of fire, the Portuguese advance was halted and twice driven back, and Bull’s troop of the RHA was outranged and outmatched – the horse gunners were silenced.

Le Marchant's ill-fated Heavy Brigade

The French left - Pinoteau's brigade and the 6e Dragons - Clauzel is on the white horse

The Allied effort in the centre did not develop – the capture of the built-up area proved to be of little value in the absence of a concerted advance by Hulse’s brigade, which spent a lot of valuable time dressing lines and forming up, waiting for the Portuguese demonstration on their left which never came.

Picquet's Charge! - 6e Dragons put paid to Le Marchant's second regiment

Though the Allies had more casualties from artillery fire, the situation was something of a stalemate until Cotton sent Le Marchant’s brigade of cavalry forward to threaten the French left. This produced a remarkable response from the French. Picquet’s single dragoon regiment advanced to meet Le Marchant, badly mauled his two regiments on the low hill to the west of the town, and scattered the fugitive survivors, cutting down Le Marchant himself in the process. Sweeping on, Picquet’s men forced the 32nd Foot into a square which was subsequently broken and destroyed when Clauzel force-marched a battalion of the 50e Ligne to support Picquet.

The infantry firefight develops in the centre - the Allied attack was so under-developed that the French came looking for them

At this point the Allies had lost what little momentum they had developed, were outflanked on their right and bogged down elsewhere – apart from losses to the 27e Ligne as a result of a fire-fight near the town, the French were unshaken. Cotton, realistically, withdrew at around 4pm, his Portuguese cavalry covering the retreat.

Orders of Battle

Anglo-Portuguese Army (part) – Lt Gen Sir Stapleton Cotton

6th Division – Maj Gen Henry Clinton:
Hulse’s Bde – 1/11th, 2/53rd & 1/61st Foot, plus converged light cos with 1 coy 5/60th Rifles
Col Hinde’s Bde – 2nd, 1/32nd & 1/36th Foot, plus converged light cos
Conde de Rezende’s Bde – 8th & 12th Portuguese (2 Bns each), 9th Cacadores
Greene’s battery, RA

Cavalry:
Le Marchant’s Bde – 3rd Dragoons, 5th Dragoon Gds
Col Otway’s Bde – 1st & 11th Portuguese Cavalry
Bull’s Troop, RHA

Total loss: 1200 infantry, 480 cavalry

French force (from Armée de Portugal ) – Gen de Divn Bertrand Clauzel

2nd Divn:
Berlier’s Bde – 25e Leger (3 Bns), 27e Ligne (2) plus battalion of voltigeurs
Pinoteau’s Bde – 50e Ligne (3), 59e Ligne (2) plus battalion of voltigeurs
15/3e Art à Pied

Cavalry:
Picquet’s Bde – 6e & 11e Dragons

Attached Reserve artillery:
10/3e & 19/3e Art à Pied

Total loss: 800 infantry, 120 cavalry

[The action was played out with standard CCN rules – 5 command cards each, Allies moved first, 7 Victory Banners for the win]

Aftermath: Cotton obliged to retreat over the hills to Orense, which manoeuvre had been abandoned two weeks earlier as a result of wintry weather. The loss to his army was not disastrous, and Cotton extracted his force with some skill, but there is severe criticism of poor decision making and general timidity of the attacks. Wellington’s political situation will suffer further as a result of the action, which is unfortunate since the combat was something of an accident, Wellington himself was not present, his appointed subordinate commander conducted himself reasonably well and the army is not mortally damaged. When news of this episode reaches London, there will once again be a clamour for Wellington to be replaced. Sir Henry Paget is widely tipped as his successor.

[Game went well – the Victory conditions should probably have been set higher – Allies lost 7-3 on Victory Banners, but their position was far from hopeless at this point. My thanks to Kieran and Nick for helping out with the battle – total time elapsed was a little under 3 hours, which is very good considering that Kieran was new to the rules and needed some instruction as we went along.]

ECW - The Welsh Campaign

Now that is a wargames room...

Just back from two very enjoyable days in North Wales, as a guest of John (he of 20mm Nostalgic Revival) and Cynthia, whom I must thank once again for their wonderful kindness and hospitality.

Apart from collecting an order of Les Higgins ECW figures, one big attraction for me was the opportunity to get some experience of ECW gaming. Accordingly, we played a full game on each of the two days. I'll pass quickly over the fact that I lost both games, mumbling feebly that at one stage I thought I was winning each battle. John has an unnervingly vigorous style of generalship, which includes a fondness for sacrificing his cavalry as quickly as possible! The first game looked a tad ambitious for introducing a rookie to the period - around 1000 castings, and a battlefield which was scenically pretty complex, but it worked out fine - we deliberately used simple rules. Charles F Wesencraft's Pike & Shot period rules from his Practical Wargaming (back in print - a recommended book for those who have missed it - Wesencraft was never as fashionable as some of his contemporaries). We deliberately did not use the later rules from CFW's With Pike & Musket, which had been improved rather in the direction of contemporary WRG practice. So the rules we used are functionally very simple - for example, missile fire - you are either in range or not. The game does not bother with niceties such as short range or anything like that. The only change we made was to halve all movement rates - they are very generous in the original. I thought this might mean we had to halve the missile ranges, too, but leaving them unaltered still gave the same sort of balance you will find in other mainstream ECW rules.

The battle lasted all day, but the overall story is quickly told. Both armies were successful early on their respective right flanks, and the Royalist infantry successfully held the line of a hedged road across the middle of the table, but gradually they were worn down, and brought up their reserves, who in turn were eventually driven back and off the field. End of battle - Parliamentary victory, but a very expensive one, I have to say!

My Royalist foot hold the road, before it all turned to rat-droppings

For the second day, we fought a rather smaller action, using the Victory without Quarter rules. Our implementation of the game was definitely on the rough-and-ready side, with a partial deck of playing cards for activation and cardboard chits to identify the units and commanders on the field. Apart from the fact that early successes were on the left flanks this time, the game played out surprisingly similarly to the previous one - even down to my losing...

VwQ is a good, fun game. Considering how short the rule "book" is, we took a little time to get the hang of what is quite a different style of game from what we (well, certainly I) have been used to. Once we got into it, however, it has it's own kind of logic and swing, it becomes a simple matter to carry in your head everything you need to know, and it went well. I am still intending to make it my ECW game of choice for the time being (well - once I have armies to fight with...) , but a couple of observations might be of interest here:

(1) From the generalship point of view, we should have allocated more brigadiers in our game. Units may be given an order when their card is drawn, but when a general officer's card is drawn, all of his units within a certain distance may be given orders, which is a big help. Outlying formations on a flank can become pretty well stranded if there is no brigadier with them - this point is duly noted for the future.

(2) If the armies start off some distance from each other, and have to march into contact, it would be useful to have some kind of bulk-order cards available for a few turns, to get things moving and keep the armies in decent shape - I'm thinking about this.

(3) The rules are not claimed to be complete, but we found a couple of things which we thought need to be covered more fully. Melees involving artillery are dealt with very sketchily - I think I would like to allow artillery to stand and fire if attacked, but to have zero capability if the enemy makes contact - that seems to accord with the spirit of the rules, but is less vague. Also, flank and rear attacks needed some extra rules - certainly for morale tests, and probably for fighting the actual melees also.

There is a great deal which works well, and gives a pleasingly sensible game. Given the possible need for a couple of tweaks, then, the rules passed the test pretty well. It would benefit from a properly prepared set of unit cards, though, and some nice-looking tokens to denote casualties, the need to reload and "shaken" would be good. We used laid-down single figures as casualty markers, and this gave rise to the hilarious sight of units charging around, dragging dead men along behind them. Given a proper level of preparation, then, this is a very enjoyable game - suitable for maybe a dozen-and-a-half units a side - and well worth checking out.

Thanks again, John!

ECW - Victory Without Quarter

I've been very busy this last week reading and comparing English Civil War rules. I've read a lot of rules, and some are very good, but I keep finding things which I don't fancy. If you like some or all of these things, then good for you - my main priority in starting this period is to keep myself happy, so if you disagree with anything that I say here then you are probably right...

I was surprised how many of the rules use singly-based figures - I don't like this system at the best of times, so the prospect of figures armed with dirty great pikes on single bases fills me with dread. I can see the advantages for flexibility of unit organisation and formations that this might offer, but don't want to go that way. A "best of all worlds" arrangement might be achieved by mounting single bases with magnetic sheet on collective sabots faced with steel paper. Thus far, my experiments with this approach indicate that it is good for keeping the little bases in order, but I have problems when I fail to remember to pick the stands up by the stand itself. Pick the stands up by the figures and they will tip towards each other, things fall apart...

I have been strongly tempted to go back to my Old School Charlie Wesencraft rules - I was a big fan of his Horse & Musket rules years ago, but I've never used his Pike & Musket rules, and it seems likely that I'm going to try these out in anger (perhaps that's the wrong phrase?) next week. In fact I'm starting to cool on this idea - the 36-inch light cavalry charge move seems remarkably spritely - I've seen aerial dog fight games with smaller moves than this. We've agreed that next week we will reduce Wesencraft's moves and ranges by half, or maybe use centimetres instead of inches, but I find another thing I am not enthusiastic about is the casualty table - I really dislike pieces of paper on the battlefield, and I prefer casualty calcs which are understandable and intuitive. I have considered Terry Wise's ECW rules, but there is a touch too much tactical detail in there for me. Forlorn Hope is obviously a quality product, but I don't care for the Vintage-WRG style casualty tables - the historic stuff and the organisational and uniform material are first rate, however.

And so it goes on. Overall, the rule set I have found most appealing on most counts is "Victory Without Quarter", by Clarence Harrison, which until recently was available as a free download from Quindia Studios. I like the multiple-figure bases, the absence of rosters and record keeping, the stand-level calcs, the non-removal of casualties, the simple mechanisms and general logic and flow of the game. I have not actually played the game so far, you understand, and I have had a few problems with getting a full understanding of the rules. They are well written, and everything is there, but sometimes you have to look for the bits. To understand how melees work, for example, you have to assemble a collection of elements from each of the sections on The Order Deck, Commanders, Unit Status, Melees (not unreasonably) and Morale. I am gradually getting the hang of where everything is, and I am reluctant to criticise, but things could have been structured more helpfully. I've had a go at reducing the rules to a short Quick-Ref sheet, and it is not straightforward.

Main issue, and the reason for the hours I've committed this week, is the card system for activation. This is absolutely central to the game - there is a card for each unit and general officer, plus some additional cards which allow universal reloading, artillery fire and so on. The card system looks to me like both a strength and an area for some concern. The player is required to make up his own pack of cards, which will be specific to each game being played. I really don't fancy the idea of spoiling the game by my sloppy card shuffling, or even of having the game based around nasty-looking handwritten cards. I have a feeling that an automated version would be smoother and less clunky for me - I'm going to give it a try, anyway. I've been writing a program to automate the game. If I am to rely on being told what to do next, I am just as happy for a computer to do the telling - it cuts down on the bits of cardboard, and I know for a fact that there can be no doubts about the computer's ability to shuffle. I'm also looking at the viability of having an option to have the game based on hexes - thus far, it looks like a goer. I am keeping the program so that it is switchable - at any point in the game, you can switch to hexes or back to inches, so all bets are carefully hedged.

That is really all I want to say about this at the moment. I won't have any ECW figures ready for fighting for a month or two, so I have some time to finalise my choice and implementation of rules.

Elsewhere, Week 9 of the Solo Peninsular War Campaign produced very little action worth noting - having had bad experience of the effects of trying to march in Winter conditions, both armies are consolidating and pretty much sitting tight, waiting for April and the better campaigning weather. I'll include Week 9 with Week 10 in my report in week or so.

Falcata - Back in Business

This may be old news for you, but it's new to me. Falcata are officially back, and have a new blog site, which is well worth checking out. They offer 20mm white metal Peninsular War figures, Isabelinos, Carlistas...

Very tasty. You can get the figures direct from Falcata, details available on the blog link above, or from Goyo at La Flecha Negra,

Hooptedoodle #46 - Banks - Why?

Banks are an easy target these days - bank executives are right up there with serial killers in the public affection. Not much of a challenge, then, to stir up some bile about banks, so why bother, apart from the chance to generate some hate mail from indignant serial killers?

I was in my local bank branch this morning. I stood in a longish queue for about 15 minutes while the only girl on the customer desk attempted to explain to an 80-year-old the differences between two equally uninteresting savings accounts - and I do mean uninteresting, as in little or no interest. I amused myself by recalling an ancient story from my former working life - so, to get things off to a really pointless start, let's get the digression in early...

Back in the 1970s, for a while I was involved in managing pension schemes for an insurance office. One of our high-profile customers was a very large shipyard - I cannot remember how much the executives of this firm paid themselves by way of pension, but the workers in the yard got a princely £6 for each year of service - so if someone was a paid up member of the scheme throughout a 40-year-working life, with no interruptions, he would rack up a staggering £240 per annum. That's £20 a month, folks. Even in the 1970s that was peanuts. Anyway, the point of this story is that one old guy coming up to retirement was outraged that this pension scheme insisted that he open a bank account, so that his pension could be paid into it on a regular basis by means of whatever passed for automation in those days. His family had never had a bank account - only toffs had bank accounts - he really was very put out about this. His employers and my own company made this a show case - they put a lot of trouble into winning him over. He was introduced to the bank manager, and there were photographs and a lot of hand-shaking, and he was given a personal guarantee by the manager that his money would be well looked after, and he could come in whenever he liked to check that everything was OK.

Great. Much self-congratulation all around, and the shipyard prepared to use this new convert to help persuade his mates to perform similar acts of class betrayal. After a few weeks, he did in fact turn up at the bank, who took photographs of him being shown his money. Then a few weeks later it all went disastrously wrong when he came in and asked again. They managed easily to find enough cash to show him, but he had taken a note of the serial numbers on the previous occasion, and this patently was not his money. What had happened to his money - what had they done with it? Appropriately outraged, at one point he said that this proved everything he had always suspected about banks, and that it just went to show that he'd be safer keeping his money behind the clock.

Over the years I've had a few chuckles at that old story, but recently I find that I'm starting to come around to his viewpoint. What advantages, I ask myself, does a bank account offer over keeping the old green stuff behind the clock? I spent a little time looking around the internet this morning, to see how the banks themselves try to present this anti-clock argument, and I picked up a few fairly traditional one-liners. Let's have a look at a few.

(1) Security - the bank is much safer. Erm - only to a point. The chances of a ruinous hold-up are minimal, true, but the fund managers themselves have shown a remarkable tendency to drop the ball recently, and the external guarantees which are underwritten by third parties are limited in scope. Watch the small print. Hmmm.

(2) Investment - they pay you interest - give you a share of the gain they make from the use of your money. You have to be joking. They pay nothing at all unless you are a new customer, or an existing customer who is patient and involved enough to spot the optimal time to switch money into a new account (and how much of the admin budget does that waste, quite apart from the customer's own time?). For the elderly, or the confused, or the uninformed, or the non-online this is a shameless scam. Thank you for the business you have given us for all these years - you mug.

(3) They can use their expertise to make modern life so much simpler. Really? I recently spent an unrewarding few weeks trying to set up a discretionary trust to provide security for a disabled relative, and no-one in my bank knew very much about it. I had to do my own research, pretty much, and had to pay my own lawyer to provide legal services that the bank felt unable to offer. The legendary girl-on-the-desk knows little about the products which she services, though she is just itching to arrange a meeting for you with the resident financial adviser, who comes in only on Thursdays, and appears to be half way through the banking exams. You want to ask about your business account? - I'm sorry, you'll have to ring this number. You want to send money overseas? - I'm sorry, it will be cheaper and less infuriating if you do it yourself, online.

(4) They can help out in more difficult times - with advice or a loan. Do not, under any circumstances, overdraw your account or we will take your children hostage. There may not be much interest going out, but by gum there's plenty coming in. If you want a loan, you have no chance at all unless you can clearly demonstrate that you don't need the money.

(5) They are nice, helpful people to deal with. "And what are you up to today, then?" asks the girl at the end of my 15-minute wait, while she is sorting out my transfer. I feel my blood pressure rising. I breathe slowly. "Oh, I thought I'd spend the morning standing in a queue in the bank," I say, "how about you?"

She sits there, several metres below my rapier-like thrust, and blinks charmingly. "Oh, I work here," she says. So that explains it. If I wish to discuss anything more intricate than my immediate tactical plans for this morning, I will have to phone up another young lady, in New Delhi, and if I do not follow exactly the script which she has in front of her then we will get hopelessly confused. Best not to ask - just keep your head down and be grateful. As for the petty chat from the girl in the branch, I do realise they are trained to do this. It is a mistake. I do not want my bank to be my bloody friend. It kind of adds insult to injury.

(6) It is good for one's own credibility to share in the corporate image of a well-known bank. Yeah - right. During the setting-up of the aforementioned trust, I went through the customary contortions to satisfy the anti-Money-Laundering regulations (which I do realise are necessary, thank you), and also had to pay my lawyer for the time he took going though the same process, since he is one of the trustees. A less respectful punter than I might easily stop and say, "Just a minute - it's you that is the bank - based on recent performance, which of us should be satisfying the other of our credentials and trustworthiness?".

Solo Campaign - Week 8

Wellington's Logistics Train in trouble on the retreat from Benavente

Week 08

Random Events

Nothing new. There was a scare about a potential typhus outbreak in the French force at Burgos, but it came to nothing.  

Housekeeping

The 3D3 activation throws give Allies 5, French 4 – Allies elect to move first.

Moves

Allies (5 allowed)

1 – A (Wellington) holds position at Lugo, to allow the troops to rest – Group is still Out of Supply, and thus is not allowed monthly reinforcement phase, but they lose their Tired status – since still Demoralised (see last week), this Group will again require to be tested for desertion and sickness (see below)...

2 – Sp B (Espana) marches over the rough road from Zamora to Orense, this requires a test...

2D3 = 4 +2 (Espana’s rating) -1 (winter conditions) -1 (brown road) = 4    - this result means that the Group completes the march but is Tired

3 – E (Cotton) also marches over the rough road from Zamora to Orense, test is as follows:

2D3 = 2 +2 (Cotton’s rating) -1 (winter conditions) -1 (brown road) = 2   - this result means that the Group has to abandon the march, and is Demoralised (see below for sickness & desertion)

4 – Fortress of Elvas is garrisoned with a force (F) of 4000 Portuguese militia with artillery

5 – Fortress of Almeida is garrisoned with a force (G) of 4000 Portuguese militia with artillery

[Intelligence step –

• Nothing new – no scouting orders]

 

French (4 allowed)

1 – H (Clauzel, with his own Divn, Piquet’s dragoons and the reserve artillery) marches 1 step from Valladolid to Salamanca

 [Intelligence step -

• No scouting orders]

Supplies and Demoralisation

Anglo-Portuguese Group A (Wellington, at Lugo) is Demoralised since he is Out of Supply until Week 09.

Demoralisation tests result in a block/base being lost to sickness and desertion for the following units:

2/24^th Ft, 2/58^th Ft, Combined Lt Coys of Blantyre’s Bde, 1^st Line Bn KGL, 74^th Ft, 1/88^th Ft, 1/9^th Ptgse, 2/21^st Ptgse, 2^nd Lt Bn KGL, 51^st Ft, 1^st Dgns KGL, 2^nd Dgns KGL. Wellington’s force thus lost a further 1935 infantry and 240 cavalry.

Anglo-Portuguese Group E (Cotton) was forced to abandon the march through the hills to Orense, and as a consequence are Demoralised. Losses through desertion and sickness are relatively light – 1 block/base lost by each of 1/8^th Ptgse, 2/12^th Ptgse, 11^th Ptgse cavalry – a total of 400 infantry, 120 cavalry.

This is the weekend nearest to 15^th March, so potential replacements and troops returning to duty from hospitals are rolled for:

Spanish Group B (Espana) gained no extra troops.

French Group N (Marmont) gained blocks/bases as follows:

2/69e (+2), 1e Leg Esp (Castilla), 1/2e Esp (Toledo), 2/2e Esp (Toledo), Regt Royal-Etranger (+1 each), 1/3e Italien (+2), 2/3e Italien, 1/5e Italien, 2/5e Italien, Lanciers de la Vistule (+1 each) – total addition is 2200 infantry, 120 cavalry.

French Group H (Clauzel) – 3/25e Leger and 2/50e each +1 = +400 infantry

French Group S (Jourdan) – 1/2e Nassau, 2/2e Nassau and Regt de Francfort each +1 = +600 infantry

Contacts

None

Narrative

Resting at Lugo after their defeat at Benavente and the harsh retreat over the hills in difficult winter conditions, Wellington’s force, being in very short supply until wagons could reach them from the new depot at Vigo, lost a further 2175 men to sickness and desertion. To make matters worse, since they were Out of Supply, they were not in a position to receive the monthly intake of recoveries and replacements.

The Spanish 3^rd Army (Espana) and Cotton (with the Allied 6^th Division and about half the Anglo-Portuguese cavalry) had a very severe march from Zamora to Orense, through bad weather on poor roads. Espana’s men made it with some difficulty (arriving Tired), but Cotton’s force were forced to abandon the march and return to Zamora, arriving demoralised and lucky to lose only 520 men on the road – the Portuguese troops were most badly affected. Cotton’s force was unable to receive any recoveries or replacements for the month, as a result of being demoralised and disordered on the march.

Clauzel, with his own division of the Armee de Portugal plus a brigade of dragoons, advanced across the Duero from Valladolid to Salamanca, thus cutting the Allied forces under Espana and Cotton off from Ciudad Rodrigo.

The French army received replacement troops and returns from hospital as follows:

Marmont (at Leon) – 2200 infantry, 120 cavalry

Clauzel (now at Salamanca) – 400 infantry

Jourdan (at Madrid) – 600 infantry

There are rumours that Wellington may be recalled to Britain, and replaced – a number of successors have been mentioned. As official 2-i-c, Beresford would expect to assume command, but there is talk of Sir Henry Paget...

A suggestion that Marmont be created Prince de Benavente for his victory was not well received by the Emperor – his exact words are not recorded, but something to the effect that he might be able to overlook one of Marmont’s past errors in consequence of this isolated success...

There Was a Little Man

The Diversification - so where was I?

Spring is rolling in here, longer days, brighter outlook, busy busy...

Big change for me this year, as I've mentioned recently, is the start of an involvement in English Civil War gaming (which is a new area), and my decision to put a final scoping in place for my Peninsular War - i.e. optimise the game, and keep involved with it, but stop the pointless, endless growth of the armies.

First development has been a pleasant surprise - starting to clean out the Napoleonic spares boxes via eBay has certainly not made me wealthy, but it has gone better than I expected - far better - and funds raised to date will more than pay for my first batch of ECW soldiers - I should get my hands on my first shipment of Les Higgins figures in a couple of weeks. I hasten to add that this eBay seam of pay-dirt will not cover getting the soldiers painted, or all the books I've suddenly become interested in, or the whole world of 15mm English Rural buildings and scenery which are now attracting my attention, but it is still an unexpected bonus.

I was intrigued to find how pleased I have been to have some unexpected cross-subsidy to offset the ECW expense. I mean the whole idea of a hobby is that it's a waste, right? It's something you don't need to do, and it absorbs funds and time that you could usefully use for something more productive. What would be the point otherwise?

And yet there is still a little inner angst. My dad's family came from what I suppose used to be called provincial working-class roots in the North of England, and there are traditions of hardship and real struggle in there, however outdated they may be now, which do not sit comfortably with anything as self-indulgent or unnecessary as a hobby. My father was always very keen on his gardens and allotments, and they were always immaculate and a source of great pleasure for him. Yet he would invariably point out the amount of hard work they represented, and justify his gardening pastime by telling you how much money he saved by growing his own potatoes - there had to be a little Calvinist balance-sheet in there to show that this was not really about having fun. You could challenge this argument if you had a mind to - for example, not everyone would choose to purchase a hundredweight of Purple Sprouting Broccoli all in one go from the greengrocer if they hadn't grown it themselves - especially in the days before freezers, so the economic case didn't always stand up. Similarly the annual production of barrow-loads of beetroot, and enough rhubarb to cure the constipation of a small town - I think he grew some of this stuff because he liked to grow it, don't you? And what about all those flowers - did we actually need them? I am not mocking - this is an entirely affectionate reminiscence, and that spirit is still alive in the relief I feel when the cost of my new ECW activities does not all have to come out of the same piggy-bank as the family holiday.

And finally...

There is a well-known nursery rhyme which appears at the top of this post. We had a discussion here recently about a slightly different, old children's rhyme which was, I think, a girl's skipping song when I was a kid in Liverpool. You might know it, or some regional variation on it - I offer advance apologies to anyone who is offended by it's forthright style, but this is street culture, and it's Trad, Dad.

There was a little man,
And he had a little gun,
And up yon hill he did so run.
With an oilskin hat
And a belly full of fat,
And a pancake tied to his bum.

Ho ho, how we laughed. Now, this might just be a child's rude parody of the duck-shooting rhyme, but I have come to understand that children's rhymes - and I mean real, folk-lore children's rhymes - usually have their origins in some political or historical theme, and often it is pretty strong stuff - e.g. nursery rhymes which are allegories for the Black Death, the burning of Catholics and other fun topics. I don't believe that the little man with his little gun is as sinister as that, but it has been suggested to me that the skipping song is a military satire based on the duck-hunter, and may come from the Boer War or some other British Colonial War. I have no idea, but since I know of no more erudite bunch than the readers of this blog, I'd be delighted if anyone can shed a little light. If it helps, the illustration at the top dates from 1912 or so, so the duck-hunter rhyme has been around for as long as you like. Who was the little man, and what was he doing?

I don't really wish to have details about the pancake, if there's a choice.