ECW - High-Ups #3

Let’s be honest about this – I am not unbiased. My liking for the Les Higgins ECW range is of many years’ standing, and the fact that they are available again in unlimited quantities (steady...) is probably the main reason for my opting for 20mm for this period – a choice which, let’s face it, is a lot less convenient than 15mm or 28mm would have been (or 6mm, as I am coming to realise).

Anyway, here is one of the two available Higgins senior officers – mounted on a Higgins horse, as promised. I don’t like Higgins horses all that much – I will certainly use quite a few, but I have a strong fancy for using SHQ horses as a standard default for mounted figures of any make (which is likely to include Tumbling Dice as well). If there is one thing calculated to help make differing ranges of cavalry figures look the same size, it is mounting them on the same horses. Expect, then, to see some Higgins cavalry on SHQ horses at some point.

But the point of this first batch of generals has been to compare and cross-reference men-on-horses as supplied by the various manufacturers, to get a feel for the possibilities without too much fudging. So let’s be appropriately critical of Higgins for a second. The horse is – well, OK. The figure of the officer is lovely – Les H was a sculptor, a real artist, and a proportion of his experience had been in the world of trophies and monumental figurines – thereby hangs a common criticism. His wargame figure poses are elegant, but stiff and without vigour. Lovely sculpting, a machine-quality finish which surpassed anything around at the time (circa 1970), but there is little attempt at natural animation, and a good number of the mounted poses have their weapon arms stuck out awkwardly, sideways, just to simplify the mould-joins for casting.

This little man is handsome, and is anatomically the most authentic of the three, but he lacks character. I guess there’s no answer to this. If I were a 28mm collector, I’d be able to buy bespoke castings for a whole crowd of named celebrities, so I guess this is all part of the consequence of going with 20mm.

OK then – I’m happy enough. The last picture from this episode is to show what I set out to prove in the first place – that three figures from three different manufacturers, each on the correct horse from the corresponding range, are fine together. Painted up, they are all happily and comfortably 20mm brothers – they can exist in the same world and on the same tabletop without awkwardness. The variety of style, indeed, becomes a strength.  

ECW - High-Ups #2

More of the same - this time Hinton Hunt's Royalist general figure. Here you see Sir Michael Earnley telling his men exactly where he wants the picnic lunch set out.

I am very fond of this classic little casting - I always have been. There is something about the styling and the poise that always puts me in mind of Alec Guinness as Charles I in the Cromwell movie - I can almost hear that Prime of Miss Jean Brodie accent. As ever, I find the Hintons hard to paint well - items like shoulder belts are kind of implied rather than obvious in the casting - too subtle for me? - but this chap is pleasing.

Overall, I'm not sure. I have a few HH general officer figures to paint, including the Roundhead one in the helmet. The figures are nice enough, but maybe a little bland - it's a personal thing (as always), but I like my generals to be definite personalities. And then there's the thing with Marcus Hinton's little legs...

Good so far - the Higgins chap is next.

ECW - High-Ups #1

It's half term at my son's school, so we have some plans to get away, and spend a couple of days visiting Loch Ness and Culloden. The plans are a bit vague - well, not so much vague as flexible. Even people with no real experience of Scotland will realise that such activities as these are heavily dependant on the weather. The latest idea is that, since the short-term forecast is iffy, and - more specifically - since the recent deluge is likely to have reduced the entire Highland area to a vast bog, we will go later in the week.

I thought I would take advantage of the spare time by painting a couple of general officers for the ECW. Some serious work has gone into planning for the production of my units of foot and horse, and - predictably - the easier bits, the generals and the artillery, which can be picked off in odd moments, have fallen behind.

Since this is all new to me, the first few such figures are a bit of a learning exercise. I decided to produce one test figure from each of the 3 principal brands of figure - Les Higgins, Hinton Hunt and Kennington/SHQ. Further, for this first series I am going to mount each figure on the "correct" (i.e. the same) make of horse, just to get the idea. Later, the intention is to mix and match pretty freely in this respect.

The first figure is the SHQ one - this is a fairly routine cavalry officer from the range, but he paints up well as a High Up. So here is Sir William Brereton, looking suitably belligerent. SHQ are relatively modern castings, with crisp detail, and are easy to paint, though the horses can require a lot of cleaning up first. My experience with Kennington Napoleonics taught me that their figures vary within the range in both height and stature, and that some have overscale hands, but the ECW cavalry are a superior breed all round. They are a very acceptable size match with the older 20mm ranges, though the infantry are a little chunkier. The swords are a bit sturdier than Higgins' ones, but that is not a bad thing for wargames figures.

Quite pleased with this - spare time permitting, some more should appear shortly.

ECW - They Called Her Babylon

Once again, I am grateful to Iain Mac, who is currently operating this blog by remote control. Iain very kindly pointed me towards this clip of Steel-Eye Span performing They Called Her Babylon, which is a song about the self-same siege of Lathom House which I referred to in the comments to the previous post. The heroine of the piece is Lady Derby, a large French lady of terrifyingly feisty spirit, who was resident in the house during the "Leaguer" and showed herself to be a much stronger character than her absent husband. Lathom House is believed to have stood on the site of the Pilkington works near Ormskirk. There is a little poetic licence in the lyric – the defenders did a stout job, no doubt, but the siege failed mostly because of lack of ordnance and suboptimal application on the part of the parliament boys, who retired rather gratefully when it was heard that Rupert was on his way to relieve the siege.

Charlotte Stanley, Countess of Derby

(1599–1664), born Charlotte de La Trémoille

Fairfax quit the siege rather early – when it became obvious that the defenders had more artillery than he had, and was dismissive of the whole episode afterwards. Alexander Rigby was left in charge, and a more dispirited commander it is difficult to imagine. He was further handicapped by the fact that many of his men were provided by militia units belonging to local towns – these men had little motivation to start with, and had to be constantly replaced as secondments were called back in.

Lathom House, as it was

A sortie by the defenders captures the solitary mortar at Lathom 

Lady Derby is a noble member of that legion of strong-minded ladies over the centuries – from Boudicca to Margaret Thatcher – who must be largely responsible for the amount of time men spend in potting sheds, or playing darts in the local pub. Or walking in the hills. Or wargaming.

Also following on from the previous comments, on the subject of hardship inflicted on non-combatants, here is a piece on exactly that subject. This is lifted, humbly but without apology, from Dr Stephen Bull’s fine A General Plague of Madness – TheCivil Wars in Lancashire 1640-1660 – it is a great book – I recommend you buy it if you have any interest in the period. 

Rupert left Oxford at the head of some cavalry on 5 May 1644. At Shrewsbury he was joined by about 8000 horse and foot, including an Irish contingent under Henry Tillier. On 16 May the royalist army advanced northwards, making first for Whitchurch, as one parliamentarian account noted, ‘plundering most fearfully all along, and especially taking men and horses’. Some Cheshire men who gave up their goods and animals to Rupert were doubly cursed, being royalist supporters already forced to hand over much of their property to parliament. William Davenport of Bramhall was a particularly good example of this double jeopardy. Part of Sir William Brereton’s [parliament] cavalry had visited him in early 1643, taking away not only eight muskets, eight sets of pikeman’s armour but other equipment to the value of £40, plus £7 in cash. Thereafter he had to make regular payments to help support the Nantwich garrison and various ‘loans’. On New Years Day 1644 Captain Francis Duckenfield and other parliament men had returned to clear out most of his horses, and various other things including a drum. Then, five months later, Rupert’s army came as something of a final insult:

‘...by whom I lost better than a hundred pounds in linens and other goods at Milesend, besides the rifling and pulling in pieces of my house. By them and my Lord Goring’s army I lost eight horses, and besides victuals and other provision they ate me three score bushels of oats. No sooner was the Prince gone but Stanley’s cornet, one Lely, and twenty of his troop hastened their return to plunder me of my horses which the Prince had left me.’

Parliamentary sequestrators would come again just a couple of months later.


In case you think you are having a bad time this year, please spare a thought for William Davenport.

ECW - The Study of Up North

As my ECW armies gain a little momentum, the homework continues. Starting from a position of pretty all-encompassing ignorance, I am getting up to speed a little on the history of the wars in my chosen (backwater?) theatre of Lancashire (spreading a little into Cheshire, North Wales, Yorkshire and Cumberland). I am enjoying the books I have to hand, which have all been interesting and useful.

The pick of the bunch - and this is no criticism of the rest, is Stephen Bull's super A General Plague of Madness - The Civil Wars in Lancashire 1640-1660. This is one of the very best history books of any type I have read for a while - it is informative at all sorts of levels, copiously (and relevantly) illustrated, relatively free of axes grinding (Dr Bull manages to embrace new knowledge without any unseemly point-scoring against earlier writers) and - wonder of wonders - it is beautifully written. For those of us who find the stylistic differences between CV Wedgwood (for example) and some of the Osprey brigade (for example) a bit uncomfortable, here is a welcome ray of sunshine. Wholeheartedly recommended.

While Googling some obscure aspect of the Civil War recently, I stumbled across a wargame blog devoted to the war in exactly the same area as the one I have decided to focus on. In my fumbling excitement, I failed to bookmark it properly, and now I can't find it again. This weekend, one of my projects will be to find it - if anyone has any clues, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

ECW - Snip Snip

Very short post this afternoon. I thought I would come clean about another instance of an unspeakable practice - converting Hinton Hunt figures. The particular case in point is the ECW standard bearer.

I have never really cared for HH standard bearers with their cast flags - it's a personal thing. Mostly this is because I am not a good enough painter to paint a pleasing flag (I had some disastrous, embarrassing failures with ACW Union flags in my formative years), but it's also because the figure is very top-heavy, and has an inconveniently extended base, which impacts on unit spacings. So I snips em, don't I?

I remove the flag, shorten his base, clean up his shoulder and remodel the brim of his hat (the cast flag is integral with the hat), then drill out the bearer's hand and superglue a metal pole in place and the job is done. I've done this enough times now to be getting comfortable and quick with it, and I'm pleased with the results (although it will certainly earn me black marks in the Great Book of Hinton).

The example shown here is the Royalist CEW2, before and after, but the procedure is exactly the same for the Parliamentarian REW2. All complaints to Chateau Foy, please, on used £10 notes.

Hooptedoodle #67 - Hardboard

Once, years ago, when I was both more stupid and more vigorous than I am now, I decided to make a large, wall-mounted display cabinet with sliding glass doors. It was not going to be a top-quality job, but it was probably a brave effort.

My cabinet needed a hardboard back, and it was important that this back board should be accurately cut and have clean edges. Hardboard was regularly used in those days to do the jobs that thin MDF sheet does now, and it was awful stuff to cut cleanly. I really did not fancy my chances of making a decent job of the back board with the Stone Age tools I had available – this one-piece backboard was going to be around five feet wide and about 3-and-a-half feet high. You may, if you wish, share the vision I had of trying to measure and cut a flexible board of this size with a hand saw, supported on a row of dining chairs or something equally useless.

I had a great idea, though. I phoned up my local DIY store, and spoke to a very nice girl, who promised that they would cut a sheet to the exact dimensions I specified, with perfect right-angle corners and crisp edges, and would deliver it to my house in a few days. Excellent. My measurements, needless to say, were correct to a sixteenth of an inch, and the girl took a careful note of them and read them back to me. She explained to me that they had recently started doing all measurements in millimetres, but there was no problem, since they would simply convert my exact measurements and everything would be fine. I paid by credit card, arranged for the item to be left with a neighbour, and quietly congratulated myself on having removed one major headache from the job.

Later the same week, my elderly neighbour reported that he had received a large item addressed to me, and there it was – packed around the edges with padding, and looking really good. Secure in the knowledge that the back board was all ready to be fixed on, I cracked on with the cabinet, but when the time came to add the back, I was horrified to find it was a few millimetres big in both directions. I checked everything – they had cut it perfectly, but it was a little too big.

I got to bed that night about 4 a.m., having trimmed the board and faked up the two new edges as best I could. It was not really very good – I arranged to have the more ragged edges at the top and near the corner of the room, but I would always know they were there. You know how it is? – something else to gnaw away at you forever – another little failure...

I phoned the store, and got the same girl, who remembered me very clearly (I would rather not think about just why she remembered me). She found the spec sheet, with the exact measurements, and could not understand what had gone wrong.

“They would have converted your measurements exactly, but we always round to the higher centimetre, to be on the safe side.”

I was dumbstruck by this last piece of information, and asked why they did this, and she said,

“Company policy – it’s what our customers want – and, anyway, all items measured in metric are always bigger.”

This should have some upsides, you would think – petrol bought in litres should give you more in the tank (though of course the kilometre journeys would be longer – hmmm...), metric cans of beer should quench a bigger thirst and so on. In fact, some rounding is a sensible thing to do – I recall visiting Cork in the 1980s and being very impressed that they had erected some smart new European signs advising motorists that the speed limit in town was now 48 kph – the metric equivalent of the old speed limit of 30 mph.

I digress. The cabinet was finished, though I never quite forgave it. It developed another problem over the years, since the weight of the glass doors gradually pulled it a little out of shape, and the doors did not shut properly. Eventually I dismantled it and put it in a public rubbish tip, and I felt somehow cleansed when it was gone.

But I have never forgotten that metric items are always bigger. There are occasions in one’s life when a sudden light-bulb of understanding turns on, and I believe that we have to embrace these moments when they arrive.