ECW - How big is an inch, Jack?

I had a hard day yesterday – it doesn’t matter why. Honest toil is a fine thing, I’ve just got out of the habit, but one consequence is that today I’m taking it easier, and am less focused than usual.

Thus I shall start – fleetingly – with a digression [now there’s a surprise]. This is what I was thinking of writing about today, but when I looked into the matter I decided against it. My mum recently heard (or watched?) a BBC programme commemorating the fighting in Libya in WW2, and El Alamein, Tobruk – all that. At one point, they were interviewing an elderly veteran, and they asked him, what was the most frightening thing he remembered from the war in the desert?

Spiders, he said. Camel Spiders were the most terrifying thing he experienced there – all the soldiers lived in fear of them. When my mother mentioned this, I had an idea that it might make an appropriate post, with a back reference to my previous Hooptedoodle on the adventures of Max Spinnejäger, my bold, spider-killing alter ego. However, when Mme la Comtesse and I checked Camel Spiders on Google, we were forced to run around the house for a little while, screaming and waving our arms. If you wish to look them up, please feel free to do so, but do not tell me about them. I wish to know no more of the subject. Mighty Max S has just retired to a sealed rest home, as far from Libya as possible.

Jack Scruby

To the main topic, then. I have already bounced this off a few of my usual expert sources, but none of them could help, so this is a general appeal to anyone who has any useful ideas.

Recently I have been interested in obtaining 20mm figures for billmen, clubmen - peasant hooligans, really – for my ECW armies. I’ve had some good suggestions, involving converting plastic figures, or converting Les Higgins artillery figures, and I also have an interesting sample figure, a militia pikeman  from Tumbling Dice, which is (to be fussy about it) a little chubby for a perfect match with the rest of my chaps, but still worth serious consideration.

Thereby, you see, hangs the problem. My 20mm ECW figures are quite small – mostly Les Higgins and Hinton Hunt, with some SHQ in the mix, they are too small to combine comfortably with Art Miniaturen, or the forthcoming Falcata 30YW figures, or even with 1/72 scale plastics. My figures, I guess, must be smaller than 1/72.

So I spent a little time looking at the possibilities of borrowing figures from other periods, or from makers I hadn’t considered. And I thought of Scruby.

I checked out Historifigs catalogue online, and I see that the Scruby Thirty Years War range (which might be just what I’m interested in, and which is still in production) are described as “1 inch” scale. There is an interesting article by Jack Scruby himself on the website at Historifigs, in which he describes how he came to re-issue the 30YW range in this scale, the implication being that they came from an earlier period.

I could take this literally, and assume – since 1 inch is almost exactly 25mm – that these are the same as Scruby’s 25mm, which (as everyone knows) are about the same size as Hinton Hunt’s 20mm. Interesting. That would fit. On the other hand, 1 inch might mean something different.

If, at this point, anyone feels moved to send a comment about the correct way of measuring a wargames miniature, then please don’t bother. I appreciate the thought, but I tend to fall asleep while such explanations are going on. The only criterion which matters is, do they look good alongside other figures which they are to be used with? I don’t care whether we should measure a miniature soldier from the toenail to the eye socket, or to the scalp, or to the bookshelf behind him. Accuracy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

So what I’d really like to know is, does anyone have any experience of Scruby’s 1” 30YW figures? Anyone actually got any? How big are they? How big is an inch, in fact? As a general guide, anything which is a little smaller than plastic 1/72 would be in the ball park. I could, of course, order some samples from Historifigs – in fact I probably will – but I thought someone might have been down this road before. I don’t think any other range in Historifigs’ very large catalogue is advertised as 1 inch. I am intrigued.

But don’t mention spiders. I don’t dig spiders, man.

Paul Glickman's take on the Stan Freberg take on the classic 1950s hit.

Late Edit: many thanks to Ross for a very useful link to the Historifigs site, which shows this extract from the 1968 Scruby catalog. This seems to indicate that 1-inch figures are somewhere between the  25mm and 30mm ranges in size. If the drawing is to scale, it suggests that Scruby had a house standard inch measuring about 28mm, which was an astonishing piece of foresight, and is similar to the conversion ratio used by my local hardware store, as  discussed in my recent blog post on Hardboard.

From 1968 Scruby catalog (thanks to Historifigs)

Hooptedoodle #70 – Don, the Probability Well

Today’s pointless yarn is about a fellow I was at school with, somewhere around the middle of the last century.

Don was always an engaging, likeable chap – great sense of humour, and he was a good footballer as a kid – but he had a remarkable ability to get into scrapes. He was constantly getting hurt, or into trouble for something which, strictly, wasn’t his fault. Unlucky - you know?

When we left school we pretty much lost touch, and since we live hundreds of miles apart I’ve only met him a few times since, but I still hear tales of his misadventures. Don seems to have a knack of being around when things go wrong. There is a long record of 200 year old pictures falling off walls as he walked past, lifts getting stuck when he was in them, one case of a very old and valuable parrot which died of a heart attack when Don spoke to it - things like that.

I arranged to meet him for a beer about 5 years ago when I was visiting his part of the world, and was privileged to see a small sample of his powers in action. A full pint of Guinness slid horizontally across a perfectly steady table – no-one touched it – and dropped into someone’s lap. I swear this is true – there were four of us at the table, and we all saw it quite clearly. Later during the same evening (and this was before the general smoking ban came into effect in England), Don took exception to a note which was attached to the ash tray on our table, which said:

Please be considerate of diners in our restaurant. If anyone

is eating near you, please refrain from smoking. Thank you.

The Management.

Don airily waved his hand-rolled cigarette over the ashtray, and accidentally managed to set both the notice and a paper napkin alight, which caused some excitement. By this time, the staff of the pub were keeping a very careful eye on us, but we survived the rest of the evening without further dramas.

My favourite Don story was told to me by another old school chum (are you allowed to have school chums now?), who was present on the occasion when a group of friends was meeting in a London pub before going to the theatre. Don arrived a bit late, and was introduced to a lady in the party whom he had not met before. As she stood up to greet him, Don bowed in suitably theatrical style and their heads met with quite a thump. The general merriment was ended when the lady realised that she had become separated from one of her contact lenses, and would not be able to watch the play without it. A panic search failed to find it, so she rushed off to get a taxi home to collect some spare lenses.

She was about half-way home when the tip of Don’s cigarette, which somehow had fallen into her handbag and had been smouldering quietly, caused her bag to burst into flames. A bottle of cologne exploded and, though no-one was injured, the fire brigade had to come to put out the burning cab.

I have no plans to travel on an aeroplane with Don. To me, the scariest thing of all is that he has earned his living for the last 40 years – and very successfully – as a driving instructor. Are some people genuinely accident prone, or are they just clumsier or less careful than others?

Solo Campaign – where is it?

Back in February I got a nice email from Francis, which prompted a time-out discussion of how my solo Peninsular War campaign worked. I was a bit shaken at the time to learn that Francis was sufficiently excited about my efforts to think about having a go himself.

This week Francis was in touch again, asking what has happened to the solo campaign – have I abandoned it?

It’s a good question, but the answer is no – the campaign continues, but has been delayed for a number of reasons, some of which are not really very good reasons at all.

(1) Recent bad attack of Real Life – I have been involved with banks and lawyers and an accountant and all sorts of people, trying to make sense of my mother’s finances (which are not in trouble – merely obscure) and also to do some work on a trust fund of which I am the managing trustee. Boring but necessary. In truth, the impact on hobby time has been less to do with the actual time spent on these tasks than with the dispiriting effect that they have. Spending an hour trying to have a sensible discussion with my “personal account manager” at RBS, for example, is a depressing experience for both of us.

(2) The English Civil War – my reading and the arrival of the first real troops have absorbed a lot of the available enthusiasm. Much of the hobby time I have had has been spent on this. That’s all fine – there’s no rush, after all.

(3) The amount of joy I get from the campaign has been dimmed a bit by a couple of early decisions I made which I now regret. This is not a terminal problem, and I intend to carry on anyway, but I wouldn’t do this campaign the same way again. The particular issues are:

(a) The intelligence rules don’t really work very well – more seriously, they are tedious enough to prompt me to take shortcuts or marginalise them. They would work well for two players with an umpire – this is a comment which is of general application to a number of the problems I’ve come up against, and is maybe a reflection of the inherent difficulty of making sense of a solo campaign – or at least of my failure to understand these difficulties fully in advance.

(b) The theatre of operations is hugely complex, and I thought I was being clever by adopting the game map from Omega Games’ “War to the Death”, which represents the peninsula as an array of “Area” boxes connected by notional roads. This greatly simplified the movement and supply rules. I also declared some parts of Spain off-limits for the game, to concentrate activity into the area around the Portuguese border and the roads back towards France and Madrid. In reality, this has forced the campaign into too few areas – the tendency is for big clumpy armies to march around the same parts of the map. I would have been happier with a more detailed map, and more detailed distribution of the forces, but the workload would have been impossible. Again, this is an area where the campaign would have worked better with two players and an umpire...

(c) This one is a real pain – I originally intended to write a little computer program to handle attrition, recruitment and battle losses and recovery for all the units. I didn’t, since I was not confident that the rules were firm enough, and since the dice-throwing rules I had drawn up looked simple in operation. This paper-based book-keeping is proving to be a lot of work – even with a battery of spreadsheets, it is a problem. I wish I had written that program – it would have reduced the workload of running the campaign by about 40%. The campaign will not work without the numbers, but I would rather spend my time on map movement, battles and writing up the account. An umpire would have had a problem with this too. I could still write the program, but it’s a bit late now.

Not another letter from my mother's lawyer?

So? So I’ll get back to the campaign very soon, with due apologies to anyone who has missed it, and with thanks to Francis for giving me a prod. The arrival of November and the greater emphasis on indoor activities will be a help.

I have been thinking of uniting the two separate parts of the Spanish “4^th Army” by sailing one part around the Spanish coast on British ships, but need to add a few rules to make this work. I must read up on how fast ships sailed in 1812, and maybe introduce a random event which can sink the lot in a storm!

The campaign was still a good idea. I just needed more time and a new brain. 

ECW - And Still They Come

Another two units of foot ready for action - here are (in the red) Sir Thomas Tyldesley's Regiment [R] and John Booth's Regiment [P]. Just for a change, the Hinton Hunt unit are the Royalists this time, the Parlies being (mostly) Les Higgins.

I find that I'm still doggedly making sure that the two armies build up at the same pace - it occurred to me today that it must be important for some reason. Since I am still some way short of being able to stage an actual battle, I'm not sure why I am being so careful to keep everything in step. Not to worry - I'm happy with progress, which continues to be steady rather than dramatic.

I now have six units of foot ready (3 each, naturally) and two of cavalry (even split, again), plus a few general officers. There are another two units of horse and two more of foot ready for painting, so I guess the lead mountain must be getting smaller.

My traditional terminology - "Ready to go in The Cupboard" as a euphemism for "Ready to Fight" - is not applicable to my ECW troops, since they do not live in The Cupboard - they are kept in a series of nice, new, pink box files!

Spanish Army - New Commander

Hot from the much-delayed parcel of Falcata figures, here - at last - is the Commander of my Nationalist "4th Army" for the Peninsular War. This is Mariscal de Campo Don Pedro Agostin Giron, Marquis de las Amarilas, Duque de Ahumada (1778–1842), accompanied by his trusty chief of staff, Colonel Sainz.

Giron was a competent, rather than exceptional leader, but the fact that General Castaños, the victor of Bailen, was his uncle must have been a big plus on his CV.

The tasteful yellow border to the base identifies the Spanish commander - house rules...

Falcata - 25th May Order Arrived

Today the FedEx man brought the Falcata figures I ordered in May. The figures received are close enough to my original order for me to be happy with them. I have enough new figures for some more units of Spanish Peninsular War milicias/voluntarios, and some Spanish general officers - no doubt some pictures will appear here at some point.

I shall now remove all previous hostile postings on the subject of this order, as promised, but I urge anyone outside Spain who wishes to purchase Falcata figures to buy them from the forthcoming UK outlet (details will be posted here when available), not direct from Madrid.

ECW - More Cavalry

More mounted recruits, once again splendidly painted by Lee. These are Parliamentarians - William Brereton's Cheshire Horse - figures are Kennington/SHQ. Having varnished and based them, I made a splendid job of the flag, then found to my disgust that I had fitted it upside down, so I printed another and corrected things - though in my heart I will always know that I didn't make quite such an accurate job of the second attempt...

Not to worry - as my old mate Allan Gallacher used to say, the deliberate error keeps away the Evil Eye. Come to think of it, I never did understand what he was on about.