The Headless Horseman

…and other mysterious goings-on.

Well you see, Clive was interested in mounted colonels for some of his British infantry, and one of the possibilities was the fellow I have pictured at the top of this post, who had been in my Napoleonic Command spares box for a few years.

I’d never quite identified this figure. At first glance it looks like a Hinton Hunt OPC, but there’s nothing like this in the catalogue. Disregarding oddities such as Der Kriegsspieler, my personal rule-of-thumb for this sort of thing is that if it looks like Hinton Hunt (especially in the horse department), then there is a good chance that it is actually a very early Minifigs 20mm piece. In fact someone had, I think, told me that this was a Minifig, and by deduction it was probably BNC5 – “Line Infantry Mounted Colonel”. Thus I had assumed this was what it was, and it lived in the spares box in this unofficial role.

I was never very taken with the paint job, and I was suspicious about the unconvincing epaulettes, so I decided to clean it up a bit and see what it was. Into the bleach it went, but bleach couldn’t handle a very thick coat of red undercoat, so it required a Nitromors bath. That shifted the red paint all right, but I was a bit shaken to find that it also shifted his head.

It was a conversion.

I should have thought of that – the Nitromors had simply taken out the glue which held his head on. At this point I was actually laughing out loud – there is something very silly about an elderly fellow like me looking so closely at epaulettes on a 20mm tin soldier, and missing the blindingly obvious. I really must get out more.

Having had a quick look around, I think it is actually a Hinton Hunt OPC Austrian General (AN102 – picture borrowed from the Hinton Hunter), with a British infantry head attached. If anyone recognizes the figure, or if you did the conversion, or if you disagree with my ideas about it, please shout.

Hinton Hunt AN102 - thanks to The Hinton Hunter blog

Good fun. Not sure what to do with him. The lack of epaulettes might make him suitable for a Spanish general, but the single-breasted jacket might not work – I’ll think about it.

Subject 2 – On Being Dead

I was happily reading Pierre le Poillu’s account of his visit to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, when I suddenly remembered that I am buried there. There are, of course, some 1 million other people buried there, so I can’t feel too bad about it if he did not visit my tomb. Out of idle curiosity I had a look in Wikipedia to see which famous people share my final resting place, and was a little upset to find I am not listed.

It would be ungracious to make too much of a fuss about this, but I would remind the reader that I was a prominent general in the Napoleonic Wars (rising to the rank of General of Division – I would have risen higher if I hadn’t blotted my record by being a Jacobin and a Republican, opposed to the Empire), I was wounded 15 times during those wars – the last time being outside the walls of Hougoumont at Waterloo, and I subsequently retired from military service to become leader of the liberal opposition in the French Chamber of Deputies. I became a noted orator before succumbing to apoplexy at the tender age of 50.

Naturally I would not wish to talk myself up here, but there are some pretty cheesy C-List celebs on the official tour of Père Lachaise – actresses and such. If you are in Paris, I hope you have the opportunity to drop in and say hello. My tomb is a bit overdone for my own taste, but it is easily spotted, and I appreciate the sentiment that created it. As you will see, they did not wish me to get out of here in a hurry.

Hi-ho, hi-ho – plus Stephen and Buddy

…it's off to work we go

The prospect of getting back to some siege gaming (an activity which – strangely – was actually discouraged by my Peninsular War campaign) has got me sifting through the boxes of not-quite projects to get some more engineering and supply units finished off.

First hit was an easy one – a little group of British infantry pioneers, individually based. Right away, I have to admit that these are not really a siege-type unit – there will be proper sappers and miners for that later on, with the regulation brown bases. These fellows exist primarily because it seems like a good idea, and there is already in existence a French equivalent. Next admission is that I don’t actually have any rules to allow the pioneers to influence the game, but now that I have a unit for each side I am more likely to do something about that.

They are, as you will see, from Minifigs “interim” range – the one after the S-Range and before the current range of clinically obese chaps. There isn’t much available in metal in this scale. My French sapeurs are a mixture of Kennington and Falcata castings, which gives some variety of poses. I had intended to use S-Range Brits for the pioneers, but the S-Range pioneer is a disappointingly weedy looking sculpt, who looks as if he is struggling with his axe, and might have trouble sharpening a pencil. So it’s the intermediates – these are BN55, vintage circa 1974?

Since this is an informal collective (pool?) of bods from various regiments, they have mixed facings. If you want someone to lose that gate for you, or to help with building a bridge, these could be just the fellows. I regret that there are no beards on show, but the castings have no beards. I tried painting a beard on, but the effect was funnier than I had hoped.

Subject 2: Stephen Fry

Of late, I have given up trying to paint soldiers with the TV on. Wearing my painting glasses, I cannot see the TV, never mind work out what is on the screen, so these days I listen to music while painting. This weekend it has been the usual mixed bag – Mississippi John Hurt (brilliant, but after 20 minutes it all sounds the same, and is always in the same key, which doesn’t help), Buffalo Springfield (disappointingly dated, and not as good as I remembered), Herbie Hancock (excellent – I played River, which is an album of Joni Mitchell’s music, with guest vocals provided by numerous worthies, including Leonard Cohen and – erm – Joni Mitchell), Cassandra Wilson (terrific, and sexy in a slightly weird way), and a boxed set of Mendelssohn’s symphonies. Intuitively, it seems odd that Buffalo Springfield seemed more dated than Mendelssohn, but hey.

One of the things I did not watch on the TV was Stephen Fry’s QI show, which makes me decidedly uncomfortable. If you haven’t seen it, it consists of a sort of bogus panel game, which is entirely designed to perpetuate the legend that SF is the cleverest fellow on the planet. The panel members do not always sit easily in their role as stooges, but the show can be very amusing nonetheless.

It’s hard to put my finger on why Stephen’s public image grates with me. I actually quite like him – he is unpredictable and witty and frequently endearing. I just get very fed up with the constant force-feeding of his TV packaging as a National Treasure – fed up in the same way that I became fed up with the constant overexposure of David Jason and the late John Thaw (great talents, both) on British TV in past years.

No amount of TV is going to make me accept that Mr Fry is an intellectual, or a great scholar, or Oscar Wilde, or Dr Johnson. My attention is limited – I will find it more convenient if he remains a comedian, an occasional writer and – to be brutal – a TV personality. I am happy with him in that more digestible role.

I hasten to add that I have huge affection for the old Jeeves & Wooster series he did with Hugh Lawrie, which remains one of the very brightest gems of British television in my humble opinion. In fact, now I come to remember that I have an Amazon gift voucher which someone very kindly sent me for Christmas, I must have a look to see what boxed sets of DVDs are available for that series. While I’m at it, I should check out what there is of the old black-and-white Tony Hancock shows. You have to be careful with this – it would be awful to be confronted with the fact that – like Buffalo Springfield on Saturday – these shows are not as good as I think they were. Tricky stuff, nostalgia.

One of the very strangest bits of Stephen Fry was when they sent him on a trip to America – touring in a London cab. His visit to Chicago included an interview – in the cab, naturally – with Buddy Guy, the great urban blues legend. The idea of Fry empathizing with Buddy’s recollection of what life was like for an impoverished black musician in 1950s Chicago is bizarre. I suspect that they could have achieved a comparable amount of empathy by getting Stephen to travel round Chicago in his taxi with a grizzly bear – he is affable and enthusiastic and correct, but these worlds never quite collided, did they?

Hooptedoodle #121 – Black Agnes

Recently, I got a friendly leg-pull via email from Louis, who jokingly noted that my various Hooptedoodle efforts appear to be generated by a formula. I complimented him on his good taste in reading such material, and on consideration I have to say that there may be some substance in his theory.

Something current in my life, says Louis – an argument with the bank, non-delivery of a parcel, disappointment over the performance of a virus-checker, a tasteless banana, whatever – will remind me, often via some oblique (or incomprehensible) link, of some remote event in my lengthy past. I shall somehow mix the whole lot up into a yarn of some sort, arrive at some unlikely conclusion and – bingo – another Hooptedoodle is born.

There are times when a glimpse of the truth is uncomfortable. I have to say that I do not fully agree with him; I admit I might recognize a process by which I am led to ponder certain subjects. I cannot claim to have supernatural levels of wisdom or insight to apply to such matters but – like everyone – my views are coloured by my personal experience, and I certainly have a great deal of that. Of course, my ponderings sometimes generate Hooptedoodles, so in the end he probably is on to something.

To prove the point – here’s the formula at work again (I’m self-conscious, now).

On the radio this morning I was listening to an interview with an elected councillor of the city of Stoke on Trent, no less, who is pleased to represent the British Nationalist Party (BNP). I am certainly not going to get into a debate about the BNP, but I listened to what he had to say. Some of what he said seemed to be based on fear, and in essence the thing that he feared most was the disappearance of the community in which he remembered growing up. The strongest attributes he mentioned were that it was an exclusively white, English community, and the trouble starts right there, with the loss of that situation.

OK – let’s not get into any of that. It occurred to me that any kind of presentation of such views is a mixed bag. Some of what he said made some kind of sense. Some of it seemed to me to be wrong, and I deliberately use a vague word like “wrong” because that covers a whole raft of reasons why it might be wrong. It might be absolutely wrong because (say) it is illegal, or morally indefensible for some reason. It may be wrong (to me) because it does not accord with my own views, or the things which I have learned (or been persuaded to believe) – and that is layered with things like religious views, fashions in society, and the dreaded Political Correctness.

The PC thing is tricky – I’ve never found it intuitively natural, and at times it can be counter-productive (CP?). For example, some of the BNP man’s views are definitely frowned upon from a PC perspective, and in some instances quite correctly so. On the other hand, the gradual wearying of the public at large (well, me, anyway) with the screechings of the PC brigade – especially on issues that do not matter a great deal – can make bits of the BNP view sound relatively calm and pragmatic. Not easy to get a handle on.

Anyway, I was left to ponder the complicated mish-mash of legality, good taste, prejudice, vested interests, inculcation, ignorance and genuine grievance which makes opinions seem right or wrong (whatever that means). And I was reminded (that’s right, Louis) of an embarrassing episode – maybe 20 years ago. I was invited to speak at a dinner organized by a Scottish business group. My subject was the future role of technology in the workplace – I wish it had been something else, but – hey – they were going to feed me.

At dinner, I was placed next to another speaker, who was an executive director of a well-known feminist publishing house. She was Agnes – she was about 6 feet 2 inches tall and she wore black clothes. Terrifying – she reminded me of Maria, the mother out of the old Charles Addams cartoons.

Her first line at dinner was “I notice that all the serving staff are girls – I bet the chef is a man.”

I was aware of the terrible history of discrimination against women in all walks of life – especially the workplace – and was generally positive about feminist initiatives, though I was very uneasy about some of the fashionable terminology, and about most of the extremists. So I just nodded, accepting my share of the inherited guilt.

Then we moved on to “how many of your company directors are women?”, to which – I fear – the answer at that time was “none”. And what proportion of our senior managers were women? – well, a growing number, but I had recently had a bad experience in this area (which I did not tell Agnes about, but it certainly coloured my view).

In my area at work there had been a vacancy for a Senior Manager (let’s not worry about what that means), and there were three excellent candidates, of whom two were men and one was a woman. As it happens, the woman candidate was the weakest of the three – she lacked practical experience, and had an overriding need to avoid blame which was worrying. However, we were instructed by our director to choose the woman, because it was important that our company be seen to be actively promoting female staff.  I protested to my immediate boss, but it was made very clear that it would not be in our best interests to disagree with the board, so (and I still cringe with shame) we did as we were instructed.

Back to Agnes.

I said, “do you actually employ men, then?”

Oh yes, smiled Agnes, men were much better for lifting big boxes and so forth in the dispatch area, and they also employed some tradesmen.

So let me get this straight – she ran a company which published only female authors, on women’s subjects, exclusively targeted at a female audience, and which had a policy of placing women in all senior positions. I have a feeling, I said, that if I were even to suggest the possibility of creating a counterpart enterprise which was exclusively male, I would be in very big trouble. How is this?

Agnes looked at me as though I were something she had scraped off her shoe, and told me – very firmly – that she was very disappointed that I was just another sexist bigot. That was my very last flirtation ever with the glamorous world of feminist publishing.

Got it wrong again.

The Mad Surfer

Cuirassier command group

I’m sure that other 20mm Napoleonic enthusiasts will have noticed some figures on eBay, listed by a French seller who goes by the ID surfeur-fou. These are plastic 1/72 figures, and they are sometimes offered painted.

They look very attractive, and there is a good range of subjects. Having read the seller’s notes about his products, and having failed to find any identifiable matches on Plastic Soldier Review, I sent him a message via eBay to express my admiration for the figures, and to ask him if he is responsible for sculpting the masters. His reply (excuse my bumbling translation), was:

Tout à fait, sauf que le véritable terme est modelage et non sculpture. Les moules et les tirages sont également de moi, tout est fait par moi à 100%. (Absolutely, though the correct term is modelling rather than sculpture. I also do the moulds and production – everything is 100% done by me.)

Quite apart from the mainstream manufacturers, there are some wonderful talents producing 1/72 masterpieces at present – Franznap, Massimo (whose work is displayed on History in 1/72 from time to time) and quite a few others. The Surfer, whoever he is, might well be another – has anyone bought any of his figures, or does anyone know more about him and his work?

French limber team

Vivandiere

Lithuanian Tartars

These illustrations are all shamelessly pinched from eBay, without permission, and - as ever - I wish to make it clear that I have no connection with the seller. Just interested.

Napoleonic Heavy Hardware – British 10-inch Howitzers

Once painted, these will be British 10 inch iron howitzers

Yesterday I finally got around to one of those open-ended refurb projects that seem to hang about for years. There’s always higher-priority stuff to be getting on with – you know the sort of thing.

This follows from a sort of minor-league New Year resolution I made, to get back to some Napoleonic siege games. There are a number of things I need to do for this – one is to arrange for some more satisfactory representation of trenches than my current unpainted wooden blocks. The Really Good Excuse for not doing anything about this at present is that I want to be sure the game is working properly before I commit to a mass of specialized terrain equipment. OK – can’t do anything with that one – put a sort of half-tick in the box.

Next thing I wanted was a hex-free table for sieges (and other things) – well I’ve done that one – the reverse side of my main warboards is now plain green, and sufficiently free of geometric cells of any type to satisfy even the most contemptuous of my correspondents. Tick in box – good.

The third, and most fiddly, thing is to make some sense of the pile of artillery equipment I’ve picked up from eBay and charitable donations, and either make it into proper batteries or get rid of it. Yesterday’s target was a small stock of Hinchliffe 20mm scale British 10” howitzers which I have managed to collect. Some were in poor shape as the result of many years of lying around in someone’s spares boxes, some needed attention because they were acquired from a well-known British eBay seller of whom I haven’t seen any trace for a while, who used to be famous for offering some real gun and wagon rarities, but always with the axles untrimmed (which gives something of the appearance of a pre-war Morgan 3-wheeler), always buried hub-deep in a bed of Evil Tetrion, and always finished in some astonishing industrial varnish which could withstand nuclear attack.

I spent an amusing evening levering things out of Tetrion, snipping and sawing axles to the right length, scraping grunge off wheels, and replacing a few wheels from the spares box if they couldn’t be rescued. A bit of superglue and we are making progress. Now they just need to be painted correctly (iron barrels, please), but there’s no immediate rush for that since I have to paint gun crews for them. Good so far, though – that’s pretty much a tick as well.

The M1800 Bromefield 10” iron howitzer is a bit of a shadowy fellow. If Frank Hinchliffe hadn’t included one in his celebrated 20mm horse-&-musket period artillery equipment (you know – the range that famously vanished – not only did they disappear, but some would have us believe they had never existed) then we might all be happily unaware of the things. Some years ago, with a bit of poking around, I learned that these guns were used at the British siege of Flushing, and then went into store and never saw the light of day until the Crimean War.

A shame for the 20mm Peninsular War enthusiast who would like some for his siege train; it’s an interesting model, with the gun mounted on what is obviously a garrison-type carriage with large wheels mounted at the muzzle end for road travel. Apart from the 18pdr gun available from Finescale Factory (now, heaven be praised, available from SHQ as part of the Kennington range) and also as part of the current Hinchliffe 25mm catalogue (explain the presence of an exact 1/72 model in this range, in your own words…), there is not a lot available for people like me who are weird enough to  wish to try tabletop sieges, so a model of a 10” howitzer – albeit rarer than hen’s teeth – would be a real help.

Well, as a result of further poking about, I have some good news on this front. They were used in the Peninsular. So there. Only a bit, but they were there.

My sources are Major-General John T Jones’ Journal of Sieges (Vol.1) and the appropriate volume of the Dickson Manuscript – both of these gentlemen were present when the Allied siege train at the (unsuccessful) first British siege of Badajoz in May 1811 included, I believe, 4 of these howitzers.

They were not very successful. Their lack of success was rather overshadowed by the failure of the vintage heavy brass guns provided from Lisbon, which drooped badly when they were required to provide continuous bombardment, but they failed nonetheless. Jones notes that two of the howitzers were included in the batteries attacking the fort of San Christobal, and two were in Battery no.5 (I think) attacking Badajoz Castle. He explains that they were removed from the transport carriages when mounted in battery, and were to be used at a maximum elevation of 30 degrees. He also observes that the Portuguese officer in charge of the battery confronting the castle failed to observe the maximum elevation instruction, as a result of which the guns broke their carriages. They are recorded as “damaged by own fire”.

Portuguese officer or not, they did not make any further appearance during the Peninsular War as far as I can tell, so presumably were stored away for 40 years until the Crimean War.

As you will see, I seem to have more of these howitzers than did the Allied army in 1811, but that’s near enough for me. If I am going to enact sieges which did not actually happen, it does not constitute much more of an offence against authenticity if the besiegers have equipment which they could have used if only they had chosen to do so.

You’ll see more of these once I have painted them and recruited gunners.

Pictures from Dawson, Dawson & Summerfield's excellent "Napoleonic
Artillery" (Crowood, 2007) of a 19th Century model of the 10-inch howitzer.
The photos are used without permission - please buy the book!

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 #119 - Eye of the Beholder

Lower Slaughter, Cotswolds - seems nice...

Even by my standards, this may turn out to be an unusually pointless post. Starting from nowhere in particular, it is likely to end somewhere similar, having passed through yet more of the same. If you wish to read it I’ll be pleased to have your company, and would welcome any thoughts you may have, but don’t say you haven’t been warned…

Yesterday I was idly reading over a forum thread to which I do not subscribe, and in which I have no special interest, but it got me thinking. Fleur d’Ennui, as Django’s tune is called.

The topic was What is Beauty? – with specific reference to landscapes. For some reason it reminded me of an occasion, years ago, when I used to visit the Cotswolds on business. I liked the Cotswolds, and it was not an area I was familiar with. Though I was, in my own right, exactly the same pipsqueak that I have always been, I represented a very heavyweight client of the people I was dealing with at the time, and thus I was lucky enough to be taken out to some very pleasant eating places.

Some village or other - seems nice...

One sunny evening I was taken to a place near the village of Bradford (which sticks in my mind because it was very different from the large city with which it shares a name). We parked the car a little distance from the hostelry we were visiting, and walked along the road to it. On the way, I stopped and took a photograph (lost years ago), because I thought the view was so lovely. A country road, curving in a gentle S-bend, over an ancient bridge and then up a little hill into a wood, with a stone-built coaching inn on the outside of the bend.

After I’d taken the photo, I started wondering why this particular view appealed to me. Did it remind me of somewhere? Was it like the illustrations in some picture book which I loved as a child? Was there something instinctively attractive about it? Did it conform to some learned standard of design? Did it seem like a pleasant place to live (or dine, in this case)? What?

First thing about beauty, I guess, is that you have to let it wash over you – just enjoy it. If you over-analyse it the wheels fall off. Still, I was intrigued.

Trin Valley - seems nice...

I am also reminded of Billy Connolly’s fine tale of taking his then-small children on holiday in the Scottish Highlands, and trying to get them to be enthusiastic about the scenery. It strikes a chord with all parents – past and present – but it also gets us back to this idea of a received concept of beauty.

“This is a mountain”, said Billy, “isn’t it lovely?”

His kids were unconvinced. A mountain is a big lump of rock and stuff, folded up and maybe a bit battered, eroded by the wind and the rain and covered in vegetation. That is the way the above-water bits of the planet behave – a mountain is just a lump – there are lots of them. Why should it be lovely? Why should this one be any lovelier than, say, that one? Billy’s kids thought the whole experience was less lovely, and much less interesting, than Sesame Street on their camper van’s portable TV.

Were they wrong? It’s a funny one – some things please me – some images can almost reduce me to tears, but I don’t understand why. All right – show me a photo of my own children, especially when they were little, and my pupils will dilate (or whatever) and I get a lump in my throat, but that’s largely hormones and things. Why the reaction to pictures of places? I seem to have a fondness for views with water in them, and there are probably certain other repeating characteristics, but where does it come from, especially as a reaction to places which I do not know and which mean nothing to me? Are we born with these feelings? Is it learned? – for that matter, and more sinisterly, is it taught?

Verwallsee, Tyrol - seems nice...

If we widen out the topic, we get into all sorts of consideration of why we all like what we like (scientific overtones), and the whole issue of “taste” (which introduces less palatable issues like background and upbringing, and the dreaded whiff of snobbery).

In truth, I suspect that if I understood more about this I might not be a happier person – I fear that I might not enjoy what I had learned, especially about myself. It does interest me though, if only in those safe moments when I know that there is no risk of my finding out any more about it.

Best strategy is probably just to enjoy what you enjoy, and don’t worry about it too much. So I’ll just try to do that. 

And, since I mentioned him, here's Django