Foy’s Almost-Summer Prize Competition 2014 – Awards Night

Thanks very much to everyone who sent an entry. I am very impressed – and mightily entertained. Because I was concerned that it might be too difficult, I think I was perhaps a little too generous with the clues, but my compliments to those who identified the right location and the associated Napoleonic event.

I received a total of 17 entries, of which 10 were correct, or at least on the right lines. The supersleuths used Google Search, Google Earth – some cunning devils even stalked my whereabouts in the month of August through my blogging activities, so there is a pervasive whiff of Google throughout.

A couple of entries provided an exact location – down to street corner level, which is scary, and the quality of the answers provided was generally so good that a lot of weight fell on the big proportion of points available for (subjective) entertainment value. Again, the standard was really very high, though I am a famously unfair and waspish marker.

Special mention must go to Rod, who provided a hilarious and very detailed explanation of why the location was Goole (in Humberside), but thus lost marks for accuracy.

Otherwise, in no particular order, I must applaud the very fine, well-thought-out entries of Steve the Wargamer, Edwin King, Ivan Fairchild (“Ivan the Tolerable”), Ludovico and James Saul, before coming to my final short list of three. These were all truly excellent, and I’ve spent a couple of days agonising over the ranking. Eventually it was a very close call indeed – thus the runners-up are Pyotr (stupefying accuracy and amusing explanation) and Johnny Rosbif (not so precise, but pulled out all the stops on the comic explanation), but the winner is Ubique Matt, whose overall score just takes the prize by a whisker(!).

If Matt can email me through my Blogger profile with postal details, I shall arrange shipping forthwith…

The photo was taken on the corner of Leopoldstrasse and Neurauthgasse in Innsbruck, Tirol, Austria, in August 2011, looking slightly west of south. There are a few misleading items (Italian and German car registrations, and the Italian-owned Agip garage, which threw a couple of people). The big clues are the Austrian-style church, which appears in a couple of old paintings of the battle, and the odd tower in the distance, which is the ski-jump from the 1964 Winter Olympics. Between the camera position and this tower there is a steep hillside which was the scene of the Battles of Berg Isel in 1809. The number of these battles is three or four, depending upon whom you ask. The first three were notable because the Tirolean partisans under Andreas Hofer (he of the whiskers) gave a series of salutary whuppings to the Bavarian regulars (who must have been puffed out with the climb). The fourth is seldom mentioned since the Tiroleans lost that one.

Hofer, on his night off

The blog post from 2011, describing my visit to the place, and showing pictures of the panorama, is here. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who took part – here is Matt’s winning entry:

Very interesting set of questions/challenges on your blog. With reference to your comp, you're standing I believe on Brennerstrasse near it's the junction with Neurauthgasse looking south, in Bergisel, just south of Innsbruck. This was near the site of the Battle(s) of Bergisel. [Ed: Brennerstrasse is the continuation of Leopoldstrasse, on the other side of Neurauthgasse, so this is certainly close enough – within the burst circle…] 

Using my Google fu powers and a bit of luck - I looked down your blog roll to August last year to find out where you had gone on your holidays and saw that it was Austria. The ski jump seemed vaguely familiar (I eventually recognized it the one near Innsbruck as I've stood at the top of it during a mad dash around Europe in my youth - how people can launch themselves off those things I'll never know).

Using Google Earth I traced the line of the street directly back looking for the church and Agip petrol station (seen on the photo) until I spotted the likely site of where you stood (Brennerstrasse near Neurauthgasse) to take the photo.

With reference to whiskers all I can think of is Andreas Hofer, who had a particular impressive set of whiskers himself. I know there's a monument to him in Bergisel because we saw it and none of us had any idea who he was at the time (this was before the dark days, before we all had mobile phone with internet access). So we asked around to find out who he was, interesting chap.

Hooptedoodle #137 – Cereal Packet Giveaways

This started off with me reminiscing in an email to Old John about the cut-out masks you used to get on the back of Puffed Wheat packets when I was a kid. So this is straightforward, aimless nostalgia, purely for its own sake.

I’m not an expert or a collector, but I suppose I must have spent many weeks of my life at breakfast times over the years, staring at cereal packets – maybe months. Nowadays my attention tends to wander a bit, but this is partly due to the messages on the packet being mostly dedicated to telling me why I should buy this stuff, disregarding completely the fact that I have obviously already bought it.

There was a long period when all cereal packets had to be themed into some popular TV character, or some cartoon personality they had generated for their own advertising – which at the time I thought was a bit limp, and probably is a useful guide to the point in history when kids were no longer expected to have an imagination. There was also a pseudo-health period – where else could I have learned that the cereal I was eating contained traces of Niacin, which (of course) is the anti-Pellagra vitamin? Just out of interest, did anyone ever have Pellagra? – I’ve always assumed it was very nasty, but I never knew.

No – I’m talking of the fifties [sinister, echoing sound effect]. Out of complete idleness, I spent a little time yesterday looking online for some evidence of some of those memories – naturally, the world of Google is swamped in US examples, probably because Americans are better than we are at nostalgia and because it rarely occurs to them that anywhere else ever existed. I found a marvellous UK site, which is worth a look, here. I borrowed a couple of examples from there, but only to show what a great place to visit it is.

Well I remember the Puffed Wheat “Hi-Hats”, which promised so much yet delivered so little. My first one was the Saturn Space Spy, which was unusual in that it was a full face – most of them were upper face only. I munched my way impatiently through a big pack of PW, gazing longingly at the thing (though I had some misgivings about the fact that it said Space Spy in big letters on the forehead). This is the stuff of fantasy – at no additional cost (as they pointed out), the mighty Quaker company – whose technology was such that every single Puff was fired from big cannons, apparently – had presented me with the opportunity to actually look like a real Space Spy. Fantastic. If you got your mum to give a hand with cutting out the eye holes, and around the sticky-out nose flap – oh yes, and punch the holes for the elastic, and then actually find some elastic – then, at a stroke, your imagination would do the rest and you would instantly - magically - be changed from a kid into a kid with a piece of cereal packet attached to the front of his head.

I believe that I actually cried a bit when I saw the reality of my mask. Even if it had worked, which it didn’t, it would only have worked from the front – although, of course, that is exactly the view I presented in the mirror. The worst of the lot was the cowboy hat. Let’s put this into context…

Cowboy hats were a problem. In fact cowboy outfits were a problem generally. You could buy any number of toy guns, you could play at wiping out the entire aboriginal population of Northern America every day (God forgive us - no wonder we grew up weird), but if you wanted to dress the part you were in for a let-down. Cowboy outfits that you bought from toyshops didn’t look like the proper cowboys in the Tim Holt movies on Saturday mornings – they looked, at best, like Hopalong Flaming Cassidy. I had a stupid black, Baden-Powell shaped hat with a lime green fringe around the brim – lime green? - what was that about? My cousin’s was even worse – it was the same shape, but a festive sort of royal blue, with a cut out tin-foil star on the front – and his cowpoke’s protective “chaps” actually had pictures of cowboys printed on them. Even at 5 or 6, we realized this was a poor show.

You get the idea. Into this authenticity vacuum, Puffed Wheat produced a very convincing looking 2-dimensional cowboy hat that Tim Holt and his chums would have been proud of, and the drawing of the happy boy wearing it, terrorizing his astonished mother and sister, showed that he looked – even from the side – just like the real deal. Although I had cooled on the idea of Hi-Hats after my Space Spy fiasco, I got quite worked up about this one. One Saturday, stuffed with Puffed Wheat, I cut it out, fitted it up, recycled the elastic from the binned Space Spy, took one look in the mirror and it was ditched within 20 seconds. Not only did it look rubbish, but it actually wrapped around the sides of your head like a sweatband – not at all like the illustration. More tears.

These were valuable life lessons, of course – about marketing and about the fact that – in the long run – no amount of imagination will cover up for complete junk!

I remember the multiple series of cut-out vehicles of all types on the back of the Weetabix packets – I’m sure some genius must have designed them, and they were fun, but – again – they were fiddly to make and looked dreadful. One after the other, they were cut out, glued together and binned, I didn’t get upset about them any more, but I was aware that I only liked the process, rather than the end deliverable. The flat wheels, printed on one side only, were an obvious weakness, but in fact the square edges were unrealistic too – in both respects, the veteran car series were better, but the finished product was never worth the effort. It must have served as a good apprenticeship for all these botched toy soldiers in later life, though! I recall that the first couple of series of Weetabix Workshop had a sketch of a boy and his mum looking suitably enthusiastic, but the later ones were more obviously macho and engineering-focused, and mum was dropped - the psychologists were busy, even then.

I also remember something called Mornflake Oats, which I assume was porridge – my cousin collected a most impressive looking village and farm which you could cut out and assemble – on good quality art card, as I recall, but we never had the courage to try to build them. There was a slight risk that if they didn’t turn out well it might be down to us.

So much other stuff – freebies which have become little icons of childhood – red plastic British Foot Guards bandsmen – I started collecting them, but gave up after I got five tuba players on the trot. Of course, if I’d had any mates, I could have swapped them.

I recall little plastic submarines which worked with baking soda, a series of small one-piece plastic racing cars, which must have come with Sugar Puffs (later?), since I can recall that they were always sticky and had to be washed.

I tried to find some pictures of proper Hi-Hats, but failed – I found some American Kellogg’s equivalents, but not the real thing from my own history. Anyway, if you never saw them, they were rubbish. Take my word for it.  

Painting - Mules...

In response to emails from Ludovico, Martin P, Martin S, Louis and Francis, here is the new mule train.  Not hugely attractive, but potentially useful. They are versatile, since they are capable of representing any nation in the Peninsula, or of splitting into smaller trains.

I would prefer it if they weren't all in step, but this is only a toy army, after all.

Painting - a Little Command Tidying-Up

While assembling some heavyweight shipments of soldiers to go away to be worked on by painters who actually know what they are doing, I've also been doing some fiddling away of my own, finishing off some odd figures that have been in the To Be Painted pile for far too long. None of them is going to win any prizes, but it is satisfying to get a bit of the backlog cleared.

First thing I did was finish off my Peninsular War mule train - it's only taken me about 40 years to get around to having one of these. Pack and draught animals are always a bit of a thankless undertaking; since I always put off painting them, I have usually forgotten that they are mostly just a mass of harness and strapping and bits tied on, all of which requires a bit of care to make them look half-decent.

That was last week. This week I have mostly been finishing off some missing generals for my other French Peninsular Army (which is sort of the Army of the Centre, or the North, or Aragon, or any and all of these as occasion demands). Two of these are Art Miniaturen castings, for the cavalry - nominally Generals Treillard (with the white "division" border to his base) and Maupoint (brown for "brigade), and the other is an old Minifigs 20mm OPC figure, who started life as one of several Marshal Neys which I have, and will be a spare General de Division for the Army of Portugal, or anyone else who needs one.

Here they are - glad to have got them finished - feels like more progress than it really is. Once again, my photographs show the blue uniforms as rather paler than they look in the flesh - my camera has outsmarted me again. [I don't mind so much if my camera is smarter than me - it hurts more when I am out-thought by the electric kettle…]

Since the Aragon role is not comfortable for King Joseph (who is the incumbent command figure for this other army), I am also thinking of having an extra figure for Marshal Suchet - the real motivation here is that I have a very nice little mounted ADC in hussar uniform who will paint up very colourfully as Suchet's sidekick, Captain Gaultier, on the 2-figure C-in-C stand. That's down the road a piece - next painting job for me is a group of British infantry intended for digging trenches in the siege game. These will be armed with shovels and pickaxes, and mounted on the house-standard brown "mud" stands (for sieges). After that there is more artillery equipment, and a refurb job on a very elderly unit of Garrison French chasseurs a cheval, who will need some improvised command. Don't hold your breath.

Foy’s Almost-Summer Prize Competition 2014 - the Actual Competition

Here it is – sorry, this is all a bit rushed now, which makes something of a nonsense of my attempt at dramatic effect, but I'm not sure I'm going to get a chance to get back to the blog over the next couple of days.

As ever, if you wish to enter you have to either be a registered follower of my blog or else someone with whom I have regular email correspondence in connection with the blog.

I’ve gone back to an old format for this competition, mainly because it used to give rise to a bigger and more entertaining response! The competition is very simple – please study this photograph, which was taken at around midday in the month of August, on a weekday, and send me a comment (or email, if you prefer) telling me where it was taken, which Napoleonic event took place near here, why whiskers are relevant(!), how you arrived at this answer, and any other thoughts you have.

I’ve deliberately made the photo large, so you can examine it in greater detail. Oh yes – I took the photo myself, so you won’t find it in Google Image. There’s quite a few clues here, but I hope it’s still a reasonable challenge.

Judging will be, as ever, completely subjective and totally unfair – I’ll allow up to 10 points for geographical accuracy, 10 points for identification of the historical associations (including the whiskers) and 20 points for your explanation of how you came to this conclusion, and any relevant observations – thus an amusing explanation of a poor answer may score as many points as a blunt presentation of the correct answer.

If you can get your solution to me by midnight (UK time) at the end of 10^th June I’ll get the details of the winner posted within a day or so after that. I won't publish entry comments received, to avoid people learning from each others’ answers, though I’ll consider publishing any clarifications, in case there are any technical issues….  (yawn)

The Prizes

This is a bit of a grand chuck-out – so I hope it appeals, there are some nice items in here. The winner will receive a parcel containing all of the following:

(1) Paperback of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Napoleonic War Stories (new)

(2) Paperback - The Wargaming Pioneers Vol.1 – edited by John Curry – includes details of Little Wars, R L Stevenson’s games, Shambattle and a pile of other early wargames (perfect, unmarked)

(3) The Napoleonic Wargame – G W Jeffrey (paperback) – (old and read, but sound and clean) – Old School, but not as we know it, Jim…

(4) Warhammer – English Civil War – rules and much more (paperback) – (very good condition)

(5) Napoleon – Matthew Fletcher - Wargames Foundry’s rules-cum-coffee table book about wargaming, which is an entertaining read – lots and lots and LOTS of pictures of their figures, with instructions on how to paint them

(6) Portuguese Army booklet as described in my previous post

If you wish to enter but do not want the prize, please say so and have a go anyway, just for the glory, and you may be the Category B winner – the prize will still go to the best Category A effort.

If you are interested then I wish you all the best, I look forward to hearing from you and thank you for reading my blog!

Foy’s Almost-Summer Competition 2014 – the Preamble

First of all – if you’re looking for an actual competition here, you’re too early – come back in a week or so!

Since it’s just a couple of weeks short of what passes for Midsummer in this part of the world, and since it’s a while since I did a competition, I decided it was time to do something about it.

The bad news is that the prize on offer consists, in part, of a very humble booklet which I put together in the 1970s. The value, if it has any, is in its rarity! I’ll set out the competition, with full details of the prize(s), in a day or so, but in the meantime a couple of stories associated with this booklet seemed appropriate – you can regard them as something to add background or, if you prefer, as further injury added to the insult already presented by the wretched prize!

Subplot 1 – the Publication

Around 1976 I was attempting to put together a Portuguese army for my 20mm Peninsular War, and became so frustrated about the lack of helpful, explicit reference information about this army that I decided to do something about it.

What I did was put a letter in the Military Modelling, asking for anyone who had any useful contacts or information to get in touch. It worked. I had been prepared to bet I would get no response, but I got a lot of mail quite quickly. Most of it was from people with a similar frustration, asking me for whatever information I already had(!), but I also got some really helpful replies – from all over the world. I remember that a chap named Gallo, in South Africa, sent me some very rare photocopies of an ancient typed monograph, with line drawings, which was better than anything I’d seen to date.

I also received a response from Herbert, who features in Subplot 2, below, which resulted in a lengthy correspondence during which we became quite good friends and exchanged a lot of information. By early 1977 I was in possession of so much material that I set it out in a formal booklet (which meant old-fashioned typing, in those days). Someone put me in touch with the Napoleonic Association, who were producing uniform and organization booklets at that time, and they were happy to publish my Portuguese effort as one of the series.

My involvement with the NA at that time was restricted to discussion of the forthcoming booklet, and I dealt mostly with Rob Mantle, who was enthusiastic and helpful throughout. I did attend their annual dinner once, in Knaresborough, and enjoyed the evening, though I became aware of some factionism within the ranks – there were definitely insiders and outsiders, and the re-enactors treated the wargaming section with a rehearsed indifference which struck me as very amusing, but then I was a complete outsider anyway.

The booklet took a while to manufacture, which was normal for 1979, during which I was requested to add an extra chapter on available reading sources, for which, I regret, I produced a half-hearted lash-up, partly because I was expected to say something controversial, or critical of established works or authors. Also, to my great disappointment, there was no time to include a lately-acquired pile of additional detail on flags and cavalry standards.

When the booklet appeared, it was given a collective roasting, along with the NA’s other publications, in a review by Donald Featherstone (would that be in Wargamer's Newsletter? - I'm not sure now), who expressed himself as increasingly tired of the flood of low quality booklets by amateur historians. There is a potential case of pots and kettles in this, but apparently DFF and the NA had some gentle history of friction – it may be that they represented a new generation of wargamers of which he did not entirely approve (I am guessing), but it also became evident that he was one of the established writers they had set about annoying, so they had certainly succeeded in this.

As for the credentials of their authors, I confess that Mr Featherstone had a point (none of them had served in the Tank Regt in WW2, after all), but the line-up included Pete Hofschroer, who is regarded pretty seriously now.

The booklet sold a modest number of copies, as you would expect, and was eventually remaindered. I never did anything about the improved, expanded version I contemplated, but I did make a lot of information available to Terence Wise, who credits me as a source in his Osprey title on flags. The booklet was also identified as a reference by George F Nafziger PhD* in his own booklet on the Portuguese and Spanish armies, and it is listed somewhere in the Napoleon Series materials.

Not that any of this matters – I am not particularly proud of my booklet, but at the time it was probably the most thorough attempt at the subject to date in English. Since then it has been surpassed by a good many later works – particularly Chartrand’s Osprey books. Whatever, I have one or two copies left in the bookcase – I found them when I was clearing out the other week – so I’ll add a fairly clean specimen to the Almost-Summer Grand Prize. I hope I think of something half-decent to fatten up the jackpot…

* I never mention Nafziger, or his fine contributions to wargaming and military study, without reference to his doctorate from the Union Institute

Subplot 2 – Herbert

Herbert replied to my Military Modelling letter, very enthusiastic. He was an interesting fellow – he was born in Austria, of Italian descent, and his father had been an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army at the end of WW1. Having been such an officer was not a great career enhancer in 1918, so a number of the officers handed over their savings to an entrepreneur and bought land in Brazil, and took their families to make a fresh start in a very different world. After a long voyage, they discovered it was a scam – they had bought a piece of swamp, in the jungle.

There seems to have been a violent disagreement – Herbert’s father returned to Salzburg, while his mother took the children and walked about 100 kilometers to the nearest civilization, which was the city of Sao Paulo. Herbert spent the rest of his life there, mostly working very successfully in the retail trade. When I had dealings with him he was in his eighties, retired but walking for an hour every day, reading and painting and delighted to hear from someone in (or near) Europe. He was fluent in Portuguese, German, English and French, and could turn a good hand to Spanish and Italian. He had a huge personal library of military history, acquired through a long life of private study and collecting, he had an excellent portfolio of his own watercolours of uniforms of all sorts of nations and periods and – above all else – he had contacts in the Brazilian government and the national libraries who could get copies of all sorts of obscure materials on the Portuguese army and their colonial offshoots. Some of these documents – being stored away in a colonial outpost at Brasilia – had survived political upheavals in Portugal which had put paid to the Lisbon copies, so some of the dress regulations and so on I saw were thought not to exist in Portugal.

Thus the very idea of my humble booklet, and the rather more ambitious follow-up which I abandoned, is very largely due to the input and support of my elderly Brazilian collaborator – at times, he was far more enthusiastic than I was! We eventually lost touch – he might, of course, have died, but I prefer to think he moved to a quieter part of the city. In due course I got no response to my letters. Since he would now be 120-odd, I can safely assume he is no longer alive, but I won’t forget him, or his good-humoured wisdom. He used to write (in 1976) that the Western powers should not worry overmuch about the Russians or the Chinese, and that the future threats to the world would centre on the Middle East. I would be more positive about his understanding of the world if he hadn’t been a regular reader of the Daily Telegraph, but no matter! 

If anyone reads German, the adventures of the Austrian emigrants to Brazil after WW1 are the subject matter of Das Geschäft mit der Hoffnung: österreichische Auswanderung nach Brasilien 1918-1938 (Böhlaus Zeitgeschichtliche Bibliothek) by Ursula Prutsch, published 1996.

Hooptedoodle #136 – Just One More Bus

All right, all right – I said there would be no more, but I’d already secretly made up my mind to get one of these if one came up in the right livery. I know it isn’t a proper, real bus in my traditional terms, but these were being introduced when I was still at school, so it squeaks in.

This is a Leyland Atlantean in the colours of Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport, on route 82, which travelled between Speke and the Pier Head, and was a familiar sight on Aigburth Road, in my old stomping ground. These must have been introduced around 1962 or so, I would guess, and were the first buses Liverpool acquired which were designed for single-man operation, though the conductors were retained for a good while thereafter (negotiated union agreement?).

It was one of these – albeit on route 86, which had similar termini to the 82, but ran through Allerton – which caught out my racing cyclist chum, Kenny, who used to train by slipstreaming the buses along Mather Avenue on his way to and from school. He couldn’t cope with the automatic gearboxes and superior brakes of the new generation of buses, and he lost his teeth in a brief but decisive misunderstanding.

I am satisfied now that my collection is complete. Unless I spot a nice vintage Leyland in Wallasey colours…