More 1809 Spaniards

Yesterday I was pleased to welcome back the two battalions of the Regimiento La Reina from their trip to be painted by the excellent Lee. Not only that, but I now also have some mounted colonels painted up, including the new mounted command figures for the existing Regimiento Africa.

After a short frenzy of varnishing and basing, here are the two regiments on parade. At present they look a little odd since they have uncut flagpoles - the flags and finials are still to come, but I hope you will see that my little 1809 army is beginning to take shape. The Reina boys have purple facings here, Africa black. Figures are NapoleoN, apart from the hat-waving colonel, who is a Falcata casting, and the other mounted officers, which are conversions of my own.

Next up will probably be Irlanda, in blue and yellow, and maybe some light infantry.

Thank you, Lee - very much!

Hooptedoodle #139 – Fave Guitar Solos

A few days ago, I got involved in that most perennial of lowbrow pub debates, one whose pointlessness does not make it any less enjoyable – the weighty question of Which Are the All-Time Great Guitar Solos?

On this occasion my companions were practising musicians (and I use the term “practising” deliberately), but it does not make a lot of difference, because the discussion is always pushed down the same lines by a couple of recognised (though unspoken) sub-clauses:

The solo must be from a (vocal) popular song – and one that everyone knows – none of your alternative stuff – no Brazilians, for example…

OTT categories such as Heavy Metal are normally excluded (or at least subject to drug tests)

The whole thing is so slanted by your age, what you like and everything else that it usually mutates into “What Are Generally Recognised as the All-Time Great Guitar Solos?” – i.e. it’s everyone else on trial here, not me.

As always, we came up with the standard answers:

Probably the solo from “Hotel California”

Probably the solo from Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years”

Probably the solo from that Carpenters’ record that we can’t remember, because we wouldn’t admit to listening to the Carpenters anyway

Probably the solo from Johnny Kidd’s “Shakin’ All Over”, because it’s instantly recognizable

Probably the instrumental sections from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” (which can still get you thrown out of most of the music shops I know)

Probably Dr Brian May’s solo on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which is getting very close to OTT)

Probably the duet solo from “The Boys Are Back in Town”, though a number of other Thin Lizzy records must be up there too

…and a lot more of the same – supply your own list (fun this, isn’t it?).

It’s very easy to get sidetracked into artists one particularly likes, which is too close to Your Specialist Subject for general comfort, so we have to avoid that (in my case, it would involve people like Robben Ford and Toninho Horta, which would get me blank looks all round). I did, however, put forward a record which I don’t think is in any way a classic, and it certainly wasn’t a hit, and it’s not by a big-name singer, and overall I don’t especially like it (which feels as though all this underselling should make it OK) – it’s Dave Berry’s “My Baby Left Me” from early 1964.

Who?

A quick word on Dave Berry – when I was a lad, he had a band called The Cruisers, who were known as the second best band in Sheffield (I think Joe Cocker’s band was regarded as the best), and I once saw them at the Cavern in Liverpool, where, I have to say, I thought they were fairly average. Berry is still around, and still performing, so all the best to him, and I shall be careful what I say (in case he comes to get me), but my view on his band seems to have been shared by the people at Decca Records, because after contributing a couple of so-so B-sides the Cruisers no longer appeared on Dave Berry’s recordings, and instead Decca used some of the best session players in the country at the time (which is a whole other subject). My Baby Left Me is short, an unspectacular cover of Presley’s record, but it includes a little gem of a solo from Jimmy Page, no less, who was 19 at the time it was recorded (swine).

By the standards of the day, this was how to do it – say what you’ve got to say in one chorus – first take, if you please – then pack up your stuff and clear out – the studio’s booked for someone else after 3pm.

It still doesn’t get into anyone else’s list, but if you haven’t heard it, here it is. 

Another Small Hit for Creeping Elegance

Replacement drummer, 2nd from left, back row...

In a post dating from December 2010, I showed a replacement unit I had acquired, and discussed my concept of Creeping Elegance in wargames armies - the replacing or modifying of odd figures or complete units if they do not please me for some reason or other (even if the reason may seem eccentric or otherwise unreasonable). The occasion, back in 2010, was the recruitment of enough 20mm Miniature Figurines castings to make a battalion of the Brunswick-Oels Jaegers, to replace a unit of Kennington Brunswickers (which, in turn, I had obtained to replace a unit of elephantine modern Minifigs Brunswickers, and so on…). The point of the 2010 replacement was that the MF20 figures are correctly dressed in the long Polrock coat, appropriate to the Peninsular War, whereas the Kenningtons were in short jackets, being intended to represent the Waterloo-period Leibregiment. The tidy-minded reader will understand this, I think...

The only flaw in the new unit was that I couldn't get a completely suitable drummer, so the Kennington drummer stayed on, and has in fact done stout service in subsequent campaigns.

The problem is that the Minifigs 20mm catalogue did not include a Brunswick drummer, for some reason - the range of available infantry for the Black Horde was:

BrN 1 Infantryman on Guard

BrN 2 Infantryman Advancing

BrN 3 Infantryman Firing

BrN 4 Infantry Officer

of which you can see specimens of BrN 2 to 4 in the picture above. The earliest near-match which is suitable is from Minfigs' subsequent S-Range, BrN 6s, and I've been on the lookout for one of these since then.

Well, I got one. Considering the current big push to get a big backlog of limbers and siege paraphernalia painted up, fiddling around with the (cosmetic) upgrade of a single 40-year-old drummer may seem a bit small-time, but such little steps bring satisfaction out of all proportion to their cost or size, especially after such a long-winded hunt. Anyway, here they are, with new drummer inserted, and they are probably as happy as I am about it.

I also included a converted S-Range officer on the right of the picture - if it matters, he is probably Hauptmann Friedrich von Doernberg, who served on General Von Bernewitz's brigade staff in 1812 - he is wearing a rather old-fashioned silver sash, and the distinctive undress cap. The battalion does not carry any colours, because the Brunswickers didn't in the Peninsula, and because they are in any case classified as British light infantry, and my light infantry units are very particular about keeping their colours safe in Lisbon.

A Useful Oddity – the Scruby Artillery Horse

More on the Ongoing Background Artillery Project (OBAP)

I’m working away to get a bit more progress on my dreadful backlog of Napoleonic limbers -  especially those of the French and their allies – which always nags away at me, and takes up space in the project boxes which could be used for something more pleasing.

Having said which, the limbers and other artillery and logistical vehicles are pleasing enough when they do get completed, but since they are not a priority (i.e. my rules mostly don’t strictly require them to be present) this is a very rare event indeed.

This last week I’ve been preparing some French limber teams for painting. Some of these castings are very small "25mm" from Jack Scruby Miniatures (these days, that means Historifigs), and their artillery horses are strange objects – I rather like them, not least because for many years they were really all you could get in metal 1/72-ish apart from vintage Hinton Hunt (which got prohibitively expensive) and Kennington (whose artillery horse is one of their “Pantomime” jobs, with short shins and an odd gait).

Your hoof-bone's connected to your knee-bone

Note the cunningly twisted draught lines, to simplify casting

Working with the Scruby horse is a bit of a challenge – the master is sculpted with the left front hoof attached to the right knee, and the draught lines twisted through a surprising angle and attached to the tail and the right rear leg – all in the interests of simplifying the mould lines. In its starting configuration the horse does not look very promising, but a bit of fiddling and sawing and twisting and it sort of works. This is not made any easier by Historifigs’ insistence on using an unusually hard, brittle alloy which neither bends nor files very easily, and is known to snap in moments of stress.

The four pairs and drivers nearest the camera are Scrubies - my lacerated
fingers will recover, please don't send flowers

Some I prepared earlier - some French caissons from my last big push on the OBAP
- as always with Scruby 25mm, they paint up better than you think they are going to

I’ve managed to produce another 4 pairs of Scruby horses with drivers this time, and it took me some time to achieve this. They should start getting painted next week. Next batch of painting is (I think) 4 British limber horse pairs (Lamming), 8 French (4 Scruby and 4 of the lovely, but expensive, Art Miniaturen), complete with limbers and cannon (mostly Hinchliffe 20, but some of the guns are of obscure origin – they may be Rose with wheel swaps) and a bunch of Peninsular, stovepipe-hatted Royal Artillery gunners for the Allied siege train (these are NapoleoN castings, but may also include some Kenningtons if SHQ send me some in time).

The gunners are for a series of 3 batteries of 10” howitzers – which is far more than the real Royal Artillery had available in the Peninsular War, but they look good.

Anyway, more of all this sometime in the future. This morning’s excitement is merely a glimpse of the Chinese puzzle which is the Scruby artillery horse. A casting which was designed to be converted before it could be used.

Assorted Wargames Nostalgia

This post really is just a collection of bits. I was going through a file of old paperwork connected with my wargaming past – nothing very distinguished, but I was reminded of a few things. Sadly, the accompanying photos for the first item were lost ages ago, during the hostilities which followed my split with my first wife (which almost certainly serves me right).

(1) Waterloo Day – yes, today is the 199^th anniversary of Napoleon’s Really Bad Day, and one of the items I found in the file was a sheet of scribblings from a 160^th anniversary Waterloo game I played at my old flat in Marchmont, Edinburgh, with some friends [that’s 1975, ladies and gentlemen]. The first thing that struck me was that, of the players involved – Philip Snell, John Ramsay, Dave Thompson, Alan Low, Allan Gallacher and myself – I am the only one still alive. Good grief – I hadn’t thought of that before. The game was considerably scaled down, but still used inappropriately detailed rules (around about this time I started using Charles Wesencraft’s rules, with all distances halved, but June 1975 is just a little early for that, so I guess we were using a hybrid game which was mostly Tunbridge Wells [George Gush?] with some bits of South-East Scotland WG thrown in). This was probably one of the last biggish games I staged before I started painting hexagons all over my tabletop – we hadn’t thought of Old School yet, though there was definitely some creaking associated with our enthusiasm for what we naively regarded as increased realism.

One thing I remember fondly was that Allan G was supposed to bring the Prussians, since otherwise we didn’t have any, but he actually turned up with Russians, since he didn’t have any Prussians either but hadn’t the heart to tell us. Thus this particular version of the B of W was notable for an unusual lack of authenticity in the OOB. The battle staggered on all day – eventually we agreed that the Allies were beaten, and that was that – we caught the last orders for drinks at the Bruntsfield Hotel and got into the obligatory justificatory arguments. We had decided that the [P]Russians would arrive after 2pm as soon as Wellington threw 11 or better on 2D6 (or “two dice”, as we would have called them at the time) at the start of his turn. As soon as they arrived, Napoleon would start rolling dice each turn, and a French reserve force under Grouchy would arrive on a 9 or better. Don’t ask me where these scientific probabilities came from, but – anyway – it’s academic, since Wellington never managed the requisite dice roll, and his bewildered Russian allies were not called into play, and eventually returned to Dunfermline in their toolbox – I’m not sure if they were relieved or outraged.

(2) Having mentioned the South-East Scotland chaps, I am delighted to have had an email from Mark, in Canada, who knew the notorious George Jeffrey back in the 1980s (rather after I knew him), and was, for a while, a disciple of George’s famed (but little understood, especially by me) Variable Length Bound system, or VLB. This, in theory, is the answer to a great many problems which wargamers have struggled with over the decades, but is reputed to suffer from the slight problem that it doesn’t actually work. Whatever – without making any pre-emptive judgements – I have invited Mark to contribute some notes about VLB, which we have briefly mentioned here before, and he hopes to send me something – excellent.

(3) I found a bunch of photos of my old (early 1970s) Ancient armies, which were dreadfully crude but served me for many years. Now gone – a nice chap in New Zealand bought them on eBay some years ago – their only claim to a place in my heart is that they are – like my Waterloo collaborators – no more. I don’t expect anyone to be excited by my crap painting or my very basic Airfix + Garrison + Atlantic armies, but – if we are to preserve a hallowed whisper for Old School – it is as well to remember that this was the reality. You may notice that my dread of paint-shedding by plastic figures was such that I kept spears and the wobbly bits of chariots etc in the raw plastic, which explains the distinctive vibrant orange preservative obviously employed by the Celtic chariot builders.

I am still quietly pleased by the onager, which I built from balsa, with shirt button wheels (all right, all right), based on the drawings in the WRG’s nice little book. Purists will protest that the Romans did not have shirts, never mind shirt buttons.

Note early view of The Cupboard - I didn't have so many figures in 2001

The occasion commemorated by the first few photos is my first wargame in my present house, New Year 2001. The room is what was the dining room at that time, which has subsequently become the downstairs shower/toilet (so wargames in the bog almost took place here), and my opponent was Malcolm Turner, who – now I think about it – is also dead now. Maybe it’s me then? That will have cut the queue of people wishing to visit Chateau Foy for a wargame, I would think.

The remainder were taken 5 years ago, when I was proposing to sell them.

(4) I also found some vintage, typed casualty tables I derived from the kill rates in Bill Leeson’s reprint of Von Reisswitz’s Kriegsspiel rules, which I am still poring over. These may be too dry even for the standards of this blog, but I’ll see if there is something useful which could be put here.

I think that’s probably quite enough of all that…

Hooptedoodle #138 - All the Rest have 31, except February

"It's weird - you know, I could swear it was a Sunday…"

Yesterday was Sunday, and I was woken early by the sun shining in the window and the birds (no respecters of late night World Cup-viewing schedules) making a racket. As I lay there, it occurred to me that we are close to Waterloo day.

One thing about Waterloo which is important (or seems so) is that it took place on a Sunday. Is there not a reference to the priest at Plancenoit insisting on ringing the bells for morning mass? Whatever, it was a Sunday – you will struggle to find any description of the event which does not mention this.

This year 18^th June is a Wednesday, and next year – the 200^th anniversary – will be a Thursday. So, in my half-awake state, I reasoned that somehow or other I should be able to reconcile the 4-day slippage over two centuries. If I failed, there was always the chance that I would drift off to sleep again, so how could I lose?

Righto – concentrate, I told myself.

Your standard year is 365 days, which is 52 weeks and 1 day, so that gives you a 1 day slip forward each year – and then there’s leap years. OK – no problem – every 4^th year we get an extra day, so on the face of it that’s 5 days forward every 4 years (or 2 days back, if that’s easier – which it probably isn’t). Aha – snag. I was vaguely aware that something funny happens at the end of each century – leap years aren’t so straightforward as this. I realized that this wasn’t going to work until I’d done a little self-education on the nippy question of what happens about extra days at century-end.

[This is a common enough situation – I regularly find that unlocking the window latch requires an expanding series of preliminary jobs until I have to move the entire house four centimetres to the left before I start.]

Not to worry, I reasoned – let’s gloss over the century issue for the time being, and see how far out I am. Then I can check the details and balance everything up. At this stage I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. OK – 100 years is 25 lots of 4 years, which (as I had already decided) means a total slip forward of 25 x 5 days, which is 125 days, which is 17 weeks 6 days, which is a slip forward of 6 days or a slip back of 1 day. That’s not too difficult, though the birds were putting me off a bit. This means that my crude version of the leap year rule gives a backward slip of 2 days in 200 years, which would move the anniversary of our Sunday battle to Friday.

Drat. We already know it’s going to be a Thursday in 2015. I’ve lost a day somewhere – or have I gained a day? At this point I decided

(a) it’s less confusing if I always count the slippage forward

(b) I’d better get up and switch the computer on. Not knowing what happens to leap years at the end of a century is not too pressing a matter if it only affects us once every 100 years, but clearly this is a gap in my toolbox.

First pseudocode rule I found was reasonably simple, even at that time of the morning:

if year is not divisible by 4 then common year


else if year is not divisible by 100 then leap year


else if year is not divisible by 400 then common year


else leap year

But then I found that it isn’t as simple as that – and we get into Gregorian and Julian calendars, and all sorts of alternative calendars, some of which I have never heard of. I think that my world conforms to the Revised Julian, and the full definition for this is:

The Revised Julian calendar adds an extra day to February in years that are integer multiples of four, except for years that are integer multiples of 100 that do not leave a remainder of 200 or 600 when divided by 900. This rule agrees with the rule for the Gregorian calendar until 2799. The first year [in which] dates in the Revised Julian calendar will not agree with those in the Gregorian calendar will be 2800, because it will be a leap year in the Gregorian calendar but not in the Revised Julian calendar.

This rule gives an average year length of 365.242222 days. This is a very good approximation to the mean tropical year, but because the vernal equinox year is slightly longer, the Revised Julian calendar does not do as good a job as the Gregorian calendar of keeping the vernal equinox on or close to March 21.

In fact, I believe these two versions both give the same answer for this particular problem – i.e. 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was. So let’s look at this again – 2 x 25 lots of 4 years, each 4 years giving us 5 days slip forward, is 250 days, which is 35 weeks 5 days, but in fact the year 1900 should not have been a leap year, so deduct 1 day, giving 35 weeks 4 days. 4 days forward from Sunday gets us to Thursday for the 200^th anniversary, which is correct.

Thank goodness for that. Since there was no point in going back to bed at this point, I got sidetracked into reading about exactly when centuries end, and I leave you with the following statement from The Times of 26^th December 1799, which does not seem to invite further comment:

We have uniformly rejected all letters and declined all discussion upon the question of when the present century ends, as it is one of the most absurd that can engage the public attention, and we are astonished to find it has been the subject of so much dispute, since it appears plain. The present century will not terminate till January 1, 1801, unless it can be made out that 99 are 100... It is a silly, childish discussion, and only exposes the want of brains of those who maintain a contrary opinion to that we have stated.

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.