WSS: First of the Brits!

 All hail to Goya, who has very kindly painted some more figures for me. Very nice too - if it wasn't for him, there would be no painting at all going on here this last couple of weeks.

Here we have The Earl of Angus's Regt of Foot*, also known as Ferguson's Regt by 1704, also known (unofficially?) as the Cameronians. The figures are Les Higgins/PMD 20mm, as usual, while the mounted officer (though not his horse) is from Irregular. Photos give a choice of with or without flash, since I couldn't make my mind up. These are not refurbed figures - all fresh castings.

Very pleased to add these chaps to the boxes - at last I have a "Dutch school" unit to join in the games!

Thanks again, Goya. Lovely job.

* Historical Clap-trap: The Earl of Angus in question was James Douglas, son of the 2nd Marquess of Douglas. He raised the regiment in 1689, when he was 18, and died at its head at the Battle of Steenkerque, in 1692, when he was 21. He was, of course, one of the "Red" Douglases, a family I take an interest in since they owned Tantallon Castle, which is next door to where I live. By the 1690s, however, after George Monck had wrecked Tantallon in 1651, following the Battle if Dunbar, the Red Douglas lot were living in their other castle, at - well, Castle Douglas...

Hooptedoodle #388 - Ian St John - another boyhood hero gone

 It has been expected for a while, since he has been very ill with cancer for some years, but I am saddened to learn that Ian St John - a real footballing hero from my formative years - has passed away at the age of 82. Ian was a native of Motherwell, in Scotland, and was one of the early acquisitions when Bill Shankly set about rebuilding Liverpool FC in the early 1960s. That team became very successful indeed - though most of their glories were after I'd left Liverpool and moved to Edinburgh!

St John was centre-forward in the team with which Shankly won the old Second Division, and which then went on to dominate the First Division in the years which followed. St John scored the winning goal in Liverpool's first ever FA Cup win, at Wembley in 1965, against Leeds United. 

There's plenty of scope at present for being upset by the demise of old footballers - they are currently going down like flies, of course, so I tend not to dwell on this steady topic of mortality, but Ian was a bit special, and I am - if not exactly choked up - then certainly a bit wistful this morning.

Back in the day, there was a local joke, which went as follows:

Teacher asks a class of Liverpool schoolkids, what do they think would happen if Jesus came back, to Liverpool, at the present time [1960s]? Correct answer was, "They'd have to move St John to inside right". Yes, it's very silly, but in its way it is an affectionate mark of the man's stature in the common culture. 

1965 - Back row: Ron Yeats, Gordon Milne (reserve), Willie Stevenson, Ian St John, Chris Lawler, Gerry Byrne. Front: Tommy Lawrence, Peter Thompson, Geoff Strong, Tommy Smith, Roger Hunt, Ian Callaghan. [Only Yeats, Milne, Stevenson, Lawler, Hunt and Callaghan are still alive, as at March 2021]

Hooptedoodle #387 - Ads for Morons, Created by Morons

 Wow - I was on the CNN site this evening, trying to get the latest on the gold statue of Trump that some bottom-hole has put on display in Orlando, and some fiendish cookie or other got busy and - hey! - I got a personalised ad, just for me. That's quite something - I mean I'm not even very famous (though my reading about Trump might have been a clue), but I'm pleased that they realised I would be interested in this sort of thing.

 

North Berwick

To put this into perspective, here is a photo of my home village. I am fascinated by this potential jet service - how impressed would my friends be, for goodness sake? I am wondering whether the jets land and take off in the fishing harbour, or they use that big field behind the telephone exchange - of course, they'd have to shift the horses, but it's marvellous, isn't it?

Amazing what they can do nowadays, as I always say. There - I just said it again...

Holcroft Blood, anyone?

 Someone recommended that I would enjoy the Holcroft Blood series of historical novels written by Angus Donald.

 I have to say, I normally don't get on with historical novels. I hated Sharpe, for example - yes, I know, obviously my problem. 20 billion flies can't all be wrong. I also got into trouble once, when I suggested that RF Delderfield was a very overrated author, and that one of his Napoleonic efforts, apart from being chucked together with little thought, was more or less a rip-off from CS Forester. Goodness me - I'll never have an opinion again - promise.

 So this is a humble request, from one who does not know, and does not claim to have the wit or the critical faculties to judge. Has anybody in my trusted world (intellectual bubble?) read any of the Blood books, and what did you think of them?

Any thoughts will be welcome. 

WSS Rules - work in progress

 After the recent playtest, it became clear that something has gone out of whack with the draft house WSS rules, so I'm working on some changes. One fairly drastic re-think is taking place in the small matter of combat. I've now reduced the range of muskets to something which is less exciting but more reasonable, and - since infantry didn't normally get to sticking bayonets in each other when fighting in the open - all combat apart from artillery fire has now been subsumed into something called Close Combat, which will include all melees and all musketry (which is only effective at close range anyway).

I've been reading a few sets of rules which I own which use this kind of system - in particular Mustafa's Grande Armée, Doc Monaghan's Big Battalions, and Polemos's Obstinate and Bloody Battle. I used to employ a similar combat system in a house Napoleonic rule set I ran fairly successfully for many years, so I know it works - though there is an implied backing away from Old School turn sequences.

That's OK - the generals can concentrate on running the battle, and trust the invisible sergeants to look after fitting of bayonets, cavalry firing pistols and all that. I think it has something to do with getting the scale of the game right.

I'm now trying to glue some changes into the previous draft. Typing - it's what wargaming is all about, really.

I should have more to say about this before too long!

Hooptedoodle #386 - The Strange Tale of the "Normandie" - in fact and the movies

 

Yesterday I got rather sidetracked by the Internet (as one does), and as a result finished up watching a movie on my TV, late in the evening. I have promised myself that I'll have a more productive day today, but I'm getting off to a poor start by writing about the time I wasted yesterday...

So there are two related threads here - the ship and the movie I watched. I'll start off with the ship.

I did some reading about the SS Normandie, a ship I recognise vaguely from old photos, but never really knew very much about. It really is a very odd story - sad, undoubtedly, and filled with some astonishing bad breaks and terrifying incompetence - if you are interested, you can find lots about it online, but here's a quick skim.

Built at St Nazaire, in Brittany, the Normandie was launched in 1935; it was the biggest, fastest, most technically advanced, most luxurious passenger liner of its day, and this in an age when the big transatlantic liners were at their most prestigious. It's success was tempered a little by a shift in the market - by design, the Normandie was heavily committed to catering for the very wealthy, and as the 1930s neared their end there was a big upsurge in demand for more economical travel, which gave the British Cunard ships an unassailable advantage.

 

After the attack on Pearl Harbour, since the USA was now at war with the Axis Powers, and France had become German-occupied territory, the Normandie, which was stranded in New York, was requisitioned by the US Navy (with the full co-operation of its owners), was renamed the USS Lafayette (see what they did there?), and after some dithering about, during which it was briefly proposed to make her into an aircraft carrier (the ship, you understand, was enormous), eventually a plan was produced to convert the vessel into a troopship. 

Conversion work was rather rushed, trying to meet a very ambitious commissioning date, and on 9th February 1942 the ship caught fire, at the refit berth at Pier 188, Brooklyn. Sparks from a welding torch set alight a store of kapok-filled life-jackets which were in a passenger saloon, the fire spread rapidly, as a result of inflammable varnished wood panelling not having yet been removed, and, helped by a stiff northeasterly breeze, which blew the blaze along the length of the ship, within about an hour, the three upper decks were engulfed from end to end.

The ship was equipped with a sophisticated fire-fighting system, and lots of appropriate equipment, but the system had been disabled and most of the equipment removed. Further, the NYCFD's hoses did not fit the ship's French connectors. Some valiant, though hopeless, efforts were improvised to fight the conflagration. As water was pumped in from shore-based fire tenders and the port's fire-boats, the ship began to settle in the dock, and took on a list to seaward.

The Normandie's designer was present in New York, since he had been involved in discussions of the refit. He arrived at the dock, with a plan to save the ship, but the harbour police refused him entry. His idea was to go on board, open the sea-cocks to flood the lower hull, allowing the vessel to settle the few feet to the bottom of the dock, which would enable the fire to be put out without risk of capsizing. The Navy commander on the spot, Admiral Adolphus Andrews, rejected this idea.

The authorities eventually declared that the fire was under control, and rescue operations ceased, but some 6,000 tons of water had been pumped on board. Continuing entry of water below the surface resulted in the vessel capsizing later on that night. This had been a major emergency - many individuals were injured, and there was one death. Andrews placed a complete shut-down on all reporting - no press were allowed anywhere near the scene.

Later there were a number of proposal for projects to restore the vessel in some form, but after a lot of wasted time and expenditure the ideas were axed, and the hulk was scrapped in 1946. Since then there have been many theories suggesting mob involvement and so on - interesting, but I'll spare you all that.

While I was reading about this, I learned that the capsized vessel appears in the 1942 Alfred Hitchcock movie, Saboteur. Now, as it happens, I have a big box set of Hitchcock films, which one of my sons gave me for Xmas some years ago, and I was pretty sure this one is included. It is.

Which brings me to my other thread - the movie, which I duly watched last night. In fact I have seen it before, some years ago, but I remembered very little about it (the plot was spoiled rather less for me last night by what I had remembered about it than by what was pretty obviously predictable anyway). The film has a big wartime message about patriotism and public awareness of national security, though there are some odd plot twists involving a wealthy, privileged elite who are masterminding the Fifth Column and sabotage in the US - seems strangely in tune with modern conspiracy theories?

The movie is fun - not a very demanding watch, and is in many ways a film of Great Silliness, not the least of which is a Hitchcock cliché - a climactic ending, set on yet another famous National Monument (yes, AGAIN). I sat up and saluted when I (briefly) saw the wrecked Normandie/Lafayette (or USS Alaska - a battleship, no less, as it is cast in the plot). 

OK - so what? Well, so nothing, really, but there is something odd about the dates. If I had been less tired, I am sure I'd have tried to find out a bit more, but I'd had enough by this stage.

Here's the thing - filming took place from December 1941 to February 1942 - not a generous timescale, but there was a war on. The capsizing of the "battleship" is not a strategic high spot of the story, but it is an impressive part of the build up to the finale. Given that the ship only sank in February 1942, I am forced to assume that there was some very fast footwork, and Hitchcock changed the story to include his (prohibited) shots of the Lafayette - I guess that the story was largely patched together as he went along anyway, but that is impressive. As far as I know, none of the conspiracy stories involves Hitchcock commissioning the sinking of one of the biggest ships in the world, to fit into his latest movie, so it must just have been opportunism on his part.

It brought him a lot of grief - his use of illicit shots of a ship, the sinking of which was the subject of a lot of denial, and the hints in the story that the Navy's security and competence might be a tad suboptimal resulted in the movie being "red-flagged" by the censors, though it was allowed to be released because of its positive wartime espionage messages, and was premiered in April 1942. We may assume Admiral Andrews never forgave him, however... 

Hooptedoodle #385 - Chick Corea

 Another personal hero gone. Chick Corea, the jazz pianist, died this week, aged 79. He became famous when he played with Miles Davis in the late 1960s (in a band which for a period featured 3 electric pianos - Herbie Hancocks, Keith Jarrett and Corea, which some might say is at least 2 too many...).

Then, of course, he became a leading light in his own right in the Jazz Fusion thing, which divided the world neatly into those who felt it wasn't proper jazz at all and those who felt it didn't quite make it as rock music either. I was playing a couple of his CDs this morning, and it occurred to me that the 1990s was longer ago than I had thought. Good, though.

Here's a track that I like. Thanks from me, Chick. Rest easy.