More on Cheriton - Orders of Battle

After my last post, I started thinking more about getting Cheriton on to the gaming table. First thoughts turned to the order of battle, so I reached for all the books on my shelves that 'covered' Cheriton, and I also searched for key sites on the internet, to see what they had to say.

If you're interested in the ECW you'll probably not be surprised that information is thin on the ground. There is mention of a few specific units and leaders on each side (but nowhere near the full order of battle). There are some names common to all sources, and a few that only pop in one place or another. Overall troop numbers are given with a remarkable degree of confidence in most of the books, but with not much consistency and with little in the way of sources quoted. I have to say here and now that I do not (yet) possess any of the books specifically about Cheriton published in the last 50 years, and they might reveal more. At 28 pages I don't anticipate a lot of detail in the Spring book; the Sawyer booklet seems currently unavailable; asking prices on the Adair book are beyond what I'm currently prepared to pay; and the Jones book is not yet published. Maybe I should get down to the library this weekend to see if I can find the Adair book through the inter-library lending service.

Being the slightly-OCD geek that I am (if you can be slightly OCD) I tabulated the sources thus:

Source	Author	Sources referenced
With Pike and Musket: Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Battles for Wargamers	CF Wesencraft	No sources referenced
The English Civil War 1642-1651: An Illustrated History, (London 1983)  pp76-7	Philip Haythornthwaite	Not specifically referenced. Select bibliography includes Cheriton, Adair, J (Kineton 1973)
A Battlefield Atlas of the English Civil War, (Leicester 1986) pp51-53	Anthony Baker	No sources referenced. No bibliography.
The Complete Guide to the Battlefields of Britain with Ordnance Survey Maps (London 1993) pp 152-153	David Smurthwaite	Not specifically referenced. Select bibliography does not show any primary sources or anything specifically related to Cheriton. Usefully overlays supposed dispositions onto OS Map but with no cited authorities.
The Great Civil War: A Military History of the First Civil War 1642-1646 (London 1959)	Alfred H Burne and Peter Young	Not specifically referenced. Bibliography includes Gardiner; Lord Hopton ‘Bellum Civile’; Thomason Tracts; Godwin, The Civil War in Hampshire (London 1904); E.Walsingham, Brittanicae Virtutis Imago; Webb & Webb, ‘Military Memoirs of Colonel John Birch’ (Camden 1873)
BCW Project http://bcw-project.org/military/english-civil-war/southern-england/battle-of-cheriton		John Adair, Roundhead General, a military biography of Sir William Waller (London 1969) C.E.H. Chadwyck-Healey (ed), Bellum Civile (Somerset Record Society 1902) Stuart Reid, All the King's Armies (Staplehurst 1998) Laurence Spring, The Campaigns of Sir William Waller's Southern Association 1643-45 (Bristol 1997) Laurence Spring, The Battle of Cheriton 1644 (Bristol 1997)
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cheriton		Adair, John Eric (1973). Cheriton 1644: The Campaign and the Battle. Kineton, Godwin, G. N. (1918). The Civil War in and around Winchester. Winchester, Spring, Laurence (1997). The Battle of Cheriton 1644. English Civil War battles series. Bristol Memoirs of Colonel John Birch, London: Camden Society, 1st ed., 1846. P. R. Newman, "Atlas of the English Civil Wars", 44-5
UK Battlefields Resource Centre http://www.battlefieldstrust.com/resource-centre/civil-war/battleview.asp?BattleFieldId=11

Overall numbers of troops quoted on the royalist side vary from 5000 to 7900. On the Parliamentarian side the lowest number given is 8000 but most quote 10000. Again I tabulated what I found in the various texts. The squared bracketed numbers against Baker are my suppositions derived from his comment that the Roundhead cavalry was over 1/3 of the 10000 strong army.

	Royalists					Parliamentarians
Source	Horse	Dragoons	Foot	Guns	Total	Horse	Dragoons	Foot	Guns	Total
With Pike and Musket: Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Battles for Wargamers	4100 (breakdown doesn’t add up)		3800 (breakdown doesn’t add up	11	7900	5800 (breakdown doesn’t add up)		3100 (breakdown doesn’t add up)	a few	8900
The English Civil War 1642-1651: An Illustrated History, (London 1983)  pp76-7					Some 6000					10,000
A Battlefield Atlas of the English Civil War, (Leicester 1986) pp51-53						Over 1/3 [3500]	[6500]			10,000
The Complete Guide to the Battlefields of Britain with Ordnance Survey Maps (London 1993) pp 152-153			1000 musketeers under Appleyard		6000	300 under Hazelrig				10000
The Great Civil War: A Military History of the First Civil War 1642-1646 (London 1959)	Nearly 3000		3000	11	Not less than 6000					Outnumbered Hopton’s army by several thousand
BCW Project http://bcw-project.org/military/english-civil-war/southern-england/battle-of-cheriton	3800		3200		7000	3000	600	5000		8600
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cheriton	2500		3500		6000	3500		6500		10000
UK Battlefields Resource Centre http://www.battlefieldstrust.com/resource-centre/civil-war/battleview.asp?BattleFieldId=11					c 5000					c 10000

Apologies for the small font on the table. I was struggling to fit it in.

On no stronger a basis than them being the most commonly quoted numbers, I'll probably go with 6000 Royalists vs 10000 Parliamentarians. Note of warning - the fact they're so frequently quoted but without good references probably suggests they're mostly repeating what some other secondary source said. Some of the books give some detail on the make up of the horse and foot, such as the oft quoted 'Appleyard's 1000 musketeers' sent to Cheriton Wood by Hopton.

Some leaders are mentioned, sometimes linked to specific units. The most useful sources in this regard are Burne & Young,  the BCW Project and Wikipedia. Putting them together we have the following:

Royalists
Titular commander:               Earl of Forth
De facto commander:            Hopton
Cavalry Commander:             Lieut. General Lord John Stuart
Major General of Horse:        Sir John Smith (Right wing cavalry?)
Left wing cavalry:                   Sir Henry Stowell
Commanded musketeers:      Col. Matthew Appleyard

Unfortunately not much else is clear about the infantry commanders.

Also mentioned; Col. George Lisle, who is the subject of one of my favourite anecdotes from the Civil War*, and Sir Henry Bard, the villain of the piece at Cheriton from the Cavalier point of view.

Parliamentarians
Commander:                           William Waller
Right Wing Cavalry:                William Balfour
Left Wing Cavalry:                  Sir Arthur Haselrig (I surmise he was in overall command)
                                                (he of the Lobsters, not present at Cheriton)
London Brigade# (infantry):    Major General Sir Richard Brown
London regiments (infantry)
in Cheriton Wood:                   Col. Walter Leighton (possibly a sub-unit of Brown's command?)

*# 4 regiments mentioned by Burne and Young: being the Red, White, Yellow and Green, of which White and Yellow were sent into Cheriton Wood under Leighton.

As with the Royalists, the PBI don't seem to get much of a look in.

In looking at the Smurthwaite book, I noticed that he has the Parliamentarian starting positions north of the Petersfield Road, and atop the ridge seen in my photo of Broad Lane in the previous post. This, if accurate, answers a conundrum for me. Most accounts refer to the 'arena' created by the ridges which run north, east and south of the field of battle. On walking the ground I found there was a ridge between the usually quoted starting positions of Hinton Ampner for the Roundheads and the monument near Scrubbs Farm for the Royalists. So the note with my fourth picture in the previous post wrongly says this is were the Parliamentarian line was - they would have passed through that way, but carried on to the next ridge. That being said, there is still a spur of higher ground jutting from Cheriton Wood into the eastern half of the field between the two starting positions as seen in this OS based map from the Battlefield Trust.

http://www.battlefieldstrust.com/media/575%2Epdf

As I can testify, the spur does not have particularly steep slopes, but it is high enough to block line of sight of anything not near the crest. I would say it is a significant enough feature to represent on the gaming table. Talking of which, from that map I reckon an area modelling 2.5km by 1.5m would be needed as a minimum. My table, at my usual 1mm to the yard groundscale, is not deep enough. I'm about 700mm out. Hmmm! Back to the drawing board.

Totally a propos of nothing, except this post being short of pictures, I wonder if this car has anything to do with the late Dan O'Herlihy.

* Captured after the siege of Colchester in 1648, Lisle was sent before a firing squad with his friend Charles Lucas. Lucas was first and opened his shirt and invited the 'Rebels' to "do your worst". Lisle came next and having kissed his dead friend, invited the firing squad to step closer. "Sir, I warrant we will hit you", declared the officer in charge. Lisle smiled, then replied, "I have been nearer to you, friend, when you missed me".

Cheriton

Radar over at Keep Your Powder Dry recently posted an entry on the Battle of Cheriton including some photos from a walk around the battlefield. The specific post can be found here, but if you haven't visited the blog before, and have an interest in the ECW, it is well worth the time. As well as Cheriton he covers other ECW sites:

https://www.keepyourpowderdry.co.uk/2019/06/battle-of-cheriton-29th-march-1644.html

That post reminded me of a hot day in July last year when I took myself down to Hampshire to do the walk myself. Summer 2018 was one of the hottest ever recorded in the UK, so it wasn't the most comfortable weather to go traipsing round the countryside in. But I had some time off work whilst the family were at work and school, and what better way to use it than indulging my hobby and getting some exercise. The health app on my phone tells me I walked 11.3km that day, most of it at the time of the Cheriton walk. I find it a bit of a stretch that the walk was over 6 miles, so I don't take that as Gospel.

I won't tell you anything about the battle itself. That has been done many times before, by people better qualified, and better writers, than myself. For example: Here; and here.  And that's not including printed material. I should also point out the Battle of Cheriton Project site  here. For some reason I haven't figured out yet, it holds a fascination for me similar to what I feel about Lobositz in the SYW. Only this is much more accessible. It's on my 'to do list' of battles. In fact it was the main target I built up my cavalry forces so much this year. Maybe it's something for the coming weekend. Hmmmm!

Anyway, here are a selection of the photos I took on my walk round Cheriton last year. Hopefully they will be of some interest and use, giving an impression of the lie of the land. First up Church of All Saints, Hinton Ampner. The village didn't seem to feature much in the battle, the manor (now a National Trust property) was where Waller was headquartered before the battle. The church I found particularly attractive and unusual in my experience and looks like it deserves a closer look, but as it was at the start of a longish walk, on a hot day I decided to push on.

More information on the church can be found here: https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101155865-church-of-all-saints-bramdean-and-hinton-ampner#.XTDXzC2ZOu4
The location map on the British Listed Buildings site is quite useful for showing the pathways around the battlefield.

I walked down the hill from the church through the very picturesque hamlet of Hinton Ampner to start the walk proper at Petersfield Road stopping at the first information board:

From there I proceeded across the road to lane opposite (Broad Lane?) (below)

and then turned right (East) along Cheriton Lane (note this is the track running east-west between Cheriton Wood and Cheriton village and not the road of the same name to the north of the wood.

Here is the view looking west from Broad Lane at where the main Parliamentarian line would have been. Erratum: subsequent viewing of the Battlefield Trust's OS-based map indicates that the area shown below is too far south for the Parliamentarian position - it looks like they would have marched through this position on the way to the next ridge.
 

The trees in the centre left look like a wood but are in actual fact just a row of trees bordering Petersfield Road.

Looking up Broad Lane - this gives you a good impression of how formidable some of the hedgerows could be. I don't know if these hedges were there in 1644 (it's never wise to assume the landscape is really as timeless as the usual romantic view of the countryside would have us believe) but most accounts say how the Royalist cavalry were particularly hampered in their deployment by hedges lining lanes to the north of here. Also given the time of year of the battle (March) there would have been a lot less foliage to obscure visibility. Without the leaves in March it would probably just about be possible to poke a musket through and see your target, but not in summer. And they're far too high to see over. However, they may well have been lower and thinner in the seventeenth century if they were planted around new enclosures.

Just before Cheriton Lane meets Petersfield Road, there is a short footpath connecting the lane to Alresford Lane. This is where I went wrong. I was following directions which said turn left (north) along Alresford Lane and head up along a field boundary. In the field there is a broad track which seemed to fit the bill. It was only when I reached the top corner of the field I found myself hemmed in by hedges to the right and in front. I'd missed the gap through to Alresford Lane. I was on the wrong side of the hedge. Faced with the choice of doubling back or somehow squeezing through the hedge, I took the latter course and found out just how formidable these hedges can be! It would be virtually impossible to get through with a pike, or with a horse at all without the help of pioneers cutting a way through, let alone be in any kind of condition to fight formed opposition on the other side. Never complain about big movement penalties for crossing hedges - they're not the twee little things we have round our gardens! It would have been much easier to continue on Cheriton Lane to the road and then head up Alresford Lane from the road.

Once back on the proper track, I followed it north up past the edge of a spur of Cheriton Wood. From a distance it looks particularly dense but the leaves give a slightly misleading impression. It's a bit clearer close up as the following shows. Not ideal country for formed pike and shot units, but passable to musketeers.

Slightly further north the edge of the wood is further back, east, from the lane and you can see here how it is on a pronounced slope. I didn't walk up there, but it's not difficult to see how it would have a commanding view of the battlefield.

The lane continues in a northerly direction towards the area of the Royalist start positions and eventually comes out on the road called Cheriton Lane where it becomes Badshear Lane. Continuing north on the road for a hundred yards or so, I route-marched to a bend in the road where it turns east and a quarter of a mile later arrived at the T-junction with Scrubbs Lane where the monument below was installed in the 1970s.

I'd held off drinking any water until this point so rewarded myself by having a good long swig and sat down for lunch on the bench with this panorama before me. Apologies for the distortion - I haven't got the hang of the panorama facility.

After lunch I hot-footed it back down the road, west, then south west for about 1/2mile where there is a large modern barn by the road and junction with a track called Hinton Lane. I took the lane due south to Dark Lane which heads slightly more south west to New Cheriton. I'd stopped taking photos by then, as time was getting on. I walked through New Cheriton and stopped by a stream which I found out this evening is one of the tributaries of the River Itchen (the sources rise around Hinton Ampner). The Itchen heads north before turning west, before turning south again, through Winchester and Southampton where it enters the Solent.

After refreshing my feet in the stream I tootled down the road to the Hinton Arms before finally heading back to the car and home before rush hour.

Overall it was a very pleasant walk, not too testing despite the heat, and one that could be enjoyed by anyone who likes a walk in picturesque, lowland countryside with no interest in military history. For me it obviously also had added interest and proved quite instructive. If you're in the area or able to get there, I highly recommend it. Maybe I should re-visit it myself in March to get a better feel.

The Continued Recollections of a Wargamer or Nostalgia Ain’t What it Used to Be

I mentioned last time round probably to no one but my reader and myself, how I’d built up a SYW Prussian army in Minifigs 25mm (as small group of school mates variously built up French, Austrian and Russian forces. Minifigs at that time (late 70s) were not the greatest of models. Apart from being on the chunky side. They were not just an extra 5mm taller than Airfix but twice as wide and ‘deep’. Other failings were inaccuracies, anachronisms and idiosyncrasies in the figures. The Prussian heavy cavalry hats were arguably a bit too late for the SYW, but passable. ‘Hungarian Fusileers’ had uniforms and hats that were about 2 decades too late (I don’t know the correct name but they look a bit like short Belgic shakos without the peak; and I cannot find any pictures of said articles). Prussian cuirassiers and Austrian dragoons were modelled holding their carbines, when most authorities at the time emphasised action with the sword  in anything but outpost duty. I’m sure ‘button counters’ can find many other faults. However, they were readily available and served us well at the time - remember there was none of this t’internet business in those days and penniless 15 year olds were not apt to ‘waste’ money on catalogues (printed/typed price lists) when they could pop into a shop in town.

At some point in the 80s I bought a publication called A Book of Sandhurst Wargames by Paddy Griffith.

 Front cover

 Contents page

Back cover showing maps and game pieces

It consisted of 3 boardgames and an RPG (Roll-Playing Game not Rocket-Propelled Grenade. Obviously). I haven’t re-read it for many years and I seem to have lost the maps and counters. I must re-read it because in the back of my head I feel it was somehow influential on me, but I can’t remember exactly how. Oh and I bought this when it was (re-)published in the mid-80s by Bill Leeson:

It only held an interest for me in the part it played in the history of our hobby. I found it of little practical interest beyond its use as a source of data like movement rates.

As time moved on (mid-80s), I’d left the delights of South Humberside’s premier coastal resort and became 'spacially challenged' for a few years while I attempted to join the booming property market in the capital’s outer suburbs. I sold the Minifigs and re-invested the proceeds in H&R and Irregular 6mm SYW ranges. By then Miniature Wargames had been going a few years and Wargames Illustrated had joined the 80s glossy mag market. I devoured them both avidly, and Practical Wargamer too when it came along. I’d had the Morschauser article in the back of my mind and other articles in MW introduced me to the idea of ‘Strength Points’ (SPs) with single base units. SPs were, at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, a way of combining size of unit with unit quality (training, morale, experience etc). They could be used as die roll modifiers in modelling combat. An idea I think borrowed from board wargames.

Never being a great originator of new ideas, but a shameless adapter, I latched onto the idea as the basis for a new set of rules I wanted to write. There didn’t seem to be any real grand tactical rules around for the Seven Years War - everything I saw and read about commercial sets involved some sort of figure or sub-unit base removal, and usually formation changes, despite claims that they were for war in the grand manner. I wanted to get to the point where I could at least game something the size of Lobositz (30ish thousand a side) which meant a ground scale in the region of 100 paces to the inch (25mm). So I got writing and eventually went along to SELWG one evening with my toys and found a willing victim to try it out on. That taught me a valuable lesson in play testing. The rules basically totted up the combined SP of any units in contact in a combat, adjusted based on tactical factors, and added a dice throw. What I hadn’t thought of was the decidedly un-Frederician tactic of building up a mass by having deep formations adding SPs to the combat. I felt like the Ancien Regime commanders must have felt like when their battalions in the effete sounding ordre mince faced the hordes of Revolutionary France in l’ordre profond.

The rules got adjusted accordingly, but I somehow never managed to fit in return visits to SELWG. It was a faff and a half to get to after work, and then get home. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Real Life also intruded in other ways - I was still ambitious in those days and I had a wife at least as ambitious. Long work days, including some weekends, and domestic responsibilities took precedence, even before having kids. I managed a few solo games in the partially converted loft of the house we moved into in the mid-90s (it seemed expensive then but I could cry when I think what I had to pay for a run down house in a less desirable street nearby, a few years ago). The rules were gradually honed. I borrowed the idea of using playing cards to generate an element of randomness in the order in which units were activated. A small sized set of cards from a Christmas cracker came in very handy.

Units were foot battalions, 3 cavalry squadrons or a company of heavy artillery (battalion guns being considered ‘factored’ in to the infantry SP). Frontages were 50mm (200 paces). Bases could be any shape and I was able to create various dioramas or tableaux with units. Combat was engaged in when opposing units of cavalry or infantry came within 200 paces of each other. At this range cavalry were assumed to be committed to charging and infantry engaged in a fire fight and advance with the bayonet. Artillery, obviously, engaged in ranged combat and could degrade enemy units’ SP before they got to combat range.

Provision was made for hidden movement - never really tested or testable in the solo environment. The idea was to use blocks to represent columns of troops, as range decreased these could be rotated to show troop type (cavalry/infantry), then later specific categories (e.g. cuirassier/dragoons/hussars) then actual strength (models replaced the blocks).

Next came Command and Control. There had been discussion of the issue in a number of magazine articles in the 80s/90s and the idea of Initiative Ratings for generals came up. I think I got the idea from Koenig Krieg. In fact I’m pretty certain. A now lost version of my rules had basically the same table of Initiative Ratings as used in KK for named historical figures. The way I used these were to get units to perform a certain action, be it initiate movement, assault the enemy or change direction, a simple dice test had to be passed whereby the dice throw had to be below the Initiative Rating (IR) of the force’s commander. In fact there had to be 3 levels of general in an unbroken chain of command from brigade to commander in chief or penalties were incurred. ‘Unbroken’ meaning that units had to be within a command radius of their brigade commander, he in turn had to be within a command radius of his column commander, who in turn had to be within range of his C-in-C. If the chain was only partially complete, the combined IR was therefore lower and the test was harder to pass. Simple and effective in principle, but it required a bit of tweaking of IRs and/or type of die used to get the balance right. [The following text in blue is a new addition to explain a little more about my thinking.] The idea was that the player was nominally the C-in-C, so formations lower down couldn't be expected to act as the player wished without there being the ability to communicate (command radius being the proxy) with subordinates. It wasn't impossible for formations to act on their own initiative but it was a lot harder, unless the subordinate had the coup d'oeuil of a Seydlitz. 

The thinking that underlay this was that disciplined military formations (particularly) in the linear period would follow instructions (if they understood them) and would continue to follow them until something made them stop following them. Those 'things' could be combat with an enemy that stopped them, the attainment of an objective (what next?), new orders (successfully delivered and understood), or different circumstances noticed by the local commander who saw the need to do something different AND he was willing to use his initiative. In less centralised armies than the Prussians, say, aristocratic rivalry might cause nominal subordinates to show less willingness to follow the original script.

Then Real Life took over. Big time. 2 small children and divorce straddled the old and new millennia. Time, space and budgets were massively impacted, to say nothing of the emotional fallout. The new Frau* Nundanket came along, followed a few short years afterwards by the new Misses Nundanket, so even less space and even less disposable income.  Around about this time I re-established regular contact with Old School Tony
* or I should say Rouva Nundanket. 

Tony had discovered Baccus and Polemos in his self-enforced exile from the Mother Country. He started building up forces of French and (if I recall correctly) Russian Napoleonics based for General de Division and Marechal de l’Empire (‘GDD’ and ‘MDE’).  I tried a game on a trip home and was hooked! This was the basis for my next few years wargaming. Helped in no small measure by his purchase of a house-warming present of a British Peninsular War starter army, ready painted and based, for my impending move back up North. A move that never came off (too good to be true - same income as I was on in London but with the ability to go to bed every night in the DN35 postcode area!). We played the Talavera and Austerlitz scenarios from the Polemos scenario book and later Zorndorf using my home-brewed rules described above. The SYW game went OK but the rules lacked something. The obvious answer was there on Tony's bookshelf. There being no Polemos SYW ruleset at that time (around 2010) I set about adapting MDE to the mid-eighteenth century. And my cardboard bases were somewhat lacking too next to his beautifully finished MDF bases. A mass re-basing followed, including a tweak to the ground scale, and a refresh on the paintjob of my H&Rs (some of which were over 20 years old by then). In my new found enthusiasm, I also painted and based to a decent standard a fair amount of Baccus Spanish and Portuguese, and a couple of corps worth of late Napoleonic Prussians (for my son who I'd suckered nurtured into being a historical wargamer). As well as the Polemos-style grand tactical rule-rehash, in my continued obsession with things Frederician, I dabbled in rules for everything from campaign, to siege, operational, to battalion-level** actions.

** as in a battalion's part in line of battle rather than a skirmish.

Nearly there now. Just a major re-hash, ditching of the Polemos MDE framework for my SYW rules to follow before I get to the ECW and the last few years!

This will be good

A second post in a day - no that's not the Good Bit. The Good Bit is the return of Little Wars TV over on YouTube.

Little Wars TV does Gettysburg

The group who produce this includes the author of Altar of Freedom (Greg I think), a great set of grand tactical rules for the ACW. My old school buddy, Tony (who appropriately amassed an impressive 'Old School' collection) and I 'did' days one and two of Gettysburg a couple of years ago using AOF. In our scenario, day two took where we left off on day one rather than use the historical starting positions. I think we decided that the Rebs would have been all but spent after our day two so didn't go onto a third day.

These were from day two if I recall correctly. The high water mark of the Confederacy was a bit higher, and a day earlier, thanks to the Federals being pushed well clear of Gettysburg on day one. I believe that to the top left, just off table in the middle picture, you can see the Iron Brigade.  Sorry. had to be done. :-(

All figures and terrain (mainly Baccus and Tiemcast/Leven) were painted or made (fences and trees) by Tony. Great use of an old felt cloth suitably spray painted in parts, and very effective looking masking tape roads.

Anyway, back to the original point, if you haven't already watched Little Wars TV, it's well worth having a gander.

Early Social Gaming and the Minifigs ‘Incredible Hulk’ period

More self-indulgence.

I’ve just remembered whilst reviewing the draft of this post (yes really, I do check them!) that one Christmas my brother got Waddingtons Battle of the Little Big Horn. I seem to remember it a tough and challenging game for the Cavalry to win. As it should be. Maybe that’s where some of the initial rules ideas came from that I referred to in the last post. 

I can’t remember the order in which more ‘authoritative’ rules crept into my games. At this point I thought I was still an oddbod wishing to play with toy soldiers, albeit in a ‘serious’ way. Gradually facts like ‘Edward Woodward is a wargamer’ came to light. Some years after the Battle of Little Big Horn arrived in the house, I got the Airfix Waterloo Wargame for Christmas. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31537/waterloo-wargame

The playing surface was a ‘vinyl’ map of the Waterloo battlefield about 2 feet by 3 from memory.  Units were variable strength (1cm frontage = 1000 troops) on plinth-like hard plastic stands on which were mounted Airfix Waterloo horse/foot/gun figures (again in hard plastic). The rules were simple but I had good fun with it. It introduced me to the idea of games where casualties were not removed from units until the whole unit was removed.

Not long after my eldest sister* bought me The War Game, edited by Brigadier Peter Young. 
This was it! This was validation. And my first exposure to wargaming eye-candy. Brilliantly written accounts of 10 battles, illustrated with fantastic photos of model soldiers in carefully sculpted terrain. Some battles I knew of or had heard about, others were totally new. Thermopylae, ah yes, so that was the battle seen in the 300 Spartans. Agincourt I knew about. Edgehill, I’d heard of the English Civil War, Roundheads and Cavaliers, even Marston Moor, but not this specific battle. Blenheim, yes, that’d been in a book on decisive battles I’d read from the junior school library. Lobositz - the SYW was known to me in the context of Wolf and Quebec, and some vague notions of redcoats fighting the French on the Continent (Minden?) - again a totally new battle (and whole theatre of war) unknown to me. That set off a future debate whether to ‘do’ the War of the Spanish Succession or the SYW. Lobositz is a battle that has become legendary amongst some warmers thanks to Charles Grant (senior and junior).  And there were 5 more battles, 3 of which were new to me. And crucially, there were ideas for rules in an appendix. It made wargaming look something serious and complex, and something to be mastered to my young mind. Fantastic!

* The same sister took me to my first ever football match at Blundell Park (a Lawrie McMenemy-inspired 4-3 victory over Doncaster Rovers), then got me this iconic book, and later with her husband introduced me to real ale. She has probably been the most responsible for cementing my three longest-standing pastimes. I owe her a lot!

The appendix to the War Game introduced me to the idea that figures could represent more than one real soldier. And that ground scales could consequently be shrunk so that at last my 6’x4’ board could become a (small) battlefield. Companies reduced from 100+ figures to 6 at full strength.

Then I discovered, around 1976-7, that there was a wargames club at school and that I knew one of the lads in it. What’s more he was one of the cool rebels, not a geek. So I joined and ended up having a few years of very enjoyable gaming. There was a rulebook in use at the club, a thin book with a green cover which had rules for ACW, WWII and a few other periods. What’s more it chimed with the ideas I’d got from the War Game. 1 man = 20. You kept a unit ledger in which you wrote down casualties in men, only removing another figure when the next multiple of 20 was reached. Orders were handwritten and had to travel to units from the commander at courier speed. There was even one lad into the then new scale of micro-armour. One of the boys had WRG ancients rules and having set out to convert (and paint!) Airfix Romans into classical Greeks) we got together to fight a Greco-Persian War battle in his partly converted loft. My phalanxes (including my red-cloaked ‘Spartans’) didn’t get close to his line, being shot up by archers on the way in. Most disconcerting! It didn’t seem to work out that way in the history books I grumbled to myself, and I didn’t return to ancients.

In 1978 I bought  WRG 1685-1845 rules. Some people are not keen on these rules now but they were like a liberation (from written orders and keeping tally). The original retro ‘old school’ rules in a way - back to rolling a dice and ‘bang you’re dead’. The army lists in the back particularly pushed Marlburians and SYW - something I’d wanted to do for a long time (proper soldiers in tricornes and mitres). I was torn between the two. I’d need an opponent. Fortuitously, the same lad who I’d had the ancients game with already had a collection of Minifigs SYW Austrians. I have never figured out why he’d bought these - he clearly wasn’t the sort of person who only buys the ‘best’ army (to our level of knowledge then, that clearly would have been Frederick the Great’s Prussians). So that made the decision for me, I would get SYW Prussians (I’d be that kid who chose the ‘best army’). For me the best thing about the Prussians was that I’d be able to build up a points based army cheaper! Being generally elite and veteran, I’d need fewer models to get to 100, 200 or 500 points. Thus started a 40 year interest.

We had a game at the school club and it took off from there.  I think we had 150 point ‘armies’ (probably a battalion and a squadron of cavalry, plus commander). The game attracted a lot of attention at the club, and from 2 interested boys we grew to 5 SYW regulars. Games grew from 100 point armies to 1500 point armies! Great games were had and I can still picture the other lads and the funny things that used to come out of our mouths (intentional and non-intentional).

Inspired by the Charles Grant classic, the Wargame, we plotted an Imagination campaign. Five rival states were created (conveniently based on Britain, France, Prussia, Russia and Austria), backstories developed, and 4th year English lessons (Year 10 in modern parlance) saw a flurry of secret diplomatic correspondence (a lot of it scurrilous, concerning the ‘drug-addicted Tsar of All the Russias’). Sadly the campaign never got off the ground and over the next few years, 5 whittled down to 2 over the years.

Building up my army was a case of the excitement of deferred gratification. Pocket-money and cash from odd jobs was saved up for weeks ready for visits to Toynes in Grimsby. Orders were placed via the shop for Minifigs (Ancients and Napoleonics seemed to be the popular periods so little or no stock of SYW was held). More weeks of waiting was ‘endured’ before being able to get your hands on shiny shiny metal. It did give you time to get units painted! Also by time they arrived you had saved for the next order.

At some point in the late 70s in a magazine (Military Modelling or Airfix?) I read an article about single stand units by what was then already a vintage set of American rules. I guess it was Morschauser, but I can’t honestly remember for sure now. I experimented with an ungridded version of the game (solo) but left it at that. I’ve never returned to gridded miniatures gaming, but who knows.

Early Doors

No, not a Jim Morrison inspired musical post. Or a quote from 'Big Ron' Atkinson. This is a self-indulgent post. A remiscence into childhood. I might make it more grandiose by describing it as a stage in the evolution of my thinking about wargames, which would be partly true.

Like most wargamers of my generation (end of the Baby Boom) I started playing with plastic toy soldiers, first Timpo cowboys and indians,  Britains (1/32nd scale) then with Airfix 1/72/76th(?). All the usual early methods* were used in games on the living room floor or dining table - toy canon firing matches, marbles, flicking coins, Subbuteo-style. Then my first ‘proper’ wargames would be when my older brother had discovered somewhere you could use dice to determine ‘hits’ and have limits on movement. There were even different ranges and different weapons had different effects (did we learn that from warfilms or had my brother read it somewhere?). Most games involved WWII, then WWI, French Foreign Legion, US Cavalry and Plains Indians. In the background there had been colourful pictures of soldiers in a compendium of fairy stories and nursery rhymes (The Tinder Box?). I’m sure this fixed the idea in my mind that proper soldiers had colourful uniforms (indeed the Guards in London wore red coats) and wore strange hats that I subsequently learned to call mitres, shakos and tricorns**.

* Later this would include a more unsusal method. My brother, by then a smoker, to the startlement of my staid friend interrupted a Pacific War game to simulate a flamethrower with his cigarette lighter and torched a Japanese sniper out of a tree. I was a bit less surprised, having on previous occasions witnessed salvoes of lit matches being fired from Britain's naval cannon. There was no saving throw for poor Sergeant Kawasaki. Thanks Mark!

** Even later I learned they were ‘cocked hats’

I think we found Airfix Waterloo figures around the same time dad took us to see Waterloo. That was it! Proper soldiers. Lined up in ranks. In colourful uniforms. And the British still won. I’d learned that their guns were single shot and slow to load and they fired in ranks, so rules were introduced that it was one dice per 6 men. I even think soldiers ran away when 1/2 of them were killed! More reading. These 'muskets' actually fired a lot further than I thought - normally under 100 yards but up to 200yards! That was 2 yards at scale, more than the length of the (6x4’) model railway board! Infantry regiments were 1000 men. I was going to need more soldiers. I was clearly never going to ‘play’ Waterloo or even some of the smaller battles I’d read about in the library book about the Penninsular War. It was only ever going to be about part of a battle or some of the actions of the Light Division units (another new term!). That was fine, I’d discovered the Carey books of Ronald Welch - Captain of Foot was explicitly about the ‘petit guerre’ of the Light Division (was it the 52nd Foot that Carey served in?).

Nevertheless, heavily choreographed, solo war-games were set-up on the chipboard my brother had bought years before for his Hornby train set. A thousand unpainted Airfix Napoleonics, with some AWI British grenadiers and Confederate infantry (as Spanish?) were thrown in for good measure.  Columns of French infantry,  each 100 strong, would pour forward and initially sweep all before them before being held in a last ditch stand by the Brits. French cuirassiers would appear and the plucky British would form square and decimate the French with their controlled volleys before the massed British hussars would sweep over the ridge and rout the French from the field. An old portable record player would be carted into the room and pressed into service, with the climax from the 1812 Overture providing a stirring backdrop!



More like this later. I promise no more toys will be hurt in the future.