Thirty Years War size comparison

L to R: The Assault Group Swedish Pikeman, Warlord Games, Swedish pikeman, Renegade ECW Pikeman

Despite my better judgement (I really don't need to start another period) I recently bought a box of Warlord Games Thirty Years War Swedish.  I first became interested in this period when I bought some of the Revell 1/72 figures.  I then started to buy some 20mm metals to gain extra troop types but gave up on the whole project eventually.  It was only when the beautiful Renegade ECW figures appeared that I started to paint 28mm 17th century figures.

Given my Swedish connections it was inevitable that I should return to the Thirty Years War at some point and a year or so ago I bought some of the amazingly comprehensive The Assault Group range which are also sculpted by Nick Collier who did such a great job on the Renegade figures.  However, I don't really like them because they are a throw-back anatomy wise with, to my mind, overly large heads.

When the Warlord figures came out I thought they were lovely and anatomically excvellent but by this point I'd painted two big 48 man ECW regiments using Renegade figures and realised that the two ranges were completely incompatible.  The new Warlord Thirty Years War figures use their ECW sprues with a few metal bits (particularly helmets).  Now fashions for the Thirty Years War and the ECW were not the same but I guess they are close enough and they are packaged beautifully.

My biggest problem with the Warlord box (apart from the fact that you really need to buy seperate metal pikemen in tassets) is the number of components in the box and the fact that there are no instructions as to which arms produce which pose  (something the Perries tell you, in contrast).  So I have been put off starting them as they aren't that easy to work out.  Fortunately several of the pikemen are one piece castings (except for the helmet) so it is simple to compare them to TAG and Renegade figures.  I, personally, don't think they are compatible but the latest TAG command figures on TMP look a little better anatomy wise.  Renegade are beefier than Warlord but could work in the same unit.

I'm due to visit Stockholm next month so, no doubt will get all enthused about the Thirty Years War again!

First Galloping Major figures ordered

Friends under fire by Robert Griffing

Well, although the last thing I need is another wargames period I have just given in and ordered a couple of packs from Galloping Major's French Indian War range. Some Canadian Militia and some Mohawks (or, rather, Kanienkehaka, as my Canadian First Nations Aboriginal contacts would no doubt prefer).

I have also just discovered the wonderful paintings of Robert Griffing, an artist from Pennsylvania who concentrates on painting scenes featuring the Eastern Woodland Indian in the eighteenth century. His paintings will help a great deal on colour schemes for the figures. Looking forward to them already!

Flintlock and Tomahawk Blog

More Ronald Embleton marvellousness!

Lance Cawkwell from Galloping Major Wargames has just made me aware of Ralphus' excellent blog Flintlock and Tomahawk, which I hadn't seen before. Trully excellent stuff.
http://flintlockandtomahawk.blogspot.com/

The greens of the new Galloping Major Rangers are really enticing! I'm not going to be able to resist these. I'm on my seventh day in Canada and coming here always makes me want to get some figures onto a board full of evergreen trees!

Rogers' Rangers and the French Indian War

Rogers' Rangers by Ronald Embleton

A year or two ago I bought from someone at Guildford all of Conquest Miniatures superb French and Indian War figures, http://www.conquestminiatures.com/french&indianwar.htm although new releases for this range seem to have, sadly, dried up. I am very pleased to see, therefore, that a new company called Galloping Major Wargames http://www.gallopingmajorwargames.com/index.htm is looking to do the French and Indian War in depth. I don't have any of the GMW figures yet so can't compare them to Conquest but they look pretty good whilst perhaps not reaching Conquest's standard (which really are superb). All I want from a firm doing this period are Indians, regulars and irregulars but no one out there has achieved this yet in an acceptable (to me) style.

It's interesting to note that my interest in the period originated from the same two influences as noted on the Galloping Major website.

Firstly, the BBC series the Last of the Mohicans (1971) which is now out on DVD and was shown Sauturday evenings.

More fake tan than Girls Aloud!

Reviews tend to comment that the sets and battles are rather poor and that the Indians are all played by British actors in make-up. Well, that is because that there really aren't that many Native Americans in Britain! Given that there are a lot more Native Americans in America then Hollywood was even more guilty in continually using white people to play Indians (for example, the otherwise excellent The Mountain Men (1980) with Charlton Heston and Brian Keith.

Philip Madoc: as scary as a Dalek!

The two things I remember about the show were Philip Madoc's brooding Magua the Huron: one of the great villains of 1970s British TV (up there with Anthony Valentine's Major Horst Mohn in Colditz (1972)) and the title music; which, nearly forty years later I can still sing and always comes into my head if I am walking in forests in Canada!

The other influence was the Look and Learn magazine series Rogers' Rangers which ran in 1970 and had wonderful art by Ronald Embleton. This 15 part picture series was on the back of the magazine and was beautifully illustrated with wonderfully evocative renditions of the North American wilderness and gorgeously composed action scenes.

The third influence, which the Galloping Major site didn't mention was seeing the excellent Spencer Tracy film North West Passage (1940) on colour TV for the first time back in about 1970. Sadly, the latter is not available on DVD (and the book is out of print too) so I am very glad I managed to tape it off the TV a few years ago. In fact, the film's full title was North West Passage Book 1: Rogers Rangers but the sequel based on the second part of Kenneth Roberts 1937 novel was never made. Largely, I suspect, this was becuase the tone of the latter part of the book becomes increasingly critcal of Britain as Rogers, as a loyalist and his friends disagree on the way the colony is run.

Recently I bought some model spruce trees and it has got me thinking about painting some FIW figures again. Maybe now could be the time to complete my half finished Conquest figure!

What's going on..

Cavalryman from Essex's army

I'm being distracted by many things at present; most specifically Colonials and some Warhammer for my little boy. However, I started work on a small group of Renegade ECW cavalryman at the weekend. I have a unit of cuirassiers painted but need some units of "regular" cavalry for my Parliamentarian force as I now have two units of infantry finished. I have also got an artillery piece which I am just filing and trimming so hope to post something in the next few weeks...

Languedoc Regiment: Musketman and Pikeman

I started these just over a month ago but, due to being in Canada for two weeks and my daughter monopolising my desk for the last fortnight for her revision, I have only just finished them. They came out OK although it makes me realise that pale grey is a tricky colour to shade correctly. I based the uniform on a plate from Wargamnes Illustrated (I think-it was kindly sent to me by Dave from the Guildford Club).

I chose the Languedoc regiment purely because we used to holiday in the region when I was small. Our house was very old and I remember being very excited by the fact that the stairs to the top floor were on the outside, like the biblical houses we had studied at school.

One thing I also remember was how dreadful the wine was. Yes, I am afraid that even at the age of seven or eight I used to drink wine, at least when we were at our holiday home there. I remember that my father bought a plastic litre bottle of wine (I think it cost 50 centimes) and it was horrible. The wine from the Corbieres was particularly nasty and so was the Cotes du Roussillion. The only decent wine was the fortified stuff from Banyuls which was just up the coast from our house. I am afraid that I used to drink it with lemonade! The wines have improved hugely since then (the late 1960s) and wines like Minervois have gone from being cheap party wine in the seventies to £8.00 a bottle stuff now. Languedoc is now the biggest wine region in the world.

Castelnaudray with the Canal du Midi, which was started during our period in 1681. The world's first Public Private Partnership Project! (one for Giles!)

The food was always good, however, and the region is famous for Cassoulet, of which we used to eat enormous quantities when we were down there as my father strove to discover the best Cassoulet in the region. We found it, eventually, in a little restaurant in Castelnaudary. The town is now famous for the dish to the extent that TV chef Rick Stein did a programme from there. We would spend the summer there and we never saw any other British people and it's still less popular with British tourists than the Dordogne or the Cote D'Azur. I must go back sometime.

I was thinking about finishing these two figures a couple of weeks ago whilst wandering through Vielle Montreal one evening when, lo and behold, I came across a restaurant called Les Pyrenees. It turned out to be a Catalan restaurant and I had one of the best Cassoulets I have had for years. Well worth going to if you are ever in Montreal. http://www.pyrenees.ca/

So I imagine my troops fortified with sausage and confit d'oie and swigging nasty, thin wine as they march to whatever battle I have in store for them. I think they need a few more troops for their happy band!

Blue Regiment of Foot completed

The 48 men of my Blue Regiment of Foot for Parliament (yes I know all the ensigns should be in the pike block but I think they look better scattered about!)

At last, despite my daughter having been sat at my desk for weeks "revising" (i.e: looking at the Britain's Got Talent website) I have finished the four musketmen that complete my second ECW Foot Regiment. They are a generic Blue Regiment; probably also a London Trained Band. These regiments are from the early war period when tassets were still worn. There are several factors that have made me go for an early look for my armies.

Firstly, the influence of my first wargame book, The Wargame, edited by Peter Young, which had a piece on Edgehill in it, written by Young. As with the whole book there were evocative photographs by Philip O Stearns of Peter Gilder figures and scenery.

One of the excellent pages from The War Game featuring Edgehill

Stearns was also a member of the Sealed Knot as well as being a photograper and Art Director for Penthouse magazine when it started in 1965! He also took this photograph of Amber Dean Smith, Penthouse's first ever Pet of the Year, for Mayfair Magazine in the August 1969 edition. I am sure the 17th Century costume and background was not an accident (not that she kept the costume on very long).

Amber does 17th Century

My second influence was the Nicholas Carter novels about the ECW from the late nineties. He wrote five and then the series abruptly stopped for some reason. He wrote a couple of novels set at the time of Henry VIII and then disappeared. A shame, as his Shadow in the Crown ECW series was really enjoyable and focussed (at least initially) on the Hopton and Waller clashes in the West featuring battles like Roundway Down and Landsdown. One of my best friends lives in Bath and you have to drive across the Landsdown battlefield to get there. Carter's description of the different groups wandering around in the dark before Landsdown and taking pot shots at the glow from burning matches gives a great feeling of what warfare must have been like at ground level. Like Stearns he was also a member of the Sealed Knot so had some feeling for being involved in a big push of pike.

The flag is by Body's Banners

I have a few figures painted for my next two regiments: the Earl of Essex's and Hampden's Regiment who wore orange and green respectively. I then ought to paint some smaller (than the 48 figures of my first two) units who look a bit tattier. The units at the recent Loseley Park re-enactment were very much on the scruffy side. Coat colours seldom matched and breeches were usually a different colour from jackets. My units by contrast are very smart. This is justifiable as they are early war Parliamentarians and, thus, better equipped. Also I can't help thinking that there are many examples of Colonels buying large amounts of a particular coloured cloth for their men. Surely it is likely that at least in some cases this would have been sourced from the same place and therfore jackets and trousers would have been the same colour and there would have been considerable uniformity. Later in the war you would expect more of a patchwork, perhaps.

In the meantime I have started on my second unit of horse; a straight cavalry unit to join my painted cuirassiers (another early war unit).