I am thrilled beyond words to have received a parcel today containing some objects I have admired since 1971.
I was contacted by Charles S Grant, who has been divesting himself of the original collection of Spencer Smith miniatures and balsa wood buildings originally amassed by his late father. Many of the buildings had already gone to collectors (or been lost to wear and tear) and all but one battalion of very fragile infantry.
Charles asked me if I would be interested in acquiring this little piece of wargaming history and naturally, I said “yes” with alacrity! He also spoke very kindly about how he was determined to offer them to me first as he knew the extent to which I have been a flag-bearer of his father’s legacy and ‘old school’ wargaming for many years, and he only wanted a very modest sum for the items and postage.
The buildings, constructed of balsa wood and originally painted in enamels, are really quite petite and not built to the same scale as the 30mm figures (they are more like modern 15-20mm sized, perhaps to go with the 1/87 Roco vehicles that featured in the earlier—1970—Battle: Practical Wargaming). To many gamers, this must seem very strange indeed, and admittedly it takes a bit of lateral thinking to come to terms with this. But the fact is, they just, somehow, look right, and one benefit is that the individual edifices don’t have the enormous table footprint that buildings matching the figure scale would. (A current gamer who knows all about this sort of thing is the marvellous Sidney Roundwood, who has created his own urban scenes along very similar lines.) And of course, as shown in the book, every building contains its own ruins, able to hold six unbased Spencer Smiths. That ties in nicely with my own rules (or, for that matter, Black Powder), so that a single base of infantry can occupy a house.
The infantry battalion is the Ostergotland, almost intact but for a couple of figures that have succumbed to the dreaded ankle rot and a couple more that have lost the ends of their muskets. Secreted within the buildings I also found a couple of Charles’ personality figures, which I must set about identifying from his various books.
Aficionados will know that the Ostergotland infantry are featured on the front cover of The War Game, entering the shot in column on the far right of the photo depicting part of the Battle of Mollwitz. They also feature (in black and white) on p.20 of the book, again in column following the Löwenstein-Oels Grenadiers.
I am, of course, extremely grateful to Charles for this amazing gesture, and as I was unpacking everything I became quite emotional, overwhelmed by the sense of everything coming full circle for that little boy who first discovered The War Game in his local library back in 1971, a year which had earlier been so traumatic for him when he lost his father.
Sometimes, a hobby and the connections made because of it really can heal.
Henry
Just one of the many home-made conversions carried out by the late Charles Grant.
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