Reunited - more Grove and Benoy

Thanks to Harry who has kindly allowed the centre companies of the 33rd Foot to join their light company brethren at Vintage Wargaming Towers.

Previous VW posts about these figures can be accessed here

First off the gentlemen of the 33rd:

with apologies for the slightly wobbly photograph; then some horses (sadly no riders) showing wire bridles:

And then some guns, marked "heavy" and "demi-culverin", while clearly representing Gribeaval system pieces

While the horses are definitely Grove and Benoy, as shown by the clipped corner rectangular copper bases to which they are soldered, it is hard to be definite about the guns - they came from the same source, but I have not seen a photograph or description of them elsewhere. Garratt in Model Soldiers for the Comnnoisseur refers to Seamus Wade, on the sale of most of the figure to Allan Robinson-Sagar of Toronto retaining figures including infantry, cavalry, foot and horse artillery, bands, mules and wagons and the Duke of Wellintgton and a Spanish priest. Since mules and the Spanish priest are included in the other figures I acquired from the same source it seems likely these are part of Seamus Wade's collection and it is likely that these are the correct guns.

It would be very interesting to hear from anyone who has any of these figures or any photopgraphs of them.

Three Fathers

On Sunday a rendezvous in  a windswept motorway service station saw me taking possession of a package from Tim Gow of Megablitz and more containing various papers from the collection of the late John G Robertson of Dundee, who was well known in wargaming circles in Scotland. Chief amongst them was a copy of Don Featherstone's Wargamers Newsletter Wargamers Yearbook 1966/7, which I had never seen before.

It is a rich source of 1966 goodies and some of them will appear here in due course. However, the thing I have most been interested in is a long article by Don himself entitled The Early Days of Wargaming - The R.L. Stevenson story.

This reports research by one Karl G Zipple of Michigan into Stevenson's wargames at Davos in 1880-1883 and contains some sources I haven't seen before.

The reason it has caught my interest to so great an extent is in the context of George Keef and Georland, who got properly into his stride in 1872, eight years before  RLS at Davos. This shows the importance of George Keef as a previously unknown early proponent of wargaming with figures, and earlier than the previously accepted pioneer RLS.

Clearly, whenever people have had toy soldiers there have been people throwing things at them and fighting battles. However, reading Don Featherstone's article reinforced the view that George Keef is now eligible to be counted as one of the early fathers of wargaming, along with HG Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson.

More on this along with the text of the article can be found in these four posts over on the Georland blog.

Here we go...

This then is the promised news:



Following the showing of the segment on the Antiques Roadshow regarding the Keef family collection of figures and revealing a previously unknown chapter in the history of early wargaming, I have been working with the family on a transcription of the Journal The History of the Army of George 1 which describes the campaigns and battles fought between 1873 and 1894.

Originally this had been with the intention of possibly serialising the Journal here on Vintage Wargaming, but on reflection and with the approval of the family it seemed it deserved a web presence all of its own. This is really a web site using blogger as a platform, rather than a traditional blog, and it remains to be seen to what extent it will be added to in the future. I would hope some further historical notes on the collection itself and more photographs of some of the figures as they are today will be added over time.

The campaigns and battles in the Journal are profusely illustrated with maps and plans.These have been reproduced within the posts on the blog. However, as the Journal is foolscap in size it is not easy to scan on a standard A4 scanner, and I have been working from photographs of pages rather than scans, so these are not as well defined as I perhaps would like. Over time it is hoped that these pictures can be replaced with higher resolution scans, but they are included as they are to provide visual interest and illustration.

As Graham Lay, the expert on the Antiques Roadshow, pointed out the importance of the collection is that it substantially predates what is generally thought of as the first documented example of wargaming with figures, the  Lloyd Osbourne article "Stevenson at Play" in Scribners Magazine of 1898, describing Robert Louis Stevenson's wargames.

Additionally, it is remarkable not only the extent to which it is documented, but the extent to which this documentation, along with the collection, has survived, thanks to a family which never threw anything away. In addition to the Journal there are a number of other sources of information including the letters home of George Keef while overseas on military service, and notes written by other members of the family.

The full text of the Journal is now available in a series of posts on the new blog, The History of Georland (click to follow the link). Visit it, bookmark it, comment on it, and keep an eye on it to see if further material of interest is added in the future.

I would particularly like to thank the Keef family for their willingness to make all this material available to a wider audience and the considerable trouble they have taken to make this possible.

Antiques Roadshow update

The family of Colonel Oliver Keef, the gentleman who appeared with the collection of soldiers on Antiques Roadshow, have now published on You Tube a six minute video shot in May 2013 of him telling the story of the collection and how it was made and used.  I was particularly interested to hear that his grandfather George had been buried at sea in 1901 with a battery of artillery and some infantry in his coffin. There are also some further pictures of the figures themselves.

More News from the Antiques Roadshow

A further email has landed from Graham Lay - he thinks the figures may have been 30mm but can't be sure. He has also been reading your comments here.

He writes:

Thank you so much for your further e-mail. I had no idea that Donald Featherstone had died recently, what a loss. However he has left behind a huge legacy of which we can all be grateful.

I am truly sorry that I cannot recall the size of the figures as I know how important this is to the identity of the makers. I have viewed again all of the recording we made including that which was left out. As you will no doubt understand, we often take up to 30 minutes to record all that is needed, which is edited down to about 4 minutes. Much of the remainder is no more than repositioning things and video that we can use in editing later (what we term 'cutaways'). These consist of close-ups of a finger pointing, or a minute of me nodding and suchlike. However the day is incredibly hectic and it is difficult to remember all things. Even so I am pretty sure that I recall 30mm, although I may be mistaken. I hope you will be able to discuss this with the family perhaps.

Having read some of the other comments one of the things that I recall was that 'miniskirt' highlanders were felt to be repainted French figures and not moulded as Scots at all. I think it is important for you to discuss this with the family really. Will you let me know if you do so and what progress you make please? I would be truly interested to know your thoughts once you have gone deeper into it.

Best wishes
Graham

If any further progress is made, I will let you know, but timing may be dictated by the wishes of the family, should they make contact.

Wargaming on the Antiques Roadshow - take 2

The Antiques Roadshow got back in touch with me yesterday after I contacted them on date of broadcast of the item shown in the previous post.

Graham Lay, the expert involved, says:

Thank you for the email which has been forwarded by our office at the BBC regarding the fascinating early lead wargaming figures and most unusual and possibly unique hand written book describing some of the campaigns fought between the youngest brother in India and other countries and the two brothers at home in Liverpool. One of the interesting aspects is that most of the figures had been repainted in different uniforms, so making French soldiers (from German and French soldiers of the Franco-Prussian war) into British for example. This was done actually at the time of that war or probably just afterwards. I am not sure if this is something that happened often but I believe not. It is likely that necessity caused them to use whatever they were able to obtain.

I felt sure at the time I saw the collection and recorded it with the owner (grandson of the original chap) that this was not just a collection of some importance in the wargaming field because of its early period but also would be of great interest to those whose pastime it is.

I am not certain that the owner I interviewed knew of the real historical importance of the objects or if they had ever come across people such as yourself, or Donald Featherstone for example, in the past. The original owner, whose photographs we showed in the programme was born in 1858. The handwritten book gives dates that are not quite correct bearing in mind his birth year and it appears earlier than in fact it was. For example it states that the army was formed in 1860, which would lead the reader to believe that he started to use the figures at that time, whereas in fact he would have only been two years old. It is understood that he started wargaming at around fifteen years of age. This must be borne in mind if you have the opportunity of looking at it. It primarily describes campaigns in the fictional country of Georland (his name was George) and is quite detailed and has some good illustrations. George died fairly young of dysentery on the ship on his way home from Rangoon I believe when the current owner's father was four years old. In some of his letters he describes various campaigns and it is not until they are read some way into the letter that it is understood whether he is referring to real or lead soldiers!

My office at the BBC is in contact with the family and will contact you shortly to let you know if they are happy to talk to you. I will give my full support and encouragement to the family to speak with you.

I have asked Graham if he could estimate the size of the figures - whether 30mm or 40-45mm - as preople have found this surprisingly difficult to do from viewing the programme.

I will let people know of any further progress through the blog

Wargaming on the Antiques Roadshow

Tonight's edition of the BBC's Antiques Roadshow (Eastbourne Bandstand 2) had an intriguing item on a collection of around 1,000 metal figures dating from the 1860s and 1870s, which had been used for wargames by a boy who became and officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1878. He took the bulk of them on his first posting to Rangoon, where he played wargames on the floor of his bungalow with the Regimental Surgeon on a large canvas map spread on the floor. It also sounded as if he might have conducted some play by mail activity with his brothers who remained with the rest of the collection in Liverpool. The collection also includes a large notebook which described how these wargames were carried out.

Antiques Roadshow expert Graham Lay says he is puzzled as he thinks wargaming (meaning battles with model soldiers) is usually accepted to have started at the turn of the century. This view is understandable - Lloyd Osbourne's article in Scribner's Magazine on Robert Louis Stevenson's wargames appeared in 1898.

While clearly people will have fought battles with their model soldiers for many years, from simple plying to more formal rules, this does seem a notable new instance and could be the earliest dated example of more formal wargaming.

The War Game 1900

Reprinted in Wargamer's Newsletter #170 of May 1976 from Royal Magazine of May 1900. An intersting article on the use of kriegspiel.

Early Wargames Clubs

From Wargamer's Newsletter #109 of April 1971, a brief note on the Oxford University Wargames Club (1877-1914). It refers to other clubs in existence in 1911, including The Inns of Court OTC, the Bristol Tactical Society, and the Cambridge University club.

The secret war gaming history of literary giants

Reference has already been made in previous posts here on Vintage Wargaming to the contribution of well known literary figures to early wargaming. These include Robert Louis Stevenson, A.J. Symons, H.G Wells and even Guy Debord.

Less well known is the involvement of a small group of academics and authors in Oxford in 1939, based on the Inklings group and their meetings at the Eagle and Child, and a young subaltern from the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. Even less well known is the contribution their wargaming may have made to some of the most famous and well loved books of the second half of the 20th Century.

The academics and authors were J.R.R Tolkien, the Rawlinson Professor of Anglo Saxon, and C.S. (Jack) Lewis, Fellow and Tutor of Magdalen College. Both men had served on the Western front in the First World War, Tolkien with the Lancashire Fusiliers, and Lewis with the Somerset Light Infantry. Tolkien was invalided out in 1916, while Lewis went to France in 1917. Their experience of war left a lasting impression on both men, and Tolkien’s obsession with trenches is reflected in his later work in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The subaltern was a young officer called Peter Young, who seems to have visited Oxford at irregular intervals to buy military footwear (including commando boots) from the well known Oxford outfitters Walters of the Turl. It may have been on one of these occasions that Peter Young attended a meeting of the Inklings – whether by invitation or accidental presence in the pub on a Tuesday morning is unknown – and met and befriended Lewis and Tolkien

For different reasons all three men sought an escape from their personal experiences of war. It seems that they evolved a complicated fantasy medieval world, where they fought at irregular intervals a mixture of a role playing and wargame campaign, punctuated and inspired by alcoholic intake at the Eagle and Child. Each man ruled an independent kingdom with castles, peasants and armies. Their name for this game was “Donjons and Flagons”, and it was fought using the patriotically incorrect (for the time) Elastolin composition Ritterfiguren (knights) bought by Lewis and Tolkien from Boswells in Broad Street. The embarrassing source of these figures from Germany may have been one of the reasons for the very sketchy detail that has existed to date about this game.

It is interesting to speculate whether this interest in mythical worlds contributed to Lewis’s development of the Narnia books between 1949 and 1954, Tolkien’s writing of the Lord of the Rings trilogy which was published in 1954 and 1955, and even to the Seven Years’ war campaigns described in Charge!

Intriguingly a recent discovery among J.R.R. Tolkien’s papers in Merton College Library (he became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945) suggests there may have been an additional element in this game – re-enactment. College Librarian M. R. Benn has discovered a previously unrecorded envelope containing two documentary fragments – a faded photograph, inscribed in Tolkien’s handwriting, “Peter Young playing the game, in the garden of 20 Northmoor Road, September 1939”, and the other a bill for hire of three medieval costumes from Walters of the Turl, also dated September 1939.

With permission of the College, the photograph is reproduced below

The Scandinavian Wells, by Harry Pearson

Thanks to Harry Pearson for writing this piece for Vintage Wargaming about a little known (take deep breath and wait for comments) Swedish wargames pioneer.

HG Wells’ classic Little Wars was the first book aimed specifically at people who wanted to fight battles with toy soldiers. The second came from a rather unusual source. Ossian J D Elgstrom (1883-1950) was a Swedish ethnologist, author and artist who may well be the only wargamer ever to have competed in the Olympics (admittedly it was in the “mixed painting” art event at the Berlin games of 1936, and he didn’t win a medal, but even so…).

Elgstrom specialised in richly illustrated books on the myths and folklore of the far north, but as the rest of Europe edged towards the catastrophe of World War One he took a break from collating the legends of Greenland and Sapmi and penned Hur Man For Krig Med Tennsoldater (A Manual For War With Tin Soldiers).

Albert Bonniers, a prestigious Stockholm publisher who might best be described as the Swedish equivalent of the UK’s Penguin, published the book in the autumn of 1914 as part of a “pocketbook” series which also included volumes of Tibet, Prince Otto fo Denmark and the childhood of Erik Menveds. The cover price was 2 krona. Two years later Elgstrom’s work was translated into German and published, as Wie man mit Zinnsoldaten Krieg Fihrt, in Liepzig. Germany’s own early wargame book, Karl Floericke’s Strategie und Taktik des Spieles mit Bleisoldaten appeared around the same time.

Some years ago I came across a rather battered and coffees-stained copy of Hur Man For Krig Med Tennsoldater in a vintage toyshop in Stockholm’s Gamla Stam. It has hard covers, is about the size and thickness of one of the old Ladybird books and is illustrated throughout with drawings and plans of what must be the most eccentric and wonderful wargames paraphernalia ever invented. Sadly my knowledge of Swedish is not sufficient to translate the main text, but the wild originality of Elgstrom’s approach can easily be gleaned from the illustration on page 11, which shows how to make a machine-gun (“kulspruter”) using 7mm hollow glass rod and a wooden box filled with dried peas.

Other fabulous devices include the “gummislang kannon”, which might best be described as a mini ballista firing rods fitted with wire heads to simulate “direct bomabardment with shell”, and the “bombkastare” a sort of tabletop siege engine made from wood, a steel strip and a jam jar lid which flings a lethal-looking missile fashioned by sticking cocktail sticks into a cork to simulate “indirect bombardment” presumably by howitzers.


Amazingly Elgstrom manages to top even this extraordinary contraption when, a few pages later in a section headed Minor I Terrangen, he demonstrates how to construct a tabletop landmine using a spring-loaded steel strip released by a fuse made from saltpetre paper (available, the text explains, in photographic shops at a cost of 25 to 30 ore per packet). Take that Lionel Tarr!

Following chapters on how to build a fort and make barbed wire and trench systems the book concludes with what appears to be an account of an action between North Army and South Army, some notes on compiling a wargame journal and an illustrated list of figures – tin flats – available from the Swedish makers Santesson and Ohlsson both of whom had shops in Stockholm at the time.


What sort of readership was Hur Man For Krig Med Tenn Soldater aimed at? My guess would be that like Wells, Elgstrom was covering the popular “children of all ages from 9-99” demographic. The model making required is certainly too complex for young children and at one point the author appears (as I say my grasp of Swedish is limited) to suggest that a suitable army might consist of 500 figures, 12 cannons and 7 machineguns, quite a collection for even the most privileged youngster.

Sadly many aspects of the book remain obscure. Did Elgstrom approach the publisher with the idea, or were Bonniers looking for a Swedish answer to Little Wars and commissioned him to do the job. Who did Elgstrom – living in Norrviken at the time he was writing Hur Man – wargame with? Did he continue with his hobby, and if so what refinements did he make to the manifold warmachines he had invented? Alas we may never know.

Harry Pearson

A.J. Symons

by Derek Atwell, from Wargamer's Newsletter 94, January 1970.

Following on H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, there is a strange gap in the literature on our pastime.

'Little Wars' is short, practical, and eminently readable: it seems strange that a flood of Wellsian War Game Clubs did not instantly spring into action. Instead we find almost a Dark Age lit only by the rules of Captain Sachs in this country and those of Fletcher Pratt in the States.

With this in mind, it was with considerable interest that I read:-

October 20th, 1921 – For the first time explained to Symons Rules for a Strategic War-Game.
November 4th, 1921 – First practice game on Swinton – Cirencester Street
November 19th, 1921 – Most considerable game yet. 3.30 p.m. – 9.00 p.m.
November 21st, 1921 – First campaign of THE WAR GAME commences. 1st Cavalry and 2nd Infantry Divisions on each side involved.

Here at last was proof positive that H.G's little masterpiece had not entirely fallen on stony ground.

A.J.A. Symons is less well known than R.L.S. or H.G. Yet his book “The Quest for Corvo” is in its way a masterpiece.

The 1921 WAR-GAME was the brain-child of Captain Harold Fisher, who had met A.J. at a debating society of all unlikely places. A glance at the list of debates shows that the Psychology of Crowds was one subject. which suggests that our modern morale rules would have been seized on with enthusiasm. The arrangement was that Fisher devised the Rules and A.J. spent his time trying to circumvent them - at which he was remarkably adept!

To return to the War Game; it was played on a 1" Ordnance Map; a session of 4-5 hours was likely to result only in the pushing back of one section of the line a mile or two. A campaign taking several months. To quote yet more from Julian Symons most interesting biography about A.J. "For a year this game occupied a good deal of my brother's time, and his characteristic passion for verisimilitude in games is well expressed by the typed reports of Campaigns which accompanied the War Game, as well as the Race Game. Now the latter game is concerned with Horse-Racing and one of A.J.'s reports is published; although he must have been very young at the time, it sparkles with all the polish of a really top-flight racing journalist. Who knows if the missing Campaign reports might not rival Robert Louis Stevenson's classic account of the affair around the Sandusky; of the sad end of the editor of the Yallobelly Record. He was hung by order of Lloyd Osbourn.

A.J. was a man of many interests; he had written books on Emin Pasha and the explorer Stanley; he was an expert amateur forger! Co-founder of the Wine and Food Society and a born club secretary. With all these interests and talents had he been with us still; one could visualise a Colonial Wargame Convention; the rules would be complex, written orders might well have been forged!

In the alcoves would be Palm-Trees; the doors would be guarded by immense Africans with fearsome tribal tattoos and assegais; as befits the organiser of The Wine and Food Society the menu would have been unforgettable certainly and possibly indigestable. This I am not inventing, it is the menu that he did lay on for an African dinner.

Paw-paws - Peanut soup - Turtle Fins - Egg-Plant and Mango Fool - Corn on the Cob. Of course they should have washed it down with Palm .Vine; actually the wines were more suitable an exclusive cavalry Regimental dinner or perhaps a similar affair at Sandhurst?

Many readers will rightly say that there is little about wargaming in this article. If I have done no more than introduce a few readers to the 'Quest for Corvo and Julian Symons1 - A.J.A.Symons. His Life and Speculations - published by Eyre and Spottiswoode 1950, I shall be quite content.

John Tunstill on the Wooden Warriors of Stirling Castle, Miniature Warfare January 1969

Another find from Miniature Warfare magazine is this brief article with pictures, of Webb Military Figures for the Practice of Tactics, from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders' regimental museum.