In Their Teenage Years, They Cried 'More! More! More!'

 It always amazes me, when people look askance or doubt your veracity when you own large armies.

Similarly, I look aghast when faced with people who believe that 30 figures constitutes use if the epithet 'army'.

As I have said many, many times in the past, although I was a roleplayerright at the start, I was fast off the blocks when it came to tabletop gaming and the possibilities for fielding massive armies on the tabletop battlefield.

My generation grew up with plastic soldiers from companies like Airfix or Matchbox, often in numbers which presaged the life of penury so many of would be faced with when we discovered the fresh new hobby of wargaming.

That said, I think it meant that we grew up with a different set of optics and in a time before £3.00 became accepted for a single 'rank & flank' style toy soldier which, costs pennies to produce, even in these times of financial madness. Of course, if you are using a third part service for casting, the base cost goes up, but the big boys in the hobby are milking you like cows.

But, as always, I digress...

It is 'normal' for me and indeed the people I 'came up' with in the hobby to think in terms of large armies. We would generally start a new period by buying two Essex or Jacobite Miniatures army packs which meat that we kicked off with over 300 models, which was a pretty good start when you were a schoolboy using pocket money and later other sources to fund the binges.

Let's look at a few ways we did it and how we got those large armies.

First and foremost there was pocket money, collected weekly from parents and grandparents, with the odd 'bonus payment' in my case as my paternal grandparents moved to Lancashire (yep... The Other Place) in the mid-70s so we did not see them so often. This meant that grandparental guilt and the fact that they had become race traitors by moving over the hills to Mordor from the Shire could be leveraged to great effect.

But seriously, my Grandma and Nan were both generous and only too happy to indulge the first born lavishly, often (as is the right of grandparents) overriding parental dictats on what I could or could not have - although I never cracked the ban on Star Wars figures.

Dinner money was another source of contraband funding of hobbies. Back then, we could leave school at lunchtimes rather than being forced into a collective barn to be fed swill (although, at my Junior schiool, Limpsfield, the food was absolutely top notch and better than several places I have eaten as an adult).

Two of us would go to a local bakery at lunchtime and buy a large crusty loaf, tearing it in half and compacting the interior down to create a bread bowl, which would then be taken to the chip shop across the green and filled with a bag of chips - proper 80s-sized bags of chips too - for a few pence. This could mean 70p pocketed per day, adding up to 10 Citadel Fantasy Tribes Orcs (12 before they went to blisters). This was how I saved for my first £2.95 Golden Dragon from GW in 4 days, actually sgharing a bag of chips one day with Alan, so that we had the required money to get to town and back and buy a dragon (2p there, 2p back and £2.95 for the dragon) on Thursday afternoon, because I was so desperate to own that model as soon as possible. Owning a £2 model was something to talk about at lunchtime, but a £2.95 dragon would be talked about for a week at least.

Then there was the fact that by 14, I and a few others were getting very 'tasty' with a paintbrush, a fact that less scrupulous older gamers in the club scene were quick to exploit, paying a 'union enforced' 7p for a 15mm ACW miniature. When you see old pictures of the SWS ACW display games, remember that many of those ACW figures were the product of teenage slave labour.

Then, I broke into the big time when an older gamer fessed up and paid me £50 for 7 28mm Call Of Cthulhu figures in 1984, which let me tell you was 1.5 times my first weekly wage packet when I left school. After this, the blinkers and gloves were off, and Roger and I, both being arguably the best junior brushes of the lot were paying for massive armies, making journeys to Tabletop Games and Q.T models with sports bags for filling with lead.

Finally, there was the most contaversial source of lead...

Younger GW staffers often took the bus to Nottingham to Citadel, where they could wander around, buying figures by weight at a heft discount. £10 could get a LOT of lead back then, and so you'd hand over say £30, allowing £10 of that as 'commission' for the staffer in question, and they would get a great day out, beer money and you got about half a carrier bag full of lead goodness. You had to accept that you may get a bit of mix, which, is why some of my 'Oldhammer' regiments have 5 figures on a 6 figure base and others have all six 'slots' filled.

You'd meet them at either The Pump or Moorfoot Tavern after the store closed, do a quick recce for management (back then it was Pete Berry and Cy Harrison) joining the troops for a swift ale, and then a carrier bag would change hands and you'd have a new army.

This may or may not be actual footage of such an exchange:

 

 

It was an older friend in the Sheffield Runelords who got me in on this (Roger was never in the loop on this but had an inside track with Peter Gilder) after I bought literally a 3/4 full carrier back of Citadel 'Wars Of Religion' Spanish from him.

It was this which eventually led to a ban from the store which lasted about 3 years and changed my life and mental health for the next 30+ years, with the full story only coming out in 2011 when I was reearching my first book. Everything comes at a price...

But that, little poppets, is why so many of us laugh at the notion of small forces and skirmish groups being caled 'armies' and moreover why we have lead piles which could buy a house. Indeed, some of us are constantly 'buttonholed' by dealers who are hoping we will die before they do...

Happily I am hoping to finally empty my lead pile and the boxes and carrier bags by the end of 2027, so that I can try and live a normal life and go to garden centres on Sundays ans watch The Fashion Show with Jeff Banks on Sunday evening... It's still on BBC isn't it? 

 

TTFN