Play or Display, Pre  War Gardening and Normans and Saxons in Middle Earth? 

Play or display... a tale of Ikea cabinets, and civilians galore!

The English Civil War collection has now been given a safe haven in one of the 25 year old Ikea 'Billy' bookcases with the glass doors. They look splendid and are ready for action whenever the opportunity arises!

Unfortunately to put them in there, I had to usurp the civilian collection including buildings. This was not a situation I was particularly happy with and I came up with 'a cunning plan'!

I have a very large collection of hardback books reprinting American comics which I collected back in the first decade of this century. These books gave me immense pleasure at the time, but I rarely read them these days and they take up a huge proportion of the bookcases in the toy room here at Apperley Towers. I made the difficult decision to sell some of them and free up some space. After reviewing the collection I eventually came up with a list of 260 books that I would try to sell. This still leaves me with over 400 other volumes but they are my favourites and the ones I am more likely to read in the future.

Complete EC comics library, the best 1950's Sci-Fi and Horror!

These books were not cheap and still have a very decent resale value on platforms like E-bay, but at 67 years old I value my time more than money. I duly contacted a dealer in such items here in the UK and we agreed a price. Pete (who is a great guy to deal with) came and collected the books a week or so ago and I was left a little sad, but also excited at the prospect of utilising the spare bookshelves for toy soldier displays.

Various DC books plus my complete Spirit collection, my favourite comic of all time

After moving the remaining books around a little I was left with a double Billy bookcase which just needed some glass doors and glass shelves. A trip to Ikea the next day, provided me with two doors and 7 glass shelves. Now the Billy range is still a mainstay of Ikeas product range and I would recommend them to anyone who needs to store books (or toy soldiers!). They are pretty sturdy, flexible and reasonably priced. Unfortunately they no longer produce the wood finish that I had bought 25 years ago but I found a compromise which won't look too out of place. So an hours work would see me ready to rehome my civilian collection!

Famous last words! Whilst the range is generally the same, they have moved the points where the door hanging mechanisms fit and they have also changed the way in which the glass shelves are fitted. These changes meant that I spent about 6 hours redrilling and filling before the new cabinet was ready. Oh well, it was worth it in the end!

The new cabinet partly filled with my civilian collection, just the farm to position

I have now almost filled the cabinet with the civilian buildings and figures. A variety of vehicles, both mechanical and horse drawn, and even my Hornby train collection have been included as well. The pleasure the filling of the cabinet has made everything worthwhile. As at the time of writing, I still have the farm collection to be displayed on the lower 2 or 3 shelves. 

A stroll in the park

All Aboard!

Postal service

Monday morning 

The Admiral in his garden watching the world go by

The Sally Army! God Bless Them!

Her Ladyship in her new fangled motorised carriage

This did bring to mind the question headlined above.....play or display? I appreciate that I am very fortunate to have the luxury of my toy room and that the majority of gamers and collectors are not perhaps so fortunate. I do wonder for those of you who have some space to display your wargames figures, what is more important to you, playing with them or displaying them?

I know that I love to get my toys onto the wargames table, preferably with a good friend as an opponent across the table. Unfortunately such games are not very frequent and if I don't set up a solo game, the soldiers spend most of their time 'back at barracks'. 

The main run of cabinets, with most of my toy soldier collection

So during those periods of peace, I am reduced to painting, planning and writing this blog. What I do nearly every day however, is spend a little time looking at my collection in their display cabinets waiting for the call to action. I occasionally re-arrange them and of course add new recruits. I get so much pleasure from 'reviewing the troops' each day that it raise the question of whether I am happy to just create displays to look at rather than wargame with them. Well the answer is I enjoy both! I am and have always been, a gamer at heart and love to shove toys around and roll dice! I have to accept however that I get almost as much pleasure from arranging the displays. The beauty of it is I can do both and my beloved soldiers are kept relatively dust free, safe from damage, ready to be pulled out for a game. Two hobbies for the price of one, or just two aspects of the same hobby? You decide. 

Tales from the potting shed.....pre-war gardening!

As regular readers will be aware, I have invested some resources in gathering together a collection of the Britain's lead garden range from  the 1930's. Up to now I have not done anything with it and this article is about my first tentative steps towards refurbishing and utilising the collection.

The bulk of the garden range was of course the flowers and the flower beds for them to be placed into. The flower beds are cast in something like mazac, similar to artillery pieces, not the soft lead used by Britains for most of their toys at this time. As a result the flower beds are common and have survived in pretty good condition. 

The flowers however are a different matter. They are made of soft lead and painted in simple colour schemes. They were cast 'flat' and it was intended that the junior gardener would twist them into a more three dimensional shape. This of course weakened a lot of them and the collector of these items will soon acquire a collection of broken flowers and plants. The commonest breakage is the loss of the nodule at the base of each plant which fits into the holes in the flower beds. As you can see I have plenty of such damaged plants and I want to make use of them if possible. 

I decided to repaint some of the broken flowers and glue them into two similarly repainted small flower beds. I then used plastic edging bricks from the plastic range of the 1960's to make them into free standing little decorative flower beds. I am very pleased with the end results and much more optimistic about saving the many damaged pieces I have. 

I hope that no one will criticise the mix of plants, as I just wanted to make an eye-catching 'toy flower bed' to enhance a building on the wargames table. The flower beds themselves are now in the hands of the Royal Mail, on their way to a new owner. A housewarming gift you might say!

Waifs and strays....Middle Earth recruits

A few weeks ago, I was given a box of 25mm Normans and Saxons by a very good friend. "These might be useful for your Lord Of The Rings wargaming" were his words as he handed me the box. He knows that I like my 'Middle Earth' wargaming and although the majority of my armies are composed exclusively of figures made by Games Workshop, he is also aware that I have started to add figures from other sources, providing the figures are broadly in scale with each other. 

As part of my 'easing back into painting' projects, I have refurbished the figures and repainted the bases to match my collection. They were generally in pretty good condition, but a weapon or three had gone missing and there was some paint chipping to repaint. Anyway here's the end result of my  fairly minimal labours. They were never painted to a very high standard, just a basic table top finish, but I am more than happy to add them to my armies.

But Graham... I hear you shout! These are obviously Normans and Saxons, not Elves or Orcs!

Well Tolkien's middle Earth had many contingents and peoples that he didn't describe in any detail at all. What is also clear is that the Peter Jackson films did not stay true to Tolkien's own descriptions of the arms and armour of the many races in the books. The arms and armour of the dark ages and early middle ages were without a doubt, a major influence in Tolkien's own vision of the warriors he wrote so magnificently about. I am therefore quite happy to use these figures as allies of Gondor (the Normans) or hill tribesmen recruited by Saruman (the Saxons) or even Rohan warriors (both). Either way a welcome gift! 

A Final Observation 

Well That's it for this episode of 'Tales From The Toy Room'. I hope you have enjoyed reading my musings. I started this blog as a direct result of reading other, great, inspirational blogs and as a creative exercise. I have never had a desire to attract huge numbers of followers or viewers. As long as I manage to entertain in some small way, those readers who also appreciate my own niche toy soldier/wargames interests, then I am a happy man.  

I was however intrigued by the viewing statistics for my last blog post which was between 3 and 6 times the amount of viewers than on previous posts. 

Apparently this is a phenomenon being experienced by lots of other wargames blogs. Whilst no one seems to truly know the answer, it is being put down to either AI bots trawling for information, or a change in the way some search engines are operating. Interestingly all of my extra 'visitors' are apparently from the USA. Make of that what you will.

My followers remain the same number ,so even if the increased visitor traffic were real people, they can't have been that excited with what they read! Ah well....

Tara a bit!