CORDERY BOB
Author of The Portable Wargame
Ifind myself in an unusual position... that of being regarded by many of those in the hobby who know me as being an old wargamer. True, I am now seventy years old, but I do not feel old, and I put a lot of that down to the fact that I am still an active wargamer. It keeps my mind alert, even if my body is a little less efficient than it used to be.
I began wargaming (well, playing with toy soldiers) when I was given a fort with a small garrison of Britain’s figures when I was six. Each birthday and Christmas saw a few additional figures added to the collection, but they were bit eclectic, and by the time I went to secondary school in 1961, it included lots of plastic ones from Woolworths and cereal packets.
The arrival of the two shilling box of Airfix figures changed all that, and each month new figures (as well as aircraft and military vehicles) were bought with my pocket money, and I quickly developed armies of World War II British and Germans as well as Union and Confederate forces. It was the discovery of Donald Featherstone’s War Games in the local library that turned my ‘pushing the figures around on the carpet’ games into ‘proper’ wargames with rules.
By the time I left school and went to work in 1968, I had acquired copies of both Charge! and War Games, and soon afterwards I visited Marcus Hinton’s shop in Camden Passage and I bought my first metal figures for the princely sum of one shilling each. From then, on wargaming became my main hobby, and I have never looked back.
I am now a silver-haired veteran of well over fifty years of wargaming... and I think that I am incredibly lucky to be living in what I consider to be a golden age for the hobby. Let me explain why. I have heard that the hobby is greying, and that it is likely to die in the foreseeable future... and yet I have been hearing the same thing for at least thirty years. It has changed and evolved, but it has done so to meet the needs of the time, and – in my opinion – it will continue to do so. It is oldies like me that should be saying ‘things are much better now than they have ever been’ … because: they are!
For example, when I started out, the number on wargame magazines that I could buy in the UK totalled one: the good old Wargamer’s Newsletter. It was published by Donald Featherstone and later by Tradition, and it was our main means of communicating new ideas and products withing the hobby. Nowadays, if I want to know the colour of the cuff of the Morschauserland Light Infantry in 1887, I can go on numerous internet forums and get an answer in a matter of minutes, whereas back then I would have to send a letter to the editor, wait for him to publish it, and then wait for an answer to be printed in the next issue... if I was lucky!
Back in 1968 I could buy metal figures from the small number of manufacturers, but nowadays I can buy any number of different figures in a multitude of scales. I am spoilt for choice... and yet I still hear people complaining that they cannot get the exact figure that they are looking for.
The cost of the hobby has also changed, and in my opinion, it is for the better. When I bought my first metal figures from Marcus Hinton, they cost me one shilling each, which was the equivalent of 1/13,000th of my annual salary of £650: and that was more than the average wage for an eighteen-year old in 1968. The equivalent size of figure nowadays is about 66p each, and – if this represented that faction of a modern salary – I would be earning £8,580 per year, which is about half the current average yearly income of a working eighteen-year-old.
My conclusion? I am silverhaired but in a golden age... and I am loving it! ■
“I am now a silver-haired veteran of well over fifty years of wargaming… and I think that I am incredibly lucky to be living in what I consider to be a golden age for the hobby.”