A hobby day

Bit of a wet day in the north of Scotland, after a glorious week of sunshine. So today has been spent indoors concentrating on hobby matters... More of this later.

Spent a bit of time flicking through the two books which have influenced me most in the hobby.
"A Military Gentleman" is well known to most of us, and its purchase re-focused me on the hobby and steered my collection in a more disciplined way, backed by some fantastic advice from the author, John Ray.

I purchased "Collecting Model Soldiers" in the early 1970's and it proved to be the influence behind my collecting and inspired me for years.

To my regret, I never met Henry Harris, although I did talk with Roy Dilley, (who helped build the collection), several times. Harris was a model soldier collector, not a wargamer, but we are all collectors to a certain extent. There is nothing more satisfying than completing a regiment or building an army,then seeing it on the table.
Henry Harris took a disciplined approach to the hobby, as John Ray has done. Harris's speciality was the British army circa 1900, and this was what he concentrated on. He drew up an "Orbat" and split it into a Court and GHQ section, a full dress corps, and an expeditionary corps. These were divided into divisions, brigades and regiments with supporting arms, staff officers etc.

I read and re-read this section over the years, and to me this is the most interesting section of the book. By creating a "plan" it gave him an objective to aim for in his collecting and created a disciplined approach.. With so many "goodies" available on the current market, and new releases constantly appearing, it is very easy for we wargamers to become distracted and use a "butterfly" approach to our collection, starting periods and armies which never get completed.
 Henry Harris built his 54mm army using lead Britains conversions, purchased during the 1950's and 60's. I missed out on this, playing with plastics in the 1960's and later Airfix 20mm. By the late 1970's Britains were becoming harder to acquire, and out of my price league. Hence the appeal of wargame figures. Willie figures and Gilders fantastic collections attracted me to smaller scales and I gradually built a number of collections over the next 30 years or so. But it was only when I read AMG that I decided to concentrate on one scale and one period, and the rest as they say is history .....