Southend Wargames Club

The ACW was probably the first period I gamed, using Airfix figures. In the early 1960's there was not a great deal of support out there, and I largely made up the rules based largely on ranges derived from my mum's tape measure and dice taken from a Monopoly game. Essentially, hits were scored on a die roll with modifiers of -1 for every foot for artillery or 6 inches for infantry. Melee was just a roll-off figure v figure, with 2 dice for cavalry. This meant that ACW cavalry tended to be far more powerful than their real life counterparts.

I can remember the excitement I felt when an article about Don Featherstone was published in one of my mum's magazines(!) with pictures of an ACW game in progress and ideas about rules. As I began weekend work, extra money meant that I could afford to get Airfix magazine - with painting information no less - and then visit the Hinton Hunt shop in Islington for some specialist figures such as flag bearers. I still have the first unit of metal ACW figures I ever painted, I think from Minifigs. Then, joy of joy, my first real set of rules from the London Wargames Society. These ha things like unit organisations and morale, and proper casualty rules so units did not get wiped out.

These rules opened up even more possibilities, including campaigns inspired by the series in John Tunstall's magazine. A friend and I played one based on the Ordnance Survey map of Essex, the highlight of which was a Union landing at Burnham on Crouch, with the Confederate defenders withdrawing in a train, presumably to change at Wickford.

All the time this was going on, I was reading as many books as I could get my hands on in the local library, with the Bruce Catton trilogy Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword and Never Call Retreat being my favourites. Even now these are some of my favorite books, Catton's humanity and power of description is moving.

However, in my late teens, the local hobby shop in Southend got its first delivery of Napoloeonic figures and I was fascinated by the sheer colour of the period. Whilst I continued to read about the ACW, my time and effort now moved across the Atlantic to the Iberian Peninsula.

In the next article, I'll explain why I decided to get back into ACW gaming after almost forty years!