Where It All Began - The Doughty Dozen Part I

The last time I was out after 11pm was Saturday night in Newark at Bring Out Your Lead 2018. 

Myself and Mrs Street haven’t been out after 11pm for as long as I can remember, but we happened to be out last Friday as she’s going away for a while (not to prison). I wondered as we waited for a midnight cab home if there would be a day when I got a cab home after 11pm and “Holding Back the Years” by Simply Red wasn’t on the cab radio. 

Trust me. It was not that day.

There will also be a day when I blog and I don’t mention the old man.

But it is not this day.

I was struggling with the twelfth member of the pre-slotta unit currently known as "The Doughty Dozen". But I made time yesterday to finish him off. So far so good.

The battle-hardened pre-slotta veterans thus far

I’m sure we all have memories of the first miniatures we bought and painted. My first wargames force was an American Civil War 15mm army by Tabletop Games bought from a shop in Kings’ Cross called “Games People Play”. Rumour has it that Rick Priestley may have sculpted some of the wagons, but hey…*citation needed.

Memories come flooding back *sniff* check out those identical horses

I painted those blues and greys and threw them across flocked polystyrene boards and threw dice to decide whether slavery was a good idea or not. I only sold them about 5 or 6 years ago after many years of games (because by not gaming with your painted chaps you are robbing them of their soul) and I really needed to downsize to 6mm.

So how did I get from my ACW obsession to Oldhammer when it was "Nowhammer"? 

In the latter part of 1986 (or maybe early 1987), partly due to the Fighting Fantasy books, and Krull and Hawk the Slayer on VHS, I was crazy on Fantasy. One Saturday my dad took me to the much missed Harrow Model Shop. He often visited on a Saturday afternoon after we had spent the morning doing more boring shopping with mum. 

Anyone who remembers the store will recall how awesome it was to be twelve years old and roaming around its three sections. Over to the left was the model railway and scenery section, in the centre was the remote control car, boat and aeroplane section. In between these two was a large Subuteo display where you could almost any team in the known world as long as you didn’t mind them being strangely all the same race.

Finally over to the right was the biggest section, my dad could genuinely dump me in there all day like a crèche and I would still not want to leave when he came back. Plastic model kits of all kinds and scales; paints and sprays from every manufacturer that ever made paint; shelves of boxed wargames of every kind; Car Wars and colour-it-yourself counters and of course miniatures. Lovely lead of all kinds, shapes and sizes, which of course meant a large selection of Citadel.

“Dad can I have this? Dad can I have this? Dad can I have this? Dad can I have this? Dad can I have this? Dad can I have this? Dad can I have this? Dad can I have this? Dad can I have this? PLEEEEEASSSSSSSSE”

I waved a blister in front of him. “Dad it’s an Imperial Dwarf Bolt-Thrower!”

“What about this one?” he countered, and showed me a Grenadier Dwarf Giant Crossbow which just happened to be 45p cheaper.

“But dad – this one comes with free bases and look…they have their names on the tabs, this one is called ‘LOADER’”

I gave him my best on the verge of heartbreak look, I’d learnt it from our pet Labrador who three minutes after eating a leg of lamb could convince you he hadn’t eaten in a week.

He looked at it for a little while and gave in.

“You’ll paint this tonight.” he said in a way which meant - "You WILL paint this tonight".

When my mum caught up with us in the shop my dad broke the news to her as I flicked through a White Dwarf:

 “Matthew wants to buy and paint dwarfs, we should therefore divert a significant portion of our household income into supporting his desire to buy and paint dwarfs.”

And so it came to be.

I celebrate as dad convinces mum that I should have more dwarfs

As I gazed with eyes like saucers he bought the Dwarf Lords of Legend set (for me) and the Chaos Renegades (for himself). That night we sat at the table with our backs to the TV sharing a lamp. We painted them in enamels and they looked better than anything I’d ever seen. Dad was an experienced mini-painter and showed me how to drybrush chainmail and armour as I sat open-mouthed. Any kind of whiff of turps or white spirit and I’m back there at the table breathing in spirit fumes and passively smoking ten cigarettes. We tend not to mix naked flames and highly flammable liquids these days but this was the mid-eighties before it was dangerous.

And then that Friday he brought me home the book “Heroes For Wargames” by Stuart Parkinson. The greatest book in the entire history of Oldhammer, Games Workshop or basically anything to do with words and pictures. Not bad for a book which Bryan Ansell once told me was basically made up from whatever miniatures they happened to have around the office that day. 

I wonder whose desk the chicken dragon was on?

More beautiful than Micelle Pfeiffer in Grease 2

I pawed through the pages gazing at the full colour plates of classic painted miniatures accompanied by beautiful artwork and Jes Goodwin and John Blanche miniature concept sketches. My favourites of course were the dwarfs – many of which I couldn’t find in the Citadel Journals I owned and never saw in the shops. I always loved the minis but at the time I never saw any in the flesh, and my young-self resolved to track down and acquire some of these minis when I was – like, you know a proper grown up.

Paint your shields Street - no more of this decal nonsense

Of course I never did grow up. But many years later when something called the internet was invented, I realised that the reason I never came across these was that by the time I started my Warhammer career, most of these so called “pre-slottas” were already out of production. Eventually, while I was selling off the majority of my non-dwarf collection a few years I spotted a few on eBay and bought a handful. Back then they were at least fifty-percent cheaper than their slotta counterparts and I picked up seven or eight models for one to two pounds each.

 Later on I bought a collection of Perry dwarfs which by sheer luck came with some twenty-plus “Fantasy Tribes” plus another 20 or so assorted pre-slottas some of which were damaged. Shortly before this year’s Bring Out Your Lead I thought it was high time I started painting some these and so I made a start.

To be continued in part II when we can have a closer look at the legendary “Doughty Dozen”. 

Spoiler alert – they’re not going to be as good as the ones by the studio staff!

P.S. Apart from the first two pictures the rest of the dwarfs in this post are lifted directly from the book "Heroes for Wargames" by Stewart Parkinson (1986 - Paper Tiger). The photos used do not have a painting credit - although I'd be interested to know who did them.