Over the last four years a lot has happened for me both personally and professionally. Simply put following a bit of a rout on all fronts I have rallied my tiny troops and their supplies at a new location - a 17th Century farmhouse in Dorset with a nice garden. A lot of space for an unmarried man to rattle around in. This stuff happens unfortunately so time for a rethink. I have plenty of space - a study, painting room and a large flagged hall (which used to be the farm kitchen) in which I reckon I could fit a decent size table. I'll come back to that and what I want to do with Hasty Works and the whole ACW project.
I have had some other priorities to attend to just lately. The sale of another property, getting my parents who are both not suffering from dementia in their mid 80's into residential care, moving twice personally and finally washing up at my new base in Dorset. After getting back on an even keel with life I have undertaken some strategic planning as to how I spend my own time for this "final extended session" of play. After four years retired and aged 57 I decided I wasn't really firing on all cylinders and that I had a bit more to "give". I applied through the Department of Education for a teacher training place at University. Back to College at 57. I polished my shoes, buffed up my CV, located some qualifications, convinced a couple of people to provide a reference and queued up for a series of interviews in competition with some vibrant young people less than half my age. I fixed on Primary Education as this seemed to offer the opportunity to teach a broad range of subjects at a foundational (business critical !) level. Most importantly I can take on an annual responsibility for the education of a whole class of small humans. I have time to impact perhaps ten classes over a decade and beyond dependent on my continued fitness and energy levels. You teach "everything" - Maths, English, Science, History and Geography, Music, Art, Physical Education, a bit of French maybe (Sacre Bleu mon Empereur !), IT, Design and Technology and I think now "Citizenship" is on the cards. Technically I would argue that there is no such thing as a citizen in this country - we are subjects - this is not a Republic yet - but I will hold my tongue and teach the syllabus. I am content that it in this part the world any attempt to remove the Royal Family would result in a lively pitchfork mob of Sedgemoor proportions.
You never know quite know what to expect when starting out something new, but I found myself getting offers from some bemused training centres and Universities. Some quite noble institutions. Ironically Cambridge would not accept an application as I only managed a 2/2 (a "Desmond") close to 40 years ago when studying the law. It seems they have a stringent entry requirement that you should not have wasted your time playing rugby and attending "bops" and dining in hall nightly if you now want to be a professional teacher ! The Desmond never really set me back in the law and noone asked what kind of degree I had when I got going. When I had to produce my degree recently it was viewed with some circumspection - it was in archaic English and looked as if it had been photocopied onto a piece of "wholemeal" paper. Not an embossed security stamp in sight. Anyway, Cambridge not a thing and who wants to live in the fens and teach anyhow ! So this September I am heading off to Bath Spa University for 3 weeks and then a day a week to study for my PGCE for a year to gain "Qualified Teacher Status". I had a choice really between there and Southampton but there is something about the South West rather than the South Coast. It's always good at my age to be out of the orbit of London. I can go up to town to see the Bayeux tapestry, an opera or attend Salute. I don't have to live on its doorstep on a teachers salary so I can preserve my capital for a retirement much later in life. I am a Royalist not a Roundhead. I just feel more at home in the countryside. For 4 days a week I will be apprenticed in a classroom somewhere within a 45 minute drive of my village so that covers really Dorset down to the coast and up into Somerset - possibly as far across as East Devon. It's very exciting - I am specialising teaching 7 to 11 year olds. I am though having fun at the moment learning phonics for the ever so litt'luns.
There is some method in my madness. Fully 1 in 3 Primary Schools in England have no male teachers at all and only 1 in 7 teachers are male and it's not getting any better. This at a time when there has been lot of criticism of and discussion of the crisis facing "boys and young men". Well, it's agreed that it helps if boys are confident when entering secondary education and feel that learning is very much something for them. I also believe this as a truth from the pedagogy. Both boys and girls benefit from having both male and female teachers as good role models. For boys coming from a home with no male role model and then being taught only by female teachers it's easy to see how, education aside, they might not "see" themselves as wedded to learning. I know my own reading habits, attitude to learning, hobbies, social confidence were pretty much set by the time I was 11. I was reading, running, singing, sailing, swimming playing the piano, drawing birds from my binoculars and moving airfix and Britains figures around a table and rolling dice. If you went to a library in the 70's and you discovered Donald Featherstone and your collection of Toy Soldiers now had endless possibilities. It just strikes me that all of the things I have done through life I was pretty much interested in and doing by the age of 11. Off course with some bolt ons as an adult when food and wine and space to garden came along. I was on an allotment planting seeds when I was 6 though and I watched my Dad cook for me when my Mum was at work on a Saturday. That was a ritual. You even cook the same things.
So it seems to me from my own history and the recent clamour that Primary it is where the action is. There is I believe an over supply of middle aged men who fancy themselves teaching history or geography at secondary school. No - I'm for chucking on an apron and getting out my poster paints and polishing up our collective male ideas around expressive dance. I've also been knee deep in the best ways to teach young people the mysteries of fractions and decimals. I have an emergent interest in recommending good books and talking about how to deploy the English language to good effect. There is a very real focus on confidence oracy at Primary. Really its teaching a skillset to access a rich life, at the developmental time when young people "take off" with their learning styles and habits but all this against the backdrop of a world we know is changing as rapidly as them and in real time. I may as well start my new professional career with some passion ! I think you have to like kids and like learning to teach. I led a rugby coaching year group for a fair while for the age groups 6 up to 12 following my son. Herding cats. It's a skill you can learn professionally I am told. I have no illusion that it will be easy. It is however a science and I will get my head down. That's my promise to myself and the young people that will be inflicted on me and I've started getting as much experience under my belt as I can in appropriate settings before I start at Bath in four short weeks.
I have spent the last year tutoring disadvantaged pupils at a number of schools in groups of 1-3. Typically 9-11 year olds in the two year run up to their first formal exams. I have a good idea now that I really enjoy teaching and that it will be sustainable and rewarding through into my 60's. Every hour spent teaching at the moment I walk away with something else to think about. Not about how I feel it went - but objectively looking at the session from their point of view. It's rigorous. Once I got my first little thank you note - misspelt in unsharpened "HB" with a crossed out and redrafted doodle of a smiling potato head man there was no looking back. Teary moment. Appreciation from a 10 year old but nevertheless. A little person had enjoyed the 12 odd hours we had spent together doing English comprehensions.
So I have four weeks until University starts, again, for me. I have an opportunity to upgrade the PGCE to a Masters - I have a Mickey Mouse one from Cambridge they give you for living for three years after graduation and not getting arrested. I quite fancy getting a real one. We'll see - I will have enough with keeping the house clean and tidy, keeping myself fed, working 4 days a week, attending Uni a day week for compulsory lectures and trains interspersed with some intensive full time weeks for deep dives into topics - all while writing essays and a dissertation. Of course I have to start ironing again. A visit to Marks and Spencers in Yeovil. What an earth do male Primary School Teachers wear ? I can't turn up as Mr Chips in Tweed. So learning on the job for a year, unpaid (I pay them fees - seems backwards given I will plugging a gap for the State) and all while observed with monthly feedback. It's "a lot" but I am "up for it". Some self doubt - but I'll fake it 'til I make it - it worked with the law. I wasn't found out until I was running a team and a senior(ish) partner and well into my 50's. This will be harder though - convincing 28 x 8 year olds to give me 30 hours a week of their lives and keeping them busy, engaged and in line. If I don't think I can do it I will pull the plug. Ocado Van it is. The law of Fiddy though (an old acquaintance - not really a friend but who did some good "big" things") states that 90 % of life is "turning up". Turning ip in every sense. A lot of people my age might say they are interested in teaching at my age but then realise that for the State sector they need to go back to college for a year. Thats going to lectures and sitting in a room with people less than half your age in the main. The average hours are 54-58 a week and the starting pay is well, modest. I will swap back to the junior assistant solicitor's salary I had in 1996. Fully 32 years ago. You can try and get a job without a QTS but you a limited to the Academy or Private Sector. I'm sure it would be lovely to teach World War One to twelve year olds at a Cathedral School and sing Jerusalem on a Sunday and coach rugby again but I think I am heading to somewhere like Yeovil, State Primary with a fair contingent of kids with challenges of all kinds. Thats my chosen front line.
You can see why I haven't been wargaming, or in fact birdwatching or growing vegetables for a while. I have been refitting and repurposing myself. It was needed. Enough - I'll get on topic.
So literally where we and when was it ? Week 1 of August 1861. On the eve of a First Mannassas with a hiatus to paint up the forces needed to get that battle ton the table. The system or campaign rules for working SPI's War Between the States 1861-65 for the Strategic war together with tabletop battles using Volley and Bayonet had been tested and proven. The war was very much underway with some stories emerging. The death of Lyons at the battle of Rolla in Missouri despite a small union victory. Missouri had come out for the confederacy but the combined forces of the Missouri State guard were no match for a smaller Union force stiffened by US regulars. The pursuit then of Price, South towards safety and in the East the first tentative moves of the Union main army into North Virginia. The reinforcement historically early by the Army of the Shenandoah of the Army of the Potamac. A face off between two green forces numbering some 30,000 bayonets each. Frenzied recruitment on both sides. An Ocean of a continent the size of Western Europe - a battlefield stretching thousands of miles from the semi tropical swamps of Florida to the grass land plains abutting Canada and from the Atlantic seaboard of the Carolinas to Oklahoma in the West - with Virginia as the cockpit of the war. Richmond and Washington no more than a good day's ride apart.
So I have had a think for two years and I want to make now some changes. I do like Volley and Bayonet but it is not a system designed specifically for the ACW. It is focused at the Brigade level and works for large battles but its look on the tabletop just wasn't doing it for me. All of the units in their "blocks" require you to imagine the individual regiments and battalions. There is little in the way of formations - the modelling of morale and movement is somewhat stylised. It's not too late, with the campaign just started, to make a quick change.
I have decided that the link up from the map to the tabletop will now be the Fire and Fury ruleset. I just prefer the look and the way they play. Here are some key considerations for me :-
(1) Each brigade is modelled as a set of bases that accurately show the size of a unit. So a division of 4,000 men (an I4 counter on the map) would convert fully to 20 bases on the tabletop (each base representing 200 men at 10 mm scale. That could be modelled as two brigades of ten bases or three brigades of perhaps 5, 6 and 9 bases. Divisions will retain their integrity - brigades can be sloughed off but within a counter different units might take unequal casualties. There is always the capacity to fold together brigades for the battlefield. There is room for variation. Casualties on the battlefield are modelled by the loss of bases rather than simply strength points on a roster with each brigade looking identical in modelled form from the start to finish of a battle. I can track individual battalions within divisions with greater detail as to their losses and morale and experience from game to game. Those effects really play out in the detail of the rules - to move, shoot and fight. There is a real friction but graded. I can have specialist regiments within Brigades e.g. Zouaves;
(2) Larger brigades can be modelled as separate battalions where needed. The formations allow for brigade lines (all battalions/regiments in line) or supported lines. Brigade lines can support other full Brigade lines or Brigades can be split into their Battalion components to support themselves. The look is just better - At a glance a strong unit can be told apart from a weaker unit. You can read the battlefield - there is a capacity for gaps. Units are visibly outflanked - Lines can be "refused" - broken units can be represented as a rabble. Battalions and Brigades can fit to linear features such as sunken roads, hasty works and stone walls;
(3) During an actual battle there is less need for bookkeeping for unit strength. Each brigade has a label which shows its casualty progress as a collapsing balloon and this can be affected by both training or experience (see below) and recent morale affects (so fresh, worn and then spent but nuanced to allow for reliable, unreliable or spirited, unspirited). There is the potential then to add another layer of morale indicators based on performance - e.g. a new unit, following a long march, perhaps a leader has been lost in the last battle;
(4) The system for modelling weapons appears more accurate with smoothbore, mixed muskets and rifled muskets and different cavalry weapons. I prefer the range and modelling of artillery;
(5) There is a system for the progression of units through Green, Experienced, Veteran and Crack. That affects their ability to manoeuvre in a much more nuanced way and their performance with ranged fire (green troops suffering a penalty and most importantly when closing for and engaging in melee. There are reasons other than for combat to attach to a unit. Simply put to get a poor unit moving to where your want it. I will alter my rules for Militia. The old PT/NE status I had running on a sixth month counter system I can scrap and this avoids some long term bookkeeping. Once a unit has been in a combat and fired or taken casualties - seen the elephant - it can always lose its Green "tag" once blooded and can become "Experienced". I can have the usual rules for advancing to "Veteran" by battlefield promotion over time. I can develop a simple system for gaining the "Crack" status based on exemplary battlefield performance. I will keep it fair. Militia I can always apply Unreliable to allow for an earlier collapse through Fresh. Worn, Spent as they lose stands. Militia that has suffered a prior defeat can become dispirited. Usually regular troops will be reliable. There is an amount of nuance that I can apply fairly. Essentially though I will lose the need to bookkeep for months to track "Training" with an automatic loss of penalties. Units can become smaller but harder to crack - large units can remain unreliable running from the battlefield but presevering their size;
(6) The scale on the battlefield is somewhat smaller 1" is 60 yards rather than the 100 yards for Volley and Bayonet. Turns are also modelled as 30 minutes rather then an hour. In general my bases are 20 mm in width rather than an inch so my whole scale will come down further by 20 % ( an inch is 2.5 mm). So my measuring unit will be 2 cm representing 60 yards. My current table plan for First Manassass designed to take in all of the fords along Bull Run is some 12 feet in length x 6 feet representing an area 8 miles x 4 miles to the Volley and Bayonet scale. Using a full 12 foot x 6 feet table I will now be limited to representing an area of about 6 1/8 miles x 3 1/4 miles. Still enough I think to lay a good rectangle along bull run. A brigade of say 2,000 men with two battalions each of 1,000 in a supported line will occupy an area on the battlefield 10 cm wide and 6 cm deep. That's 300 yards x 180 yards. As a single line the brigade could cover a frontage of 600 yards along a linear feature like a stone wall at Fredericksburg. A line was two deep so that does represent on average 2 foot per man but of course there were number of file closers and officers, orderlies and so on. It does seem about right; and
(7) To the extent that I cannot fit the whole of a historical battlefield I can just model this with tabletop arrival rules with the turn system. When the corps system develops armies will be dispersed across areas of hexes on the map - converging for battles and some of them multi-day affairs. The main thing is to produce an interesting battle with units recruited, grown, equipped and led on the map in the SPI mini-monster board wargame system and then thrown onto the tabletop. I am as much interested in the look and feel of those battles to tell a story as with 100 % accuracy. The hex game itself is utterly detailed down to supplies, economy, manpower and politics. The battles should be fun and a light relief to decide the issue for a hex.
(8) There really is the ability to model some "Exceptional" leaders from their counters to the battlefield. I will need to generate divisional leaders but it's clear in the early war that the Corps or Army system was not in operation so I can think about that over time. The Fire and Fury rules for First Mannasses or Bull Run make it clear that there are just 3 on table command figures (for Beuregard, Johnston and Macdowell) and that individual brigades have a smattering of Exceptional leaders who provide a small advantage that is just a die modifier.
Essentially it's workable in my mind - some hard work to rewrite the living Order of Battle but that is really the component brigade parts from divisional counters which can be tweaked when used. The counters on the map all stay the same as generated. There is one more thing - the Battle of Rolla which was my first engagement with very few troops. I think less than a full division on each side - really just 3 small brigades or so a piece - that should be capable of being modelled far more easily using Fire and Fury and equally there is always the option (if I can be bothered) to scale down to the Regimental rulesets with Battalions becoming the building blocks on the battlefield. Battles in the West can be modelled at the regimental scale. I will take a view.
So it is about look and nuance - detail and ease of record keeping. Overall I think it enhances my capacity to tell stories through the campaign from the largest to the smallest. So this is the new look for a 1500/1600 man brigade.
Top left is a Union Volley and Bayonet base modelled as 6 bases within a movement tray. Whether representing 3,000 or 1500 bayonet strength the look would be the same with no ability to model a brigade line of battalions stretched out, two men deep or indeed a supported lined with different sized battalions. It's literally one size fits all. A 3 " by 3" block with a frontage of 300 yards. So in this case 1,500 men - a 3-4 on its label for 3 strength points of 500 men and a 4 for morale - with an added PT/NE if militia or otherwise and a time counter of 6 months to lose this. I was doing a lot of my unit modelling with named regiments within each counter built into brigades. Less capacity for unit story telling through modelling and battlefield experience. No capacity to represent a field column and awkward for modelling a column along a road. Little nuance with morale. In front I have shown the same 1,600 men as Confederates - first in a single brigade line of 8 stands. A frontage of some 480 yards across 16 cm. Secondly as a supported line with two battalions of 800 men representing a frontage of 240 yards. It seems to me that Volley and Bayonet is designed for the brigade columns of the Napoleonic Wars. Fire and Fury has been written for the reality of the American Civil War.
Further my Confederate Brigade will always be Green for its first battle suffering a -1 for manoeuvres -1 for its musketry role and -1 on a charge. The Green status I will lose after the first battle but I won't allow Militia to ever progress to Veterren. As militia I will probably model the brigade as "unreliable" initially and possibly after continued battlefield losses as "dispirited". I think Militia should always be "unreliable". So its initial morale profile on its label might read Evans Green 8/7/6 (For Fresh, Worn Spent) - if remaining as militia the unit would lose its Green status gaining Experience but after battlefield losses in succession and some casualties it might be dispirited and of weaker strength (after 30 % casualties but recovering 1/3 of its losses). So a base might then read say Evans Exp. 6/-/5. If the unit won a couple of battles it might have recovered 2/3 of its casualties but remained as "unreliable" being Militia. The base would read Evans Exp. 7/6/5 having the capacity to avoid a further casualty and becoming worn before suffering a -2 penalty as spent when testing to change formation or advance.
A fresh battalion has a + 2 modifier for manoeuvre checks (which also affect rallying from broken to good order). So the same unit as regulars and at the same strength initially could be Evans Green 8/6/4 - reliable trained troops to a degree. That unit can suffer a casualty without losing its fresh status. The harsh penalty for a spent brigade does not apply until the unit has suffered fully 50 % casualties. After a couple of battlefield losses with 30 % casualties and recovering 1/3 of those it might be now unreliable and have a label reading Evans Exp. 6/5/4. Conversely with a series of battlefield wins despite losses (recovered at a higher rate) and a promotion in status beyond mere experience for both the troops and its commander and a shot in the arm to morale its label might read Evens Exceptional Commander, Veteran, 7/5/3. A spirited unit. Capable of withstanding heavy casualties with a + 2 modifier for its veteran status and exceptional commander. No negative modifier for its musketry and a + 3 modifier for charging with a mighty "Rebel Yell". So much more nuanced and if the brigade contains a regiments of the Louisiana Tigers I can paint 4 of the bases as confederate zouaves with striped trousers and straw hats - some distance from their being raised on the docks of New Orleans.
The downside to this reconfiguration of my campaign to include more detail but hopefully some ease of bookkeeping is that I still need to churn out plenty more bases. I think it represents though better looking battles going forward and more storytelling. Lines withering under fire visibly. A greater capacity for a battlefield reputation to grow and roll. More capacity to tell the story of leaders within units with more actual implications overall for influences on battlefield gameplay.
So that's the plan for the campaign. I need something to leven the effort of a year's study - I have the room, I have a new home. I just need to set aside an evening and an weekend afternoon a week to the project and I can find out what happens to Price in Missouri and the units right now facing off across Bull Run in Northern Virginia on August 7th 1861.
Next stop an updated living Order of Battle and the Order of Battle for the Confederates and Union forces at Bull Run. See you hell in Billy Yank ! see you in hell Johny Rebb !
