Paddington Station War Memorial

THE war memorial at Paddington station in West London looks in such a good state of repair and maintenance that it would be easy to mistake it as a recent dedication.
This effect is enhanced by a plaque that states the memorial commemorates 3,312 employees of the Great Western Railway who "IN THE WORLD WARS … GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR KING AND COUNTRY"

The war memorial at Paddington station

But the memorial's statue, of a soldier reading a letter, presumably from home, shows a figure with a distinctly WW1 trenchy look.
That is because the memorial was unveiled on Armistice Day 1922, with a new plaque added much later.

Tricky Conversions

I CAN report fairly good success with the Tricky Stick I bought to solve the problem of getting superglue to work with soft plastic.
It was needed because I could find no suitable figures for Prussian artillerymen for my Project Kaiser 54mm refight of the Franco-Prussian War.
I wanted to convert Armies In Plastic Union artillery crew from the American Civil War by replacing their heads with pickelhaubed Prussian heads.
Superglue alone did not come close to getting the job done, but by first preparing the Union torsos and the Prussian heads with Tricky Stick, I was able to come up with appropriate-looking crews.
There was an awful moment when one head fell off at the smallest touch. For a moment I thought I might have to restart from scratch.
But the other conversions proved fine, and the failed one worked at the second attempt.
By adding some Prussian infantry to the six converted Union men, I have come up with three sets of four-man crews.

Three crews with two guns - all from Armies In Plastic

And here is how a gun and crew look beside one of my newly finished houses:

Housing Improvements

I HAVE finished improving the £2 houses I bought from The Works at Stratford, East London.

The final step, after priming and painting, was to add doors, windows and chimneypots ordered from  Irregular Miniatures of Great Edstone, North Yorkshire.

No one could mistake them for being diorama-standard, but they work for toy soldiers.

Toy Soldier Collector - August/September 2019

ISUUE 89 of Toy Solider Collector is full as usual with glossy pix of metal and plastic toy soldiers.

Included among the contents is a four-page article by me about my 54mm Project Kaiser plans for refighting the Franco-Prussian War on the 150th anniversaries of its battles.

History Today - August 2019

THE August edition (Vol 69 issue 8) of History Today starts off pretty well, if you ignore the twerp at the front who claims "racial divisions" are the "most enduring legacy" of the American Civil War.
Articles on so-called witch marks in limestone caves in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, Graham Greene in Havana, thefts of antiquities in Renaissance Italy, military slaves in Islamic states and de Gaulle's righthand man Philippe Leclerc all held my interest.

August's History Today … promising start

But then the right-on brigade gets its turn with reams of space devoted to Peterloo (what a foreigner would think of such detailed coverage beggars belief) and to 18th-century women who did not go to university but were nevertheless scholarly. Perhaps the magazine should be renamed Social History Today.
The final straw, for me, comes at the back with 20 questions to a woman who specialises in "contemporary history," a contradiction in terms to say the least. Asked to name "which history book has had the greatest influence on you," she lists The Handmaid's Tale, The House Of The Spirits and 1984.

SPQR ASAP

MY gift for taking out a three-issue subscription with History Today has arrived - a copy of Mary Beard's much-praised book SPQR.
I started reading it yesterday and am fairly racing through the pages, despite a few misgivings about a somewhat-verbose introduction in which she seldom uses one word where ten will do.

SPQR … racy read

It could be argued that the story of ancient Rome is so compelling that only a complete dullard could make it boring, but I am sure there are writers who could achieve this.
Rather than just telling the story as she believes it to have occurred, Professor Beard discusses the various possibilities, sometimes with an annoying emphasis on modern PC concerns, but generally with what seems to be intelligent analysis.
My one regret from reading the first four chapters, apart from the inadequate and hard-to-decipher maps, is that the book ends in AD212 (or 212 CE, as she puts it).
Rome did not cease to be Rome simply because citizenship was extended to inhabitants of the whole empire, which Prof Beard claims is her reason for ending the story there.
I suspect the real reason is that the length of the book, which, for a paperback, is lavishly illustrated with colour plates, was getting out of hand and she did not want to (drastically) trim it.
This is an observation, not a complaint, and the early finish has the advantage that with any luck there will be a part two - I would certainly be a buyer.

Throwback To Another Age

STROLLING around Bridgend, I came across this impressive drinking fountain/memorial.

It turns out to have been built on the orders of Caroline, Countess of Dunraven, in memory of John Randall of Salisbury, Wiltshire, who died in 1859 after managing the Dunraven Estate for more than 30 years.
Dunraven Castle - really a manor house - was in Southerndown, a village southwest of Bridgend.
Caroline is credited with building two fountains in Bridgend as part of a philanthropic scheme to give the town safe drinking water.

Newcastle (Bridgend)

ASK people how many Newcastles there are in Britain, and I guess many would answer two, citing the football-mad one in Tyne & Wear and the market town in Staffordshire, namely Newcastle-under-Lyme.
But the Newcastle electoral ward in Bridgend, South Wales, is a reminder that "Newcastle" was a common if unimaginative name for military buildings all over the British Isles.
The ward is named after a Norman castle, which apparently began in 1106 as a ringwork, ie an earthen/wooden ditch-and-bank on a hill overlooking Bridgend, a town that developed around a ford on the River Ogmore.
It is believed the current ruins date back to the late 1100s, when a more permanent stone castle was built, possibly on the orders of Henry II.

Newcastle ruins, Bridgend

Looking through the main gate

Not much survives of the internal structure, which is probably why entry is free. But I found the site to be quite atmospheric, perhaps because of its very basic nature.

Looking back from inside the castle, with the parish church of St Illtyd in the background

Bridgend War Memorial

AM spending a week in Bridgend, which is a town in South Wales about halfway between Cardiff and Swansea.

Bridgend War Memorial was built to commemorate the Great War, which is dated as 1914 - 1918 (rather than 1919).
Made from portland stone (as, for example, is The Cenotaph in London's Whitehall), it features Britannia with her right hand resting on a sheathed sword.
The memorial has been updated with plaques commemorating the dead from later wars.

House About That?!

I HAVE finished preparing the four wooden houses I bought from The Works for £8 (https://timspanton.blogspot.com/2019/05/working-it-out.html).

The four houses as they came

Giving them an undercoat was simple enough.

The four houses treated with Bulls Eye 1-2-3 primer sealer from my local branch of Leyland SDM

The next step was to give them basic paint-jobs - I did not see the need for anything fancy.

The roofs of the righthand houses are identical in colour - a trick of the flash makes one appear pink

The final step has been to order four doors and a variety of windows from Irregular Miniatures of Great Edstone, North Yorkshire.