Thomas Fairfax, his part in my downfall

Recently, in a comment posted on this blog, MS Foy appeared to confuse Sir Jimmy Savile with Sir Thomas Fairfax, something I suppose that could happen to any of us as we get on in years. One must assume that Fairfax himself would be very unhappy at this elision; after all Savile was a Roman Catholic. Anyway, it reminded me of how I first came to meet the Ilkley Lads and become an occasional visitor to the legendary wargames room of James ‘Olicanalad’ Roach. The story is neither particularly interesting nor amusing, but that’s never stopped me before and it’s not going to stop me now.

Black Tom does Movember

My career has for many years been a combination of working away from home interspersed with periods of downtime. Eventually and inevitably I started casting around for a hobby that would withstand being put down at short notice and then picked up again six months later. Somewhat to my ex-wife’s bemusement I reverted to my teenage pastime of wargaming or more specifically to painting and basing figures never to play with. My only interaction with the wider hobby was a visit to a Society of Ancients gaming day at the Royal Armouries. Amongst the people I came across there were a bunch calling themselves the Ilkley Lads playing a bizarre game called Piquet and arguing furiously among themselves about the definition of a flank.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Ilkley in those days had a wargaming shop – unusual for a relatively small town even given its status as the wargaming epicentre of the lower Wharfe valley - which I had never visited assuming it to be selling exclusively fantasy stuff. However the shop had a stand at the SoA show so I made a trip and had a look. On buying a discounted copy of Sam Mustafa’s Grand Armeé rules I fell into conversation with the owner. Noting my bemusement at Piquet, he said it was the ruleset of choice locally (an observation which turned out not exactly to be true) and that advice on how to play it was available on an internet discussion forum. After reading through the past messages on the forum I was sufficiently convinced by the mechanics (except possibly the bit about what constitutes a flank) to return to the shop and buy a copy of the master rules.

And there it stayed, except that now it was Piquet that I didn’t play rather than Shako, Principles of War, Days of Knights and the various other rulesets that I hadn’t been playing before. I continued to take the occasional look at the discussion forum and one day the subject of Sir Thomas Fairfax’s birthplace arose. As it happened I was at that point sitting in my office on the very estate where he had been born and I posted to that effect. Very shortly thereafter my phone went and a voice announced that he was Mark Dudley. Having seen my post he had deduced that I must be working at the head office of the group he worked for and had found me in the telephone directory. One thing led to another and I was introduced to the rest of the Ilkley Lads. Soon I was upping and downing like a good’un, showing them how to win at Condottiere and refusing to get drawn into arguments about flanks.

Not long after that I became, for a period, Managing Director of the division at which Mark worked. While that lasted we got into a nice routine of spending an hour or so last thing Friday afternoon discussing wargaming. My further involvement with the group has been intermittent over the years due to my slightly odd work schedule; I once had to pull out of my role as warrior Pope in a very interesting, if long, Italian Wars campaign in order to swan around Little Rock, Arkansas not borrowing $100m. My main claim to fame during that period – apart from beating them all at Condottiere, did I mention that? – has been as the only person to have read Command Piquet before the one time that we played it. Upon my recentish return to Ilkley I have obviously been saddened by the great Old School schism, although frankly not as saddened as I would be to play nothing but Charge! all the time.