George Macaulay Trevelyan

 I've been doing a little bit of research about the collection of model soldiers at Wallington in Northumberland. Unsurprisingly perhaps I discovered that this wasn't the first wargames blog in which the figures have featured. There's a bit more detail and a lot more photos on a post on Tom's Toy Soldiers from October 2013. The eponymous Tom seems to have found some notes about the collection, which is more than I did. Maybe he was extravagant and bought a guide book. It's interesting to note that the Trevelyan brothers seem to have bought whatever figures happened to be available and then used them to represent whatever they needed them to be; it seems nothing much had changed between the 1880s and when I started wargaming in the 1960s. It also explains why I thought there were figures from the Risorgimento.

I hadn't come across Tom's blog before, but it looks like it will be worth reading. In another of those happy coincidences which always intrigue me his post from last Monday also concerned model soldiers at a National Trust property.

The George mentioned solely by Tom in terms of his role as a substitute for dice rolling grew up to be the distinguished historian George Macaulay Trevelyan. This fact was picked up by an even earlier, and with all due respect to Tom, even more celebrated wargames blogger. In his Wargames Newsletter #114 (*) from September 1971 the late, great Donald Featherston says that Trevelyan credited this early study of war games with his ability to so vividly describe battles in his own writing. Among Trevelyan's major works is his trilogy about Garibaldi; I wonder if that interest was also inspired by the figures in the collection.

* This edition also contains a letter from Gary Gygax and the exciting news that Airfix are to release a set of French Napoleonic Infantry.