Eight for August

I have now added he grass which I had forgotten when I took these pictures!

So, in the end I did just get eight figures completed for August, even if I did have to finish them at midnight on Sunday 31st!  First off were another seven Afghans.  I now have just ten to do,  This batch includes some with swords and they all have their arms held as if they should be carrying shields which, interestingly, the Studio Miniatures figures have.  Did Artizan just forget to include shields?  I've just ordered a pack of Studio Miniatures Afghans to see how they compare in size.  The Sikh Wars figures I have are slim, more anatomically correct, Perry Miniatures in style but the Afghans look chunkier.  We'll see.

Lastly, I finished one of those non-unit figures that lurk around on the workbench for months.  A Black Scorpion pirate girl for my all female crew.  Anne Bonny from the new North Star range is also now well underway and I have undercoated Blackbeard's crew.  Next up will be the North West Frontier British, who I have now started, plus some more odd figures which are close to completion but I couldn't quite get done by the end of the month.

I couldn't finish them as I spent the weekend down in Cowes for the Cowes-Torquay-Cowes powerboat race.  I have been watching this since I was about eight, although it is a shadow of its former self with only just over a dozen competitors this year.  I remember the whole width of the Solent being taken up with a mass start in the seventies and eighties but this year the whole field could fit into the Royal Yacht Squadron haven.  Although it was nice to see the original Dry Martini, which won in 1974, competing again.

While walking along the front my son, Guy, said that there was a Lancaster about to fly over.  It wasn't a Lancaster, however, but a B17!  I've never seen one at all, I don't think, let alone one flying!  It was en route to the Bournemouth air show. It was the Sally-B which is based at Duxford, somewhere I really need to visit.   I only had time to grab a quick shot as it thundered overhead!  Impressive!  I always wanted to build the Airfix kit when I was younger but had never saved enough pocket money to be able to afford it!  Thanks to Airfix (or rather Roy Cross) I always think that they should be silver though!

Osborne Court

Just along from our house in Cowes is Osborne Court, a large Art Deco apartment building, constructed in 1938.  My father-in-law told me that it was paid for by the German government with the idea that it could serve as the German army headquarters when Britain was invaded.  I couldn't find this mentioned anywhere else but he is usually reliable on history and has been visiting Cowes since the mid-thirties himself.  An intriguing thought, anyway!

We haven't had a musical interlude here for a bit but there is a musical link to Cowes and Osborne Court in particular.  I am currently listening to a CD of music by the largely forgotten British composer Albert William Ketèlbey (1875-1959).  You might not think that you know any of the composer's work but the first few bars of In a Persian Garden should be very familiar.

Rookstone, the house of Albert Ketèlbey, Egypt Hill, Cowes

Ironically, Ketèlbey was tremendously famous in his day and was heralded as Britain's greatest living composer in 1929, as his work was performed more than any other British composer that year.  He is also believed to have been Britain's first millionaire composer.  Yet by the time of his death in 1959 he was almost forgotten; his melodic, programme music becoming very unfashionable.  Now he is rehabilitated somewhat, with compositions such as In a Monastery Garden, In a Persian Market and Bells Across the Meadows being performed regularly and receiving airtime on radio.  In fact, the latter composition was actually banned from radio broadcast (the first recording banned by the BBC!) during WW2 in case people thought that the bell chimes in the piece were the warning for a German invasion!

Born in Birmingham, the son of an engineer, he began piano lessons at the age of eight and started his formal studies at the age of eleven at the School of Music of the Birmingham and Midland Institute.  At the age of eleven he performed his own piano sonata in Worcester Town hall and greatly impressed Sir Edward Elgar, who was in the audience. At thirteen he won the Queen Victoria scholarship to London's Trinity College of Music, beating one Gustav Holst into second place. At Trinity he won numerous prizes and became a very young professor there; affecting a tail coat to make himself look older.  His first major compositions followed at the age of eighteen and by the age of twenty his Piano Concerto in G Minor won the Tallis Gold Medal for Counterpoint.

He met his first wife, Charlotte Siegenberg, while acting as musical director of the Vaudeville Theatre, where he started work at the age of 22.  For over forty five years his compostions made him "The King of Light Music" and in 1926 sales of the sheet music for In a Monastery Garden, the composition that made him a household name in 1915, passed one million copies.  He composed a lot for the pre-sound cinema and was also involved in the early days of gramophone recording.  His wife died of pneumonia in 1947 and he moved out of London to the south coast to recover from a nervous breakdown. There he met  and eventually married Mabel Pritchett, then the manageress of a hotel he was staying in and who had initially refused his request to have a piano installed in his room. They moved to the Isle of Wight, which was where Pritchett's family came from, in 1948, initially living in Bembridge. The following year the couple moved to Cowes and Rookstone, a bungalow on Egypt Hill, where he continued to compose, although his music had faded from popularity after World War 2.  He wrote one piece, in 1952, named after a place on the Isle of Wight, On Brading Down (which is just above a splendid Roman villa and well worth a visit if you are on the Island), but it wasn't published and is now lost.

Osborne Court, Cowes 1958

In 1959 he moved to Osborne Court on the Parade at Cowes but died there on December 1st the same year.  While Osborne Court is still there today and, hopefully. listed, given it's prime seafront position and the alarming rate of development in Cowes (a pub had gone from the high street, I noticed this summer, to be replaced by yet more luxury apartments), we don't know how secure its future is.

Osborne Court today

Last summer I was walking up Egypt Hill in Cowes and noticed that Rookstone, the bungalow he moved to in 1949, had been demolished and replaced with a rather horrible (and expensive looking) modern monstrosity (not that Rookstone had any architectural merit but that's not the point).  There were several letters of protest to the Isle of Wight County Press at the time but to no avail.  Fortunately, I had captured it in the photo in this post a few years ago.

Merlin Engine

Here is my father in law (left) demonstrating the Merlin Engine to Prince Michael of Kent!

Wings and Wheels

P51 Mustang and Spitfire. Nice sound!

Not much to report on the painting front as I spent a few days in Cowes watching the powerboats and yesterday went along to Dunsfold Park aerodrome (better known as the home of Top Gear) for a car/air show yesterday called Wings and Wheels. It was blooming freezing but I had to stay until the bitter end as my daughter, Charlotte, is joining the school (or, rather, my old school) CCF this term in the RAF section. She now is very keen on learning to fly and maybe even joining the RAF, especially after she met the Red Arrows over lunch at the Royal Yacht Squadron last month. Given that her best subjects are Maths, Physics and Geography that all looks worryingly attainable. Actually, her best subject is German but hopefully she won't be joining the Luftwaffe. In her first year she gets at least one flying lesson and later in the school she does a parachute jump. I can't say I am very happy about this!

I have always had jobs that mean a lot of international flying. I would guess that I do around 40-50 flights a year. And I hate every one of them! I really, really hate flying. In fact, it terrifies me. Only the consumption of huge amounts of Champagne enable me to fly at all and as soon as the plane starts juddering around I become immediately sober and grab hold of the seat in front in terror. One day I will get to an airport departure gate and find that I am unable to get onto the plane. It will then be a very long boat trip home. I have a lot of travel coming up this month (not very good on the painting front). I'm off to Poland in a couple of weeks followed by one of my grand tours of North America. Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Toronto, again and then Philadelphia. Far, far too many flights. I have worked out today, however, that I can get from Montreal to Ottawa to Toronto by train which is much better than the coffin-like Embraer aircraft (do I really want to fly in a plane made in Brazil?) that Air Canada operate on those routes. OK the train rides take four and a half hours each (there is no high speed rail in North America-everything clanks along at twenty miles an hour) but at least I'm not stuffed in a tiny tube (I'm mildly claustrophobic as well!) banging around in turbulence 30,000 feet in the air.

That said, I have always been interested in planes but only from a visual point of view. Much like my interest in cars really. I'm not at all interested in how they work or what engines they've got. I just like them to look nice.

Recently I ready Harry Pearson's entertaining book Achtung Schweinehund!, which really should be required reading for any wargamer my age. A lot of it mirrored my own experience but then a lot of it didn't. I did have a resonably large selection of toy guns and I was particularly fond of my cap gun Luger. My favourite was a Gatling gun into which you dropped those teeth-cracking silver balls which we used to put onto trifles. You cranked the handle and they shot out wreaking havoc amongst my Britains Red Indians. Initially all my toy soldiers were 54mm plastics. I had cowboys and indians. Some American Civil War and some rather strange WW2 Germans in soft hats who looked like the Nazis in the Sound of Music or at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was aware of the HO/OO Airfix figures and my friend David Marsden had a lot of them but my Airfix fix was always aircraft. I din't get into the figures until I was about eleven.

A Fairey weird choice

My father had sat me down when I was quite young, eight or nine I guess, and I sat with him whilst he made an Airfix Stuka. I was amazed by the process that turned this bag of plastic bits into a fully formed and (beautifully) painted model. Of course my first attempts were dire and I always built them first and then painted them (leaving painted planes but ghostly grey crewmen inside the canopies-which I could never paint the lines on anyway). The first model I remember making was the Sikorsky helicopter as it was the one used to recover astronauts from the Apollo capsules and I was very interested in space and rockets. Oddly, I didn't follow the normal Spitfire/Hurricane route. My choices were based on interesting shapes and availability in Johnson & Clark department store in Staines. I remember early kits I built were a Trident, the Lunar Module, some WW1 dog fight doubles, the Starfighter (which I painted copper and blue gloss) and the really weird Fairey Rotodyne. I then did build some WW2 planes but they were an odd mixture: Me 110, Vought Kingfisher, Me 262 and my favourite, and the first one I finished which came out looking OK, the B25 Mitchell

Buy me ! Buy me!

So I was delighted to see a B25 flying yesterday at Wings and Wheels albeit missing the top gun turret and in Dutch colours and not the magnificent silver colour I painted mine based on the wonderful Airfix box art by Roy Cross. If ever a painting shifted kits then that painting was it!

It's always good to see a Hurricane and a Spitfire fly but the Battle of Britain memorial flight (the best bit of which is the Lancaster, of course) had to cancel due to the bad weather. Fortunately I had seen them last summer when my father in law arranged a Dunkirk Little Ships and Rolls Royce event at Eton last year. He arranged for the Lancaster and Spitfire to do a fly past which involved closing down Heathrow Airport for 75 seconds! In fact it was because of him that we attended Wings and Wheels as one of his friends invited him to join the Rolls Royce display (he is a member of the Bentley Drivers Club but for some reason thinks that the Surrey Bentley Drivers Club branch are a complete shower-far too many members driving modern Continentals for his liking!).

Charlotte looks forward to the aerobatics whilst Grandma retires out of the cold. Grandpa's car is a 1961 Bentley Continental S2 Flying Spur.

I wasn't very interested in the cars (although someone had a Singer Gazelle like the one we had when I was little) but the planes were good. I hadn't seen a P51 in flight before and the Eurofighter was certainly noisy but the real reason I went was the AVRO Vulcan.

It's big. Really big!

My grandfather, who was in the RFC in WW1 (flying SE5As), went on to work for AVRO after the war. There was some concern that they would have to cancel but they did make it through in the end, thank goodness. My daughter, however, was most excited by the aerobatics display by the Grob Tutor: "the very plane I'm going to fly!" Oh dear!

Don't even think about it, Charlotte!

Finally, we had a rather restricted show by the Red Arrows (low cloud and worrying proximity to Gatwick) but Charlotte insisted on staying to the bitter end. She was excited because the Red Arrows flew in from Poland so they had all 11 planes with them rather than the usual display 9.

All the Red Arrows!

From my point of view the really worrying thing was how many of the aerobatics pilots were British Airways 747 pilots! One thing the whole event has got me thinking about is making another plane kit (of which I have a fair few in the loft). Of course the one to wait for is the imminent Airfix 1/24 de Havilland Mosquito. But how on earth will I find the time to build a 617 part kit and, above all where am I going to put something with a 27 inch wingspan?