From Waterloo to Brécourt Manor, via Penge…

This article comes to us care of Duncan Wasdell, whom we encountered unveiling the first section of his Band of Brothers themed Bolt Action Mega-Table at this year’s Salute Wargaming Show (picture below), all the name of charitable causes. We asked him to tell the tale in his own words. Here he ruminates on the genesis of the project…

Duncan: To say 2020 was a tough year is a bit like saying a King Tiger might not be the best way to build a 750 point army…Overstatement it is not! My personal story of the Pandemic was certainly challenging and very dark at times, but out of it has come an initial project which fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition and a follow-up project that has already been seen in person by thousands of people, with many more having viewed it online. So, this is the story behind the making of Duncan’s Band of Brothers and a Bolt Action Mega-table…

April 2020 found me with a dilemma. Which was a bit of a problem as I was already drowning under the weight of a whole host of others. Lockdown One arrived at a particularly inconvenient time for the Wasdell household, given that we were right at the point of selling the house we lived in and separating into 2 new, post-divorce homes. Instead, sale on hold, life as a divorcing couple with two kids carried on for a little longer than expected. At the same time, the Kidney Transplant list that I had just been placed on, was suspended and I was granted a new identifying label as one of the “Clinically Extremely Vulnerable”. It did not feel like the start of a holiday…

YouTube at that point for me was simply a place where I caught up with occasional sports videos, and where my children seemed to spend a good deal of time and obtain most of their cultural references from. It was not a place I knew well. Lockdown 1 changed all that. Like thousands of others, the enforced free time and need to occupy young minds gave me the drive to re-examine how I spent my time in my own youth. And YouTube provided me with an instant gateway back into that world…

Military history had always been my passion, fuelled by early childhood visits to places like the Imperial War Museum and the National Army Museum in Chelsea, where I was enthralled by the model dioramas on display. I began collecting 1/72 Airfix plastic soldiers from about the age of 5 or 6 and would spend hours alone in my room, setting up huge battles and fighting them with marbles and plasticine bombs as weapons, skittling troops in their wake.

By my teens, my collection was substantial, I had begun to paint (badly) and even found a friend to start to play against. I visited the Ilford Wargaming club with my friend, but felt pretty out-of-place among a much older group of men and never went back. And then puberty came knocking at the door and suddenly there seemed to be a lot more interesting things to do with my time. My collection, the vast majority still boxed and unpainted, was slowly neglected and eventually sold on to help pay for a games console…

But I did keep a bit.

I couldn’t bear to let go of my Napoleonic collection. It contained the best of my painting (and hordes more untouched) and I have kept hold of it ever since, boxes moving from attic to attic, gathering dust and sentimental value in equal measure with every passing year. Those little men are the last direct link I have to my own childhood, and just after my own son’s 7^th birthday in April last year, faced by the blank canvas of an Easter “holiday”, I blew off the dust and introduced them to him. His joy and delight and passion and interest as we rolled marbles into the evening was a light in a very dark place.

Inspired and motivated, I pulled another dusty box out from the depths of the rafters the next day. It was the central piece in my childhood pile of shame, the Airfix “La Haye Sainte” farmhouse kit, unmade and still in its box. It was a kit I had always dreamed of building and using as a centrepiece for my grand Waterloo table, dreams that were of course never realised. But at that moment I realised I had been simply waiting for the right time to do it. And Lockdown One was the time…

If you’re going to start any project, there has to be a reason for it, a purpose. Without that, any sense of drive and direction soon dissipates. The stronger the reason and motivation, the greater the energy and commitment to completion will be. Sounds obvious right? But it was certainly not something my teenage self had really understood. But at the grand age of 50, clinically vulnerable and in the middle of a global pandemic, I felt a huge and overwhelming desire to make some memories and to make the most of every moment. And to share and finish a project of my dreams with my kids. And so we did, my daughter joining my son and I in our enthusiasm to get started.

So, we had the thing we wanted to build, the motivation to build it and a young, eager team to help, but not a scooby about how to go about it! Where do you go to learn this stuff? That was a question I was never really able to answer in 1981. Now, however, as my kids quickly demonstrated, it’s easy…YouTube!

Within minutes I was marvelling at the work of Mel Bose, and my vague and dreamy aspirations started to gain a little focus. And then I found Luke at Geek Gaming Scenics, who not only demonstrated what appeared to be some pretty straightforward techniques but also provided all the products I would need to use too. My kids and I were hooked, and over the next month, we slowly and gleefully worked on our Lockdown project.

As Lockdown 1 ended we presented our Waterloo model in our front garden for friends and family to come and see, asking for donations to the NHS at the same time. The response from the local community was awesome, and I was taken by how engaged the younger kids were to be able to get up close and actually interact with our little board. It reminded me how frustrated I had been as a kid at the glass prisons that surrounded the museum models I so loved. These were kids who knew little of history and nothing of wargaming, and yet they were mesmerised and enthralled by our little model. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was where the seed of the idea for Duncan’s Band of Brothers first germinated…

Autumn’s arrival brought with it a fresh set of challenges. The summer’s Covid hiatus had allowed both the house-sale and divorce to complete their interrupted processes. Still shielding however, I found myself alone, approaching kidney failure with a best hope for the future as an immune-suppressed transplant patient, in a world with a deadly virus, with a life-time history of mental health and depression challenges. It was a dark and very lonely place. I felt the passing of every heavy second, desperately aware of the fragility of life and the sense of sands slipping through a glass. But slowly, out of this darkness and loss and fear, a determination and resolve started to appear. I had no power to change any of the events that seemed to have so conspired against me, but I did have the power to choose how I responded.

I resolved to use the time that I have to make as much of a difference as I can, and to do things that would bring pleasure to me and others in the process. And so, just after my birthday last year, having binge-watched Band of Brothers (again), and more of Luke’s content on YouTube, I had a wonderful dream about playing a massive game of Bolt Action on an unbelievable model table.

The next day, I wrote Luke an e-mail, and set about selling him a dream…

We’ll check in more with Duncan as the project develops. The Brécourt Manor project was completed in partnership with Luke over at Geek Gaming Scenics. You can find a full video on the subject over on their YouTube channel. Our thanks to Duncan and Luke for sharing their story.