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| Dad's Dad's Army - miniatures painted by a friend in Sevenoaks as a present for my dad |
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| Dad's Lance-Corporal Jones and his famous butcher's van |
When I was growing up, Dad's Army was a hugely popular show in our household, both mum and dad having been kids during the war, and dad later serving - courtesy of National Service - in the Royal Corps of Signals.
Knowing his love for the show, over the years, I got dad a number of Dad's Army themed gifts, which, when he died, I inherited and have loving cared for since.
The documentary for the show's 50th anniversary in 2018, hosted by Pointless's Alexander Armstrong, also got me thinking about a series of articles I read as a child - in my father's collection of Airfix annuals - about staging Hitler's aborted invasion of Britain (aka Operation Sealion) as a wargame.
This was my first introduction to the idea of wargames and, although I never pursued it further (instead being drawn to the Battle of Waterloo with my giant Airfix box set of soldiers and the Wild West with my larger Britains toy soliders), it stuck with me ever since.
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| Selection of pages from the original series of articles in the Airfix magazine |
However, the Saluting Dad's Army documentary briefly reignited my childhood fascination with Operation Sealion and wargaming a "what if..." Nazi invasion of the UK.
I immediately started trawling through the Warlord Games' website - knowing they had the licence for official Dad's Army miniatures - and was dreaming about creating my own miniature Home Guard regiment to fend off the German invaders.
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| Official Dad's Army miniatures from Warlord Games |
My flights of fantasy even embraced the idea of creating a scale replica of Walmington-on-Sea for the Home Guard to defend, but thankfully that's as far as my wild ambitions went, and I didn't pull the trigger on any miniatures or terrain (it quickly dawned on me that my scenery building skills weren't anywhere near good enough to build a 1940's town that I would be happy with).
