First look at the Partizan giveaway figure for August

It is a year of anniversaries.

At the May show we celebrated the centenary of the founding of the Royal Air Force with our WW1 pilot figure. Now we have before us a far more sombre anniversary but one that still needs to be marked.

As we are sure everyone knows, November 11th will mark 100 years since the Armistice which ended the First World War. We wanted to produce a suitable figure to mark the occasion and for inspiration we turned to some of the war memorials that have been put up in the century since the Armistice. In particular we found two; one erected in the 1920s and the other far more recent, erected only a few years ago.  

The Scottish American War Memorial was erected in the West Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh in 1927. It was designed by the Scottish Canadian Sculptor R. Tait McKenzie and is a tribute to the bravery of Scottish troops during the First World War. It is called 'The Call' and shows a kilted soldier about to rise from his seat to go forth into combat.

The Seaham Memorial in on the seafront at Seaham in County Durham was erected in 2014. It was designed by Ray Lonsdale and depicts the end rather than the beginning of the soldier's duty. Designed particularly to highlight the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder it shows a weary soldier, head bowed over his rifle, reflecting on the horrors of war.

 
Our own figure designer Martin Baker has used these two memorials as his inspiration to produce the Partizan figure for the next show.

With apologies for the quality of the photos, here is the figure. We hope you like it.

The figure will be available to the first 500 through the door on the day as well as to all of those providing games, trade and society stands.

Please note a number of groups and individuals are continually working away to raise money for soldiers suffering from the physical and mental effects of combat and you may well see some of them fundraising at the shows. If you do, please do dip into your pocket to support them.

For wargamers, the study of conflict is an interest, a hobby and an escape from daily life. For many of those who have had to endure it, conflict and its effects are a daily struggle from which they can never escape.  

Of Dreams and Nightmares.

So, planning is well underway for the second Partizan show of the year which will be held at the Newark Showground on Sunday 19th August.

Invites are out to games, societies and traders and most replies are already in. If you have received an invite but have not yet replied please do try to let me know as soon as possible if you can attend as we need to get the floorplan finalised well in advance of the show.

Advertising is in place both online and with the Wargames magazines. If you are trading at the show then over the next few days you should receive flyers which we hope you will include in your mail order dispatches.

Later this week we will update the website with the latest lists of traders, games and society stands. After that it is just a case of waiting for the last few replies, sending confirmations out to everyone  and then producing the final floorplan.

And then we await the most important moment in all Partizan planning. The Partizan Dream.

This has become something of a legend amongst the Partizan crew, rather akin to the ravens at the Tower of London.

Basically it goes like this:

It is Sunday morning, either just before or just after opening time at the show. We are wandering around the halls - always the stygian gloom of Kelham rather than the bright new venue - and the place is filled with empty tables. A few poorly produced games (unpainted figures on a blanket) sit alongside trade stands usually selling potted plants or house cleaning products. And inside the dream we think this is all great and everything is as it should be. It is only when we wake up that the cold sweats start.

Alternatively everything is in place and we open the doors to... one small child and a lost delivery driver.

Another variant is that the venue has inexplicably shrunk to the size of one small room and we have 40 traders and 60 games to fit into a space the size of my kitchen - on more than one occasion it has actually been my kitchen.

The point about these dreams is that they are invariably about failure and disaster for the show and one or other of us invariably has them before each show. So much so that it is now part of the Partizan mythos that as long as one of us has The Dream everything will be fine. And of course the year we don't have The Dream the show will be a catastrophe.

So as well as getting the final preparations ready for the show, we will be doing everything we can to ensure we get the right sort of nightmares before 19th August.

If not we might just stay in bed and give the whole thing a miss.