Miyakazi Illustrates Chesterton’s 1984 The Napoleon of Notting Hill 1904 and at last a use for toy Beefeaters?

This post is a follow up to yesterday’s toy soldier post about early wargames in G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904).

In this book, set in the future date of 1984, Britain is run “through a figurehead king, randomly chosen. The dreary succession of randomly selected Kings of England is broken up when Auberon Quin, who cares for nothing but a good joke, is chosen. To amuse himself, he institutes elaborate costumes for the provosts of the districts of London.”

Thanks to a comment from Bob Cordery, author of the Wargaming Miscellany blog and The Portable Wargame series, I tracked down this Hayao Miyazaki front cover for a Japanese translation of G K Chesterton’s 1984 or The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) as it is more commonly known:

http://smallpax.blogspot.com/2010/08/miyazaki-illustrates-chesterton.html

Mary MacArthur features this cover in her own illustration blog:

http://snowflakeclockwork.blogspot.com/2010/08/miyazaki-illustrates-chesterton.html

The book link comes through a gift from Father Peter Milward of the Japan Chesterton Society – who knew this existed? – passing a copy to Mary MacArthur, a member of the Catholic Illustrators Guild – who knew, ditto?

This is what I enjoy about toy soldier and wargames hobby blogging, the tangential learning and random ferment of ideas from others, such as the comments by Bob Cordery and Alan (Tradgardland) Gruber on my previous Chesterton Toy Soldier post:

https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2021/01/16/toy-soldiers-and-the-napoleon-of-notting-hill-by-g-k-chesterton-1904/

Reigning in the mission creep of my New Gaming Years Irresolutions for 2021, I pondered an interesting question from Alan Gruber about how this Chesterton book might feed into my gaming?

I didn’t want to start another Wargames project this early in 2021 but it made me realise there is an odd link between my Arma-Dad’s Army project and Chesterton’s book.

I am always looking for (what Peter Laing christened) ‘dual use figures’ to cut down on costs, storage and painting time.

Bunging some beefeaters into a more modern ImagiNations conflict seems suitably like Wells’ Floor Games or Little Wars, who often filled in forces and Floor Games with what figures he had to hand.

Those are very Tudor / Yeoman Warder /Lanschknect type uniforms featured in The Napoleon of Notting Hill and Miyazuki’s cover illustration.

Opening page of Preben Cannik’s Military Uniforms of the World (Blandford)

A few of my randomly acquired metal “Beef Eaters collection.

At last a modern 1904/84 use for all those halberd wielding ceremonial yeoman warder types of plastic, Britain’s Deetail new metal and old hollowcast figures that you slowly acquire from childhood onwards.

They remind me of the yeoman warder chess pawn pieces from Prince August Spanish Armada and Henry VIII Cloth of Gold homecast moulds. These have now both arrived and are awaiting a good casting day.

The Catholic / Chesterton angle is interesting in view Of my Christmas mix of Armada, Tudor and Elizabethan books, along with A.L. Rowses’s Tudor Cornwall (1941, recent paperback reprint). Even now with the distance of history, it takes some doing to keep up with the changing shifts of Catholic / Protestant regime changes in Britain and especially in its Celtic extremities like Cornwall with its culturally disastrous Prayerbook Rebellions, along with the splits, feuds and intermarriage between the landed gentry.

Backing the wrong side during the reign of Henry VIII or Elizabeth The First could see you lose you head or merely your whole landed estates.

This clash rumbled on through the English Civil War and Interregnum. Pity the poor estate staff, tenant farmers or peasants and fieldworkers who got caught up in all this at the behest of their local landed gentry family. It is too important a topic to call it the whim of the landed gentry as people were prepared to die or be disinherited for their faith,but it must have been quite a random thing for the workers which side their landlords backed or broke with as kings and queens changed. These ordinary people would form the often unwilling backbone of the local Arma-Dad’s Army of Muster or Militia as it was later known.

My Chintoys sets of figures and Tudor reading from Christmas

The idea behind this project is seeing the Armadas and Spanish raids of Invasion fears as a version of the Home Guard facing the German WWII invasion plans ofOperation Sealion, in Tudor Spanish terms Operacion Leon Marino?

A.L. Rowse occasionally noted some of these occasional parallels into his Tudor Cornwall, finished in the early years of WWII.

Some might object to a comparison of Catholic Spanish of Philip II and the Conquistadors or Armadas as an invasive and fearsome foreign regime parallel to the Nazi hordes with their “typical Shabby Nazi tricks” (to quote Captain Mainwaring). There was a hope on the Spanish side and fear on either British side, fuelled by concerns about espionage, that loyal Catholic families would rise up as a “fifth column” when the Spaniards invaded.

My Chintoys 54mm Spanish https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2020/10/30/the-spanish-fury/

Even the painting or colour scheme of my ‘Spanish Fury‘ troops is intended to reveal the Tudor fears of the possibly satanic black and red, to reflect their popular image after years of Tudor English propaganda. I shall continue this colour scheme with the new Chintoys figures reinforcements from Christmas.

I have to say I have no personal bias, having grown up with both Catholic and Protestant friends.

However much I am enjoying the Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England book by Ian Mortimer and fascinated as I am by my family history of Cornish ancestors in these sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I am very thankful not to be living in Tudor times, whether it is from the confusing switching religious regime angle or the medical and dental one.

Having read Winston “Poldark” Graham’s The Grove of Eagles: A Novel of Elizabethan England, there is more of a sympathetic portrayal of the Spanish and Catholic characters than I expected, along with an understanding of the divided family loyalties of the intermarried Protestant and Catholic Cornish or West Country families. These were the same old families that sometimes hung on in larger or smaller means to run the estates and houses that shaped Cornwall and the West Country into the last century. In fact, a small number of hese same Cornish county family names of old still exist in some of these houses and estates today.

This week in my forthcoming blog posts, I shall feature some pikemen, the first completed shiny figures of my dual use Trained Bands and English Civil War figures as reinforcements for the poorly armed and barley trained ‘Muster’ or Arma-Dad’s Army.

Blog post by Mark Man of TIN, 17 January 2021

Toy Soldiers and The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G K Chesterton 1904

The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a novel written by Gilbert or G. K. Chesterton in 1904, set in a nearly unchanged London in 1984.

*

Wikipedia plot summary: Although the novel is set in the future, it is, in effect, set in an alternative reality of Chesterton’s own period, with no advances in technology nor changes in the class system nor attitudes. It postulates an impersonal government, not described in any detail, but apparently content to operate through a figurehead king, randomly chosen.

The dreary succession of randomly selected Kings of England is broken up when Auberon Quin, who cares for nothing but a good joke, is chosen. To amuse himself, he institutes elaborate costumes for the provosts of the districts of London. All are bored by the King’s antics except for one earnest young man who takes the cry for regional pride seriously – Adam Wayne, the eponymous Napoleon of Notting Hill. (Wikipedia plot summary)

*

G.K. Chesterton fans will no doubt know of the G.K. Chesterton Society https://www.chesterton.org

From Chapter 2: The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

“Sir,” said Wayne, “I am going from house to house in this street of ours, seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens our city. Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here.

For the toy-shop keeper has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before the first wars began.

You sit here meditating continually upon the wants of that wonderful time when every staircase leads to the stars, and every garden-path to the other end of nowhere.

Is it thoughtlessly, do you think, that I strike the dark old drum of peril in the paradise of children? But consider a moment; do not condemn me hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumour or beginning of that danger, just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained the terrible tree.

For judge childhood, even by your own arsenal of its pleasures.

[Pg 153]

You keep bricks; you make yourself thus, doubtless, the witness of the constructive instinct older than the destructive.

You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry.

You keep Noah’s Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only, sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality of the earth?

Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality of Eden? Do not despise the lead soldiers, Mr. Turnbull.”

“I don’t,” said Mr. Turnbull, of the toy-shop, shortly, but with great emphasis.

“I am glad to hear it,” replied Wayne. “I confess that I feared for my military schemes the awful innocence of your profession. How, I thought to myself, will this man, used only to the wooden swords that give pleasure, think of the steel swords that give pain? But I am at least partly reassured. Your tone suggests to me that I have at least the entry of a gate of your fairyland—the gate through which the

[Pg 154]

soldiers enter, for it cannot be denied—I ought, sir, no longer to deny, that it is of soldiers that I come to speak. Let your gentle employment make you merciful towards the troubles of the world. Let your own silvery experience tone down our sanguine sorrows. For there is war in Notting Hill.”

The little toy-shop keeper sprang up suddenly, slapping his fat hands like two fans on the counter.

“War?” he cried. “Not really, sir? Is it true? Oh, what a joke! Oh, what a sight for sore eyes!”

Wayne was almost taken aback by this outburst.

“I am delighted,” he stammered. “I had no notion—”

He sprang out of the way just in time to avoid Mr. Turnbull, who took a flying leap over the counter and dashed to the front of the shop.

“You look here, sir,” he said; “you just look here.”

He came back with two of the torn posters in his hand which were flapping outside his shop.

“Look at those, sir,” he said, and flung them down on the counter.

[Pg 155]

Wayne bent over them, and read on one—

“LAST FIGHTING.

REDUCTION OF THE CENTRAL DERVISH CITY.

REMARKABLE, ETC.”

On the other he read—

“LAST SMALL REPUBLIC ANNEXED.

NICARAGUAN CAPITAL SURRENDERS AFTER A MONTH’S FIGHTING.

GREAT SLAUGHTER.”

Wayne bent over them again, evidently puzzled; then he looked at the dates. They were both dated in August fifteen years before.

“Why do you keep these old things?” he said, startled entirely out of his absurd tact of mysticism. “Why do you hang them outside your shop?”

“Because,” said the other, simply, “they are the records of the last war. You mentioned war just now. It happens to be my hobby.”

Wayne lifted his large blue eyes with an infantile wonder.

“Come with me,” said Turnbull, shortly, and led him into a parlour at the back of the shop.

[Pg 156]

In the centre of the parlour stood a large deal table. On it were set rows and rows of the tin and lead soldiers which were part of the shopkeeper’s stock. The visitor would have thought nothing of it if it had not been for a certain odd grouping of them, which did not seem either entirely commercial or entirely haphazard.

“You are acquainted, no doubt,” said Turnbull, turning his big eyes upon Wayne—”you are acquainted, no doubt, with the arrangement of the American and Nicaraguan troops in the last battle;” and he waved his hand towards the table.

“I am afraid not,” said Wayne. “I—”

“Ah! you were at that time occupied too much, perhaps, with the Dervish affair. You will find it in this corner.” And he pointed to a part of the floor where there was another arrangement of children’s soldiers grouped here and there.

“You seem,” said Wayne, “to be interested in military matters.”

“I am interested in nothing else,” answered the toy-shop keeper, simply.

Wayne appeared convulsed with a singular, suppressed excitement.

“In that case,” he said, “I may approach you

[Pg 157]

with an unusual degree of confidence. Touching the matter of the defence of Notting Hill, I—”

“Defence of Notting Hill? Yes, sir. This way, sir,” said Turnbull, with great perturbation. “Just step into this side room;” and he led Wayne into another apartment, in which the table was entirely covered with an arrangement of children’s bricks.

A second glance at it told Wayne that the bricks were arranged in the form of a precise and perfect plan of Notting Hill.

“Sir,” said Turnbull, impressively, “you have, by a kind of accident, hit upon the whole secret of my life. As a boy, I grew up among the last wars of the world, when Nicaragua was taken and the dervishes wiped out. And I adopted it as a hobby, sir, as you might adopt astronomy or bird-stuffing. I had no ill-will to any one, but I was interested in war as a science, as a game.

And suddenly I was bowled out. The big Powers of the world, having swallowed up all the small ones, came to that confounded agreement, and there was no more war. There was nothing more for me to do but to do what I do now—to read the old campaigns in dirty old newspapers, and to work them out with tin soldiers. One other thing had occurred to me. I thought it an amusing

[Pg 158]

fancy to make a plan of how this district or ours ought to be defended if it were ever attacked. It seems to interest you too.”

“If it were ever attacked,” repeated Wayne, awed into an almost mechanical enunciation. “Mr. Turnbull, it is attacked. Thank Heaven, I am bringing to at least one human being the news that is at bottom the only good news to any son of Adam. Your life has not been useless. Your work has not been play. Now, when the hair is already grey on your head, Turnbull, you shall have your youth. God has not destroyed, He has only deferred it. Let us sit down here, and you shall explain to me this military map of Notting Hill. For you and I have to defend Notting Hill together.”

Mr. Turnbull looked at the other for a moment, then hesitated, and then sat down beside the bricks and the stranger. He did not rise again for seven hours, when the dawn broke.

The headquarters of Provost Adam Wayne and his Commander-in-Chief consisted of a small and somewhat unsuccessful milk-shop at the corner of Pump Street …”

The whole book is available at:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm#Page_147

An interesting blog post

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/22/the-napoleon-of-notting-hill-g-k-chesterton/

In Maisie Ward’s 1945 biography of Chesterton, she mentions:

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18707/pg18707.html

“With H. G. Wells as with Shaw, Gilbert’s relations were exceedingly cordial, but with a cordiality occasionally threatened by explosions from Wells. Gilbert’s soft answer however invariably turned away wrath and all was well again. “No one,” Wells said to me, “ever had enmity for him except some literary men who did not know him.” They met first, Wells thinks, at the Hubert Blands, and then Gilbert stayed with Wells at Easton. There they played at the non-existent game of Gype and invented elaborate rules for it. Cecil came too and they played the War game Wells had invented.

“Cecil,” says Wells, comparing him with Gilbert, “seemed condensed: not quite big enough for a real Chesterton.”

“They built too a toy theatre at Easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play began by the Commissioners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle, putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger than when he went in.”

Cecil was Cecil Chesterton (1879-1918), younger brother of G.K. Chesterton and friend of Hilaire Belloc, was an English journalist and political commentator, known particularly for his role as editor of The New Witness from 1912 to 1916. He was injured fighting in WW1 and died on 6 December 1918.

Gilbert and Cecil appear to have played Wells’ Little Wars with Wells at Easton.

Easton?

Easton Glebe is Wells’ one time house in Dunmow in Essex, alongside his Hampstead house nearer London. It was here in Essex that Wells’ second wife Jane died in 1927.

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1334055

https://sangerpapers.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/margaret-sanger-slept-here-easton-glebe-estate-in-essex-england/

Besides his home in London, Wells rented Easton Glebe, on the Easton Lodge estate, between 1910 and 1928.

It was during this time that Wells had a 10 year affair with Rebecca West.  They met in 1912 when Wells was 46 and West only 19. West was also a prolific writer, later being appointed a Dame for her service to English literature. Their son, Anthony West, born in 1914, grew up to became a well-known novelist.

http://www.hundredparishes.org.uk/people/detail/hg-wells 

Blog post by Mark Man of TIN, && January 2021

B.P.S. Blog Post Script

http://community.dur.ac.uk/time.machine/OJS/index.php/Wellsian/article/download/429/416

Penny Plain and Tuppence Coloured – RLS, The Toy Theatre of War and early wargaming

Peter Dennis’ 54mm civilian figures from his Little Wars Paper Soldiers book (Helion)

As a follow up to my recent post about The Toy Theatre and my 54mm figures inspired by this Emily Dutton advent calendar toy theatre, I wanted to photograph on stage my own paper Soldiers. These were quickly produced for my roughed out Suffra Graffiti game, inspired by those Wellsian Little Wars figures of Peter Dennis.

Fans of the Toy Theatre read like a Who’s Who of early Wargamers. I am curious about this overlap and what it offers us in gaming today.

I have been rereading “Penny Plain and Tuppence Coloured“, a well known essay by Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) about the influence of the toy theatre on him as a child. It is available free online via archive.org here at:

http://archive.org/stream/memoriesandportr00stev

” [RLS] Louis and cousin Bob had mastered the art of toy theater as boys. As a married man, age 30, in 1881, RLS was doing it again in Switzerland, after his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, age 11, had come into possession of a toy theater — “a superb affair costing upwards of 20 pounds that had been given me on the death of the poor lad who had whiled away his dying hours with it at the Belvedere,” a hotel in the health resort town of Davos. Lloyd continues: “He painted scenery for my toy theatre and helped me to give performances and slide the actors in and out of their tin stands, as well as imitating galloping horses, or screaming screams for the heroine in distress.”

http://pennyplain.blogspot.com/2020/09/robert-louis-stevenson-in-america.html

“Stevenson wasn’t Pollock’s only interesting customer. G.K. Chesterton’s passion for the hobby rivalled Stevenson’s. Chesterton saw the toy theater as a microcosm of the cosmos, where everything can be examined under the spotlight of a miniature stage, where good and evil are starkly contrasted in bright colors and dramatic scripts. Winston Churchill was a big fan of the little stage, too. He bought his stuff at H.J. Webb, an offshoot of Pollock’s …”

.

Churchill’s favourite, Pollock’s The Miller and his Men – Image from the Old Pen Shop (EBay)

Churchill’s favourite toy theatre play The Miller and His Men apparently had a stirring “No Surrender” speech that may have influenced his later speeches and attitude. I have recently bought a repro copy of this Pollock play, characters and scenery from the Old Pen Shop online and look forward to reading it.

Haha! Paper Soldiers Pollock style, suitable for wargaming? (From: The Old Pen Shop, EBay)

“The Miller and His Men” was mentioned by RLS along with another title which I also purchased, the uncoloured Waterloo scenes for the Toy Theatre or Juvenile Drama from the same source.

* Update: Derek Cooper pointed out in the comments that the Wargames / Toy Theatre link continues with Warrior Miniatures in Glasgow also producing toy theatres and plays including Waterloo, Inkerman, Balaklava and Alma battles and Skelt pieces that RLS would recognise https://www.toytheatregallery.com

Pollock’s shop, sited at Covent Garden for a hundred years, still remains and they do online sales / mail order.

My three Edwardian postcard inspired coppers quickly created for my Suffra-Graffiti game …

RLS was a fan of Pollock’s toy theatres and Benjamin Pollock was a fan of RLS. Another interesting overlap.

RLS had a sickly childhood which in time inspired the writer of ‘The Land of Counterpane’ and other such toy inspired poems (featured on this blog) in the Child’s Garden of Verses. RLS and his stepson Lloyd Osborne also collected and gamed theatrically with Toy Soldiers, some of which survive in America – https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2020/10/02/robert-louis-stevensons-toy-soldiers/

There is lots of interesting overlap between wargames and toy theatre. I also associate Toy Theatre with convalescence, probably due to E. Nesbit, author of The City in The Library with its toy soldiers, who was also the author of The Railway Children which has a great Toy Theatre scene in the 1970s film.

My paper Suffragists and American cousin on roller skates for SuffraGraffiti

Alan Gruber at the Duchy of Tradgardland blog has also been musing over this Toy Theatre idea of wargaming. I suggested in the comments that:

“There is an element of framing, set dressing, assembling the protagonists or characters, behaving in the beginning in preset ways to set plans (take the ridge, cover the bridge, advance and occupy the town) etc and then each of the scenes making up the acts (beginning, middle, end?)”

The link is very clear when you consider the changing backdrops and changing scenery between games (or acts).

One overlap or connection may be that The Toy Theatre, real live theatre, TV drama, fiction and gaming are all things which allow us to play out strategy and “what if”, changing the variables of a scenario to affect the outcomes, without anyone getting hurt.

Shifty looking opponents of Women’s Suffrage from my Suffrage-Graffiti game

As mentioned in my opening paragraph, the fans of the toy theatre read like a “Who’s Who” of early wargaming – RLS, Chesterton, Churchill. I wondered if H G Wells was involved? Certainly Floor Games and Little Wars have a charming theatrical invention of worlds and theatre sets.

Protogamers The Brontes’ juvenile dramas and fictional worlds were inspired by the gift of ‘The Twelve’ wooden toy soldiers.

A little research on Board Game Geek reveals that Chesterton and Wells both appear to have devised together satirical toy theatre plays on current or recent events. Chesterton’ auto biography in 1936 reveals this larkish attitude by Wells:

“What I have always liked about [H.G.] Wells is his vigorous and unaffected readiness for a lark. He was one of the best men in the world with whom to start a standing joke; though perhaps he did not like it to stand too long after it was started. I remember we worked a toy-theatre together with a pantomime about Sidney Webb.”

Chesterton’s biographer Masie Ward notes that the pair: “They built too a toy theatre at Easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play began by the Commissioners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle, putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger than when he went in.”

Thanks for the references to:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/651482/origin-history-and-speculation-original-game-gype

“Three Little Maids from the WSPU are we …” My roller skating Suffragettes

Peter Cushing the actor was a known collector and maker of toy soldiers, a dandy proponent of Little Wars, but he also collected and made toy theatres with elaborate set designs.

http://petercushingblog.blogspot.com/2016/10/toocooltuesday-toy-theaters-too-good-to.html

Alan Gruber pointed out the puppet theatre in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander – featured here https://youtu.be/U5h5T-fcoDk

My first toy theatre? Probably Asterix cut out characters and playscenes c. 1975 from the back of cereal boxes

http://cerealoffers.com/Weetabix_Ltd/Weetabix/1975/Asterix_-_His_Friends_-_Foes/asterix_-_his_friends_-_foes.html

More thinking required in this interesting overlap of Toy Theatre and wargaming !

Blog posted by Mark Man of TIN and ” Tuppence Coloured or Penny Plain” 12 December 2020