Lamming Catalogue

Probably only the Lamming first series Napoleonics (see posts elsewhere) really fall within the scope of this blog, and a full list is available at Vintage20mil.

I was not a fan of the chunkification of the Napoleonics. However, I always had a soft spot for Lamming figures and had an opportunity once a year to buy them from the man himself, at an annual show. While not a fan of the Napoleonics (I did and do like the earlier versions) there was just something about the look of his Normans and Saxons, Vikings, oddly for me Romans, and most of all Medievals, that really appealed. Add to this in many cases separate heads and weapons, and you could achieve variety that was out of the question with other manufacturers.

Obviously this would be a great asset in one-to-one scale games and Lamming published a set of campaign and battle rules by Bill Lamming and T H Houltby. This allowed for exploration, castle building, cattle rustling and all sorts of goodies, backed up by 1/3000 scale medieval cogs.

My little burst of enthusiasm here is due to my trying to work through painting or refurbishing around 200 Lamming medieval figures. My basic painting style particularly falls short with anything requiring heraldry, but a few pictures of figures may appear at a later date to illustrate the listings posted below.

I found it particularly hard to find any resources on line about the Lamming ranges, apart from the history and Napoleonic listings at Vintage 20mil. So when I found a B&B Miniatures catalogue from around the year 2000 I thought it might be helpful to post up the listings of the various ranges, to make them accessible.

As far as I am aware these figures are not currently available.

Personalities on Parade: Bill Lamming

In the 1970s I used to attend an annual wargames show, Warfare Through The Ages. The highlight among the traders for me was always Bill Lamming's stand. With early multipart figures, I liked his Romans a lot, and especially his Medieval range. His Medieval Campaign rules were inspirational - I remember he produced tiny models of medieval cogs to handle the naval side of these. Unfortunately, this was after his Napoleonics went "heroic" in scale - I much prefer the first versions now. Lamming figures are usually easily recognisable through their "Easter Island" faces. I hope to provide some more information on the figures soon. His Napoleonic artillery models were also very highly regarded. I'm not quite sure whether these were also upscaled from 20mm to 25mm. I have some of the later models, but I'm not sure if there were earlier, smaller versions. If so, they would be second only to Hinchliffe 20mm equipment in my view. Lamming also made the only personality figure I am aware of for the Duke of York.

The earlier Napoleonic cavalry range is pretty well catalogued and illustrated on Ron Marshall's Lazy Limey's Wargaming Place.

Don Featherstone conducted a series of interviews with luminaries for Battle magazine in 1977 and 1978, under the banner Personalities on Parade. I have posted the one with Neville Dickinson of Miniature Figurines over on the Lone S Ranger and Doug Crowther has posted the Peter Gilder one on his blog, Unfashionably Shiny. I am posting the one for Bill Lamming here, and will also post it with others (Dickinson, Gilder, and George Gush), over on Vintage Wargaming.