It’s always a pleasure; never a chore visiting Gripping Beast down in Evesham. I had several boxes of what they warmly refer to as “Dark Age Haries” to return to them - painted figures Wargames Illustrated had borrowed for a recent photo session. What made this trip particularly interesting was that when I entered GBHQ (part warehouse-part office) I looked around to see the warehouse shelving, that houses their stock, and most other surfaces about the place had become home to a huge and bizarre collection of … curiosities. A few weeks ago, the boys at GB got a call from a local lady who had unfortunately recently become widowed. Her husband was an avid hobbyist and his passing had left her with two rooms full of his creations. She contacted Gripping Beast to see if they could find new homes for her husband’s large collection of curios. Our hobby is a broad church and home to a diverse range of talents and interests. The gentleman who had recently died was ostensibly a fantasy collector, he had spent the last 50 years obtaining models from Games Workshop and other similar model manufacturers, before kit-bashing them into his own wonderous creations. Clearly, our comrade’s favourite pastime was taking a piece from here and apart from their collection and bringing them together in a Heath Robinson fashion to create models and scenery that had little or no final ‘use’ – it was all about the pleasure of their creation. Seeing all the completed model projects, half-finished creations and also hundreds of unopened packs of figures was a sobering sight, particularly when thoughts turned to how a wargamers widow goes about disposing of everything left behind, but myself and the Gripping Beast boys also raised a toast to someone we personally didn’t know, but with whom we shared a slightly bonkers kindred spirit.
