Recreating The Siege of Dendermonde

 The Siege of Dendermonde, which took place in the War of Spanish Succession and saw the allied army besieging the French, was the subject of a famous article by Ron Miles that ran in Battle for Wargamers magazine from December 1976 and covered his reconstruction of the siege by building Dendermonde in his wargames room.

As a 13 year old when this article came out I was fascinated by it and eventually did play out a siege similar to it using 1/300 Heroics and Ros Napoleonics and drawing out the city and siege waorks on a large piece of paper.  I cannot remember which side won in that refight.

Henry Hyde has made the original series of articles available as a scan into a single PDF download here:

https://battlegames.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Siege_of_Dendermonde.pdf

for those people who have never seen it before.

I have always continued to be fascinated by the article over the yers have have dug out the original issues and reread the articles on a number of occasions.

As I now have the time and (at the moment at least) the space I have decided to finally press on with a project to recreate the siege in the article and play through the siege in my own wargames room.

The original article shows the figures that Ron Miles used which were around 1,000 Minifigs S Range figures.  They are not easily available (I know that John Cunningham has been recasting them but I don't believe the range is complete and friends have had no response to enquiries to him) so I have decided to go with the current Minifigs 25mm Marlburian range which is available from Caliver Books.

I am hoping to pick up some older figures (so if anyone has some they no longer want, I am interested) in order to keep the cost down but I have bought some samples to paint up from Caliver.  

These are 3 British Infantry.

Gloss painted (of course) and I have also gone for the 1970s black-lined look - very quickly painted so could with some tidying and I haven't yet decided what to do about faces.

I did consider the Irregular Miniatures 20mm range and did order a battlepack, but decided that true 20mm Marlburians are scarce and that the range doesn't offer some of the extras that I wanted.  Also Minifigs have the "Old School" look that I want to have.

This is intended to be a long term project (probably 1-2 years before it is ready to play) and the first stage with the scenery for the game is to decide on what size to build the town to...

The original article has this map of the town

which, from Ron's suggested measurements of 1" to 10 yards gives a model 10 foot square!  He does say in the article that he realised that was too big and he couldn't fit it in so he planned on building only half the town.

That would imply he built something that was 10' by 5' which he then had to cut down to enable there to be space for the attackers.

I think, looking at the photos and from the description that he cut it after the 3rd bastion on the side wall and produced a model that ran from table edge to table edge.

At his scaling (16" for a bastion, 12" for a wall. and 10" for the moat and 12" for the Glacis) the model would still have been something like 7' long by however deep he made the town.

I can fit a maximum table size of 12' x 6 at a push'  (but 5' wide is really the largest practical size) into my wargames room but for practical reasons I don't want to leave that size table up for a year or so while the game is played out (which is how long Ron Miles took!).

So, I am likely to limit it to 8' x 5' as a maximum and plan to make it in sections so it could be moved out of the way to provide table space for other games.  

The question is going to be can I make it 6-7' wide and 3' deep and then have only 2' for the attacking forces or should I try to give the attackers more space?

Lots of things to think about!