South Cheshire Militaire
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I travelled up on the Saturday rather than a silly o’clock start on the Sunday morning and this gave me the opportunity to meet up with Shane Rozzell and his better third and to also savour the delights of a local hostelry later that evening ready for an early start at the venue to set up. The organisers taking charge of the downstairs didn’t know what was happening upstairs so it started off with a bit of a run around trying to find out where our pitch was and Murphy’s Law dictated we were upstairs.
2.jpgMajority of the traders were in the main hall downstairs with some of the usual traders in attendance such as SK Miniatures, Just Bases, MDC, little Cars (who sell airbrushes and modelling equipment amongst other things but not little cars!!), lots of plastic kit traders and local trader ABC also El Greco where I spent my mortgage again.
Displays were provided by clubs and enthusiasts from up and down the country and a wide variety of models were on display, including armour and aircraft from various IPMS clubs, an Airfix tribute group, local modellers, model railways, Mechano (for those of us old enough to remember this from our childhoods), remote controlled aircraft and cars, space ships and also a variety of ships in various scales as well as The Basement and of course WAMP. During the day R2 D2 and Darth Vader along with some imperial bomber pilots were seen walking around the show with Darth Vader at one stage providing entertainment when the force failed him and he missed a couple of steps...The WAMP display had a lot of attention and some very nice comments from people stopping to chat and even coming back for a look at the display a second and third time, although I was slightly embarrassed that some of my figures on the display which were 20 years old were getting more attention than some of the more recent and better painted figures on the display!?!
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The show also hosted a painting competition which had a combined Fantasy & Sci-fi class with a good selection of entries across all classes. It was very disappointing though to hear comments like “They should award the medals to the figure classes last because there is so many of them, it takes too long”. And “Why do we have to have figure classes anyway”. I thought the hobby had moved away from this sort of prejudice but obviously not the case where some modellers are concerned and I am not going to go into the vagaries of the figure judging. WAMP members did well in the painting competition with Shane Rozzell taking one of the gold medals in Sci-fi and fantasy with his Krigar model and John Harrison (Darkmessiah) taking a silver medal for his Khorne Juggernaught.
8.jpgOverall it was an enjoyable show with a steady flow of visitors around the traders and displays which allowed for plenty of time to talk to people and have a chat with the traders either on their stands or when they came visiting to see what else was being displayed and definitely a show I would attend again.
The next show that WAMP will be attending will be the Aldershot BMSS Show held in Guildford on 26th March (check the calendar for details and location etc and we hope to see more of you there, bring some models to go on the display and show people what you can do.5.jpg
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