More about John Ruddle and the Garden Wargame

I spend some time this evening reading through the two magazine articles that featured John Ruddle's garden wargames ... and they are still as inspiring as they were when I first read them.

John's garden was laid out to represent six countries: Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, and Turkey, and areas that include Flanders, Africa, Arabia, and Northern Italy are regularly fought over. The actual layout was in no way geographically accurate, with the lawn acting as the 'sea', the paths as 'rivers', and the various flowerbeds and rockeries as the countries.

His British infantry regiments were made up of sixteen men and two officers (except for the Gurkhas, who had eighteen men and two officers) whilst the German infantry regiments had fourteen men and one officer. All cavalry regiments had sixteen troopers and two officers. Each of the officers was named, and a proper record of deaths, promotions, and retirements was kept.

Besides an army, each country had a navy. The British had two battleships, two cruisers, eight destroyers, and six torpedo gunboats, and facing them was a German force of one battleship, four cruisers, six destroyers and four torpedo boats. The French was unique in that their navy had a pocket battleship.

The following pictures show some of the model ships John Ruddle made and used.

The first picture shows a naval dockyard. In the centre is one of the larger warships, and elsewhere in the harbour are two motor torpedo boats and a merchant ship. The picture also shows some of John's cast concrete buildings.

The second picture shows the main French naval base, with their pocket battleship – Richelieu – alongside. Also in port are a destroyer, two motor torpedo boats, and a small merchant ship.

Although these pictures only give a flavour of what John's garden wargames must have been like, I hope that they make it easier to see why I found them (and still find them) to be inspiring.