A couple of years ago we had our 25th anniversary, and we wrote about the origins of Brigade, back in the mists of the 1980s. A little while back I found this – it’s a casting of the original church that started everything off. I made this from a plasticard core covered in Das clay, which Phil then cast in polyester resin. It’s not all that much to look at now, but significant for us in terms of what it led to.
Now the back of the Brigade workshop is a largely uncharted area. It’s not very tidy and there are piles of boxes ‘n’ stuff, not all which is labelled. I was searching the other day for a load of slottabases which I’m sure is there somewhere but can’t find, and which is rapidly taking on mythical status. I came across this rather grubby item in a plastic bag, which turns out to be another piece of Brigade history. It’s the very first mould that we made for metal casting and is of two spaceships – the Condorcet and the Guangdong. You can just about make out their outlines in the right-hand half of the mould. When first released they were only available through the SFSFW and we branded them as the SemFed (the Semitic Federation of Space Faring Worlds) or Israelis in space. The two models then were called the Sharon and the Meir respectively. So if you ordered these from us back in those early days (1995-ish), this is the mould they came from, they were drop cast on the kitchen stove in my first house!
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