WSS: Strelets - the briefest of flirtations.

 

 

Strelets set No. 253

Very strange week for my WSS project. I've been playing about with ideas for a couple of French dragoon units, complete with stocking caps. The big problem in my scale is the command element - especially mounted drummers!

My most recent thinking has been along the lines of using Irregular dragoons - they manufacture 20mm dragoons in stocking caps - at a pinch I could have the officers in tricorns - I understand that both kinds of headgear were issued. The drummer is a scary idea. I've been experimenting with conversion possibilities, none of which were pleasing. After a lot of fiddling about, I sat down to have a really close look at odd figures I have here.

My WSS armies are primarily Les Higgins/PMD 20mm from the 1970s - small figures - 20mm to the eye. Only Irregular will work with these; plastics are too big, as are the very nice 1/72 metal offerings from Minairons and Hagen. I reckon the Higgins boys are about 1/76, in old money, and in this scale a millimetre on the hat brim size is very obvious. Fine visual tolerances. I have been talking myself up, therefore, to use Irregular, and there is a value-added pinch to this, since I could use some of my spare Irregular horses, which are appreciably smaller than the Higgins horses I use throughout this project. Robert Hall says that French dragoon horses were normally about 12 hands, as opposed to 17 hands for cavalry horses, so this is looking like a sensible possibility.

OK. I put that idea on hold while I just checked if anything better presented itself. 

I have in my bits drawer a box of the Strelets "Early War" WSS Fusiliers. Very nice models. A little chunky in the head and hands for a perfect match with Higgins, but very interesting. They are described on the PlasticSoldierReview as "24mm high" (I never know what that means) - OK, still interesting - they are about 20mm to the eye, according to the plastic ruler I nicked from my son's former school on their open day. If Strelets's stocking-cap dragoons are to the same scale, I reasoned, then - since the hats will be different from the standard tricorns and thus not directly comparable - I could do plastics for the French dragoons, and these sets come replete with all sorts of mounted drummers and fancy officers. PSR describes the dragoons as "24.5mm high", and certainly I've seen specimens painted by Will and by Lee which look very attractive. The Big Issue, then, is that of scale match.

 

"Mounted Dragoons in Attack"

After a long ponder, which went as far as measuring on-screen images with my trusty 6-inch ruler, I decided this was the way to go, so I ordered 2 sets of the Mounted Dragoons in Attack (box 253) and 1 of Dismounted Dragoons Skirmishing (box 254). These are very hard to find - I tracked down the mounted chaps at Model Hobbies, and the dismounted ones from an Italian eBay shop, which was a bit painful in the shipping cost department, but times are tricky.

Today I received an eBay message from Italy, apologising for selling me an item which they did not actually have in stock. Apparently this was not their fault (that's what they all say). They offered me a refund or they could get me another box by the end of May. So the dismounted dragoons are not going to arrive any time soon. Also, this morning Model Hobbies did very well to get my mounted dragoon boxes to me. So I rushed upstairs with them, to get my first in-the-plastic look at some actual Strelets horsemen, and compare them directly with my usual metal figures, which did not even require me to unseal the plastic bags inside the boxes.

Bummer. The Strelets figures are very obviously taller and heftier than my Higgins standard. This business is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but to me these will not fit in at all with my armies, very nice though they are. I was also a little disappointed in the amount of flash, the odd "leaning" horses which I'd read about in PSR, and - especially - with the fact that the mounted dragoons, with a scabbard sticking out on the left and a slung musket on the right, are each about 25mm wide, which will not work even a little bit with my standard system of 3 mounted figures side by side on a 50mm wide base.

So, very quickly, my Strelets period came and went. I messaged the Italians and said that I would take the refund, thank you very much, and emailed Model Hobbies to apologise for messing them around, and to see if there is any scope for returning the figures - if not, I'm sure I can move them on through eBay - these things are in very short supply, and, since they come from Ukraine, the situation is likely to worsen.

Back to my Plan B-and-a-half, then, which is to use Irregular men on their (small) Irregular horses, and just not have any musicians in the units. If someone subsequently comes up with a nice little mounted drummer in a small 20mm scale I'll pop a couple in. In passing, it occurs to me that if Newline made figures for this period they would be about right. They don't, of course...

Ultimately this was a bit of a damp squib of an idea, but I'm now satisfied that I couldn't have gone ahead with it. One thing for certain is that I'm not going to derail the whole project for the sake of two dragoon drummers. They'll be fine. Now that I've decided, I'll start getting the metal castings prepared for painting, which will feel more like progress.