Majority of the figures are Les Higgins, one of the foot officers is a 20mm Garrison casting, and the mounted officer is PMD, though I put him on a rather passive Falcata horse to give suitably non-reg campaign appearance and to avoid having the rather silly Higgins horse galloping alongside marching troops. The drummer is a 1/72 Strelets plastic, and I'm not awfully happy with him, but there isn't much else available.
Anyway, I'm very pleased with the unit - thanks very much to Iain for most of the Higginses, and to Clive for help with the command figures. I fear these chaps have a fairly humble career coming up - they seem like ideal garrison troops for a fortress or maybe a hostile village. Higgins put epaulettes on the advancing dragoon figure, though not on the "at the ready" one, and thus I have a very high proportion of guys here in elite company uniform. Accordingly, they are a provisional bataillon de marche, from the 19e and 23e regiments, who seem to have sent all their best men!
Hi Tony - what an excellent looking little unit. Far too good for garrison duty!
ReplyDeleteIan
Lovely unit Tony. I can see what you mean about the drummer figure though, the rest are just so much finer. Would a conversion from a metal figure be a possibility?
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Lee.
Lee - yes, the drummer is a disappointment. He is from a Strelets set which combines French foot dragoons (doing various siege-type things like carrying ladders) with Polish grenadiers. Yes, odd is a word that comes to mind, but also quite interesting - some of the figures are very nice - a sapeur of foot dragoons, for example.
ReplyDeleteNot so the drummer - the drummer is a mutant. The problem with dragoons for the old head-swap ploy is the damn horsehair mane - it falls well below the shoulders, so a good transplant is well-nigh impossible. I did think of using an Old Guard grenadier drummer - the elite company in a dragoon unit (I think) sometimes wore bearskins, so a judiciously green-painted grenadier drummer might be OK. I was so pleased to get the Strelets figure that I hadn't considered that he might be grotesque. Maybe I should go back to the earlier idea.
I looked through all the old Garrison, Hinton Hunt, Lamming, s-range etc listings, and as far as I can see no-one ever did a dragoon drummer.
Hmmm...
Thanks for tuning in!
Tony
Tony,
ReplyDeleteI know you said that if you could start all over, you would use plastic miniatures. Looking at this unit...I do think your model soldier collection has a certain quality that can't be reproduced with modern plastic miniatures. Mind you, I like the modern 1/72 models, and it's not about metal or not...maybe it's just nostalgia. A vague memory of how I wanted my armies to look like when I was a boy. I'm just a tad jealous now, ...never mind, just keep inspiring me.
Pjotr