Gotcha! - retail therapy for nerds

In the last two weeks, some very unexpected things have happened here.

I managed to win a lot on eBay which includes enough NapoleoN Miniatures British light dragoons - in authentic Peninsula-style Tarleton helmet - to make up a full unit when added to what I already have in my spares box. Very pleased with this - they can join the painting queue, and will eventually become the 14 LD, replacing my present late Phoenix Model Developments unit, which is splendid (Tim Richards mastered the figures, and I painted these back in the days when my eyesight was up to the job), but dressed for Waterloo. Also (sadly) they come from the days when scale creep was starting to make PMD a bit overscale. It doesn't matter a lot for most of the range, but the Light Dragoon figure (BN25) is definitely a whopper.

Whoppers. The soon-to-be-replaced 14th Light Dragoons - PMD figures. Their brigadier, Viktor von Alten, looks rather puny in comparison in the foreground.

Then, of course, I somehow managed to achieve the trick of accidentally buying back my own book - again on eBay - after it had been in orbit for a dozen years or more. I was hoping to dine out on this tale for some time, but, strangely, people I have told the story to in the pub invariably respond with an even more astounding story about how their Auntie Jean once met herself while on holiday in Tibet, so I have to assume that the impossible is, in fact, commonplace.

Now I have another unexpected triumph to relish. Somehow, my worldwide network of dodgy contacts has managed to trace two boxes of the out-of-production and unobtainable Falcata Spanish Lancers, and these have now arrived safely in the post from Vigo. If this event appears underwhelming, bear in mind that I have never seen any evidence that this set ever made it into production, so I never expected to see such a thing. They also will join the painting queue. There are two "uniforms" in the set, thus - if I ignore the falling man in each box - I should be able to form two units of lancers (one will be Julian Sanchez' Lanceros de Castilla, the other is a much more irregular unit in sombreros). With the leftovers, if I arm them with swords and blunderbusses and generally paint them all the shades of brown in the rainbow, I have the option of producing some mounted guerrilleros. The lancers, by the way, come without lances, so I will have to provide brass wire ones.

Naturally, being a miserable person, I am not tempted to rush out and buy a lottery ticket on the strength of this unaccustomed run of luck, and I am only casually keeping an eye open for meteorites or falling pianos, but it does make you wonder. If someone now comes up with 4 packs of NapoleoN Miniatures British heavy dragoons (in bicorns), plus maybe a couple of their Spanish generals, I will be as near to a happy bunny as makes no difference.

Calloo, callay.

Falcata - if you blinked you missed them

My earlier post on Falcata Miniaturas, the Madrid based manufacturer of 1/72 scale white metal Napoleonic figures, has attracted a lot of interest since it appeared - I think it's currently at No.2 in my all time hit list!

I've also had a number of enquiries asking for details of the range, and their current availability. I have to say that I don't really know very much about them. They started production in September 2004 - I am reliably informed that the original intention had been to make the figures in plastic (which makes sense when you see the range of poses), but they opted for white metal - and they seem to have closed the business sometime in 2008. The date is uncertain - supplies to retail outlets stopped, and stock was gradually cleared. Remainder items are hard to find now, though they turn up on eBay from time to time.

The range, sold in packs of 34 castings, was:

FE-01 Spanish Line Infantry

FE-02 Spanish Grenadiers

FE-03 French Infantry

FE-04 British Infantry

FE-05 Spanish Garrocheros & Lanceros de Carmona

FE-06 KGL Heavy Dragoons

and that was as far as they got. Subsequent releases were planned thus:

FE-07 Spanish Guerrilleros
FE-08 Spanish Line Artillery
FE-09 Spanish Hussars
FE-10 British Rifles
FE-11 French Guard Marines [for Baylen?]
FE-12 Polish Guard Lancers [for Somosierra?]
FE-13 British Highlanders

but, sadly, they never appeared.

Provenance and Vandalism

One of my other interests, apart from wargaming, is motor racing - especially the history of Grand Prix racing, and I maintain a casual interest in the actual examples of old cars which still survive. There is always a lively debate about what constitutes a genuine specimen and what doesn't. For example, if someone now builds a perfect 1955 Lancia D50, entirely from genuine 1955 factory spare parts, that does not constitute an authentic historic car, since the entity (and chassis number) did not exist in 1955. Now - just suppose that, back in 1955, Alberto Ascari had written off his works Lancia in practice at Monaco, and the mechanics had worked all night to create an entirely new car for the actual race, using exactly the same heap of spare parts - that would now be a genuine historic car, if it were still around.

Lancia D50 - genuine

Next case: suppose someone wishes to buy, say, one of the 1954 works Maserati 250F cars - the chassis number being identifiable as the one in which Fangio won the Belgian GP (say). If genuine, this is going to be worth an absolute fortune. However, if the car has really had a full life as a competitive car, and then has subsequently been maintained and raced in Historic racing, then it will have been fettled, patched, repaired, and renovated for 50-odd years, and it is possible that there is not a single part of that vehicle which is original - except maybe the chassis plate! The actual entity, however, is regarded as genuine if it has existed continuously since manufacture. You may recognise the celebrated Executioner's Axe conundrum. This is not entirely a straightforward matter - yes, this is the actual axe which has been used to execute traitors since the 15th Century, though, naturally, it has had many replacement handles and at least one new head over the years.

Move on. A long time ago, I was sitting in the National Library of Scotland, reading an old, leather-bound copy of the English translation of Maximilien Foy's history of the Peninsular War, and was horrified to find that the book was defaced - someone had obviously taken exception to the bold Maximilien's views, and had expressed his patriotic outrage, in pencil, in the margins of several dozen pages. Shaking, white with indignation, I reported this to the girl at the lending desk (not least for fear that she might think I had done it!). She checked the records, and reported back that the book had come to the library from the estate of the 5th Earl of Rosebery around 1930, and that the annotations were almost certainly the work of the Earl, or possibly of his father. In short, the pencil scribbles were part of the provenance of the book.

So much for the ramble around the subject - now to the point. Today I noted that 10 unpainted Hinton Hunt Line Chasseurs a Cheval have been purchased on eBay for some £260. You may do the conversion into your currency of choice, but that is a great deal of money. I am aware that the value of these miniatures is also influenced by whether they are original issue or the later Clayton products, so there is a definite thread of provenance and authenticity in there, whatever you or I may think of the actual sums involved. Someone has been prepared to pay a certain amount to obtain the genuine article.

Now it gets a little complicated. I have seen, at first hand, some of Clive's ex-Peter Gilder Hinton Hunt Napoleonic cavalry. They are breathtaking - individually animated, some with bases replaced with sheet brass, wire harness and flat wire sword blades added and so on. My personal favourite was a trumpeter of chevauxleger-lanciers, converted from a trooper, with the cord of his trumpet made from plaited wire. So what are these things worth? I know that some of them have been bought and sold within living memory, so a value must have been placed on them. I guess that the fact that Gilder converted them adds greatly to their worth and, like the ex-Rosebery book, the mods were carried out so long ago that they have become an important and essential part of the character of these models. I also guess that, if I had hacked them about myself, the value would be approximately zero. Hmmm.

What brought all this to mind, if you will kindly excuse the jump from the sublime to the agricultural, is that I am currently working on some Minifigs s-range Spaniards. As ever with s-range, I rather like the figures but I really don't like their enormous bayonets. They are very robust, and they are part of the tradition of s-range, but they do look a bit silly alongside figures from other manufacturers. And, as ever with s-range, I find it is Groundhog Day. Once again I have given serious thought to shortening and slimming down the bayonets to improve them, and once again I have chickened out, primarily because these are very old figures, they are expected to be like that, and it would feel wrong to change them.

So - just as on every previous occasion - I'll leave them unaltered, and I suppose that this is the correct thing to do, even though I shall continue not to like their bayonets very much. I'm also pretty sure that Peter Gilder would have just changed them, without a second thought, and he would have been right, too.

Hmmm.

Replacement Unit - Brunswick-Oels Jaegers

Creeping elegance.

That's when you start refining your armies to make them "nicer", or nearer to your personal (current?) idea of perfection. In my case, this follows an extended period during which I was so desperate for more and more troops that I would have kept both the new and the old versions of a unit, just to get the numbers up.

This is the second time I've replaced the Brunswickers, which is getting a bit serious, I guess. My original battalion was all Minifigs - the officer and drummer were s-range (and were really very nice), but the rank and file were the later, bigger Minifigs - as wide as they were high - and they were pretty awful. No - I didn't mean to express it like that - what I mean is they were a poor match for the rest of my armies. Anyway, I lived with them in that state until a few years ago, when I set about getting rid of all the overscale Minifig "chunkies", and I replaced them with castings from the current Kennington range.

The Kenningtons were fine - much more like the thing - but they were, strictly speaking, the Leibregiment from Waterloo. Now I think this uniform is probably pretty authentically what the Brunswickers wore in the last year of the Peninsular War, but I really wanted to try to get some figures in the earlier uniform with the longer polrock coat.

I'm delighted to say that I managed to buy some suitable vintage figures on eBay a week or two ago, and Clive (once again) very kindly helped out with some matching skirmishers, and here they are, based in my normal light infantry style, with two half-subunits of skirmishers and two close-order subunits to act as supports. They seem to me to be some sort of early Minifigs, though the small bayonets are clearly not s-range (I have some s-range Brunswickers, and the figures are similar but distinctly different). If anyone knows what they are, please shout. The officer may well be s-range - not sure. Alas, I did not get a replacement drummer to complete the unit, so I still have my Kennington drummer. If anyone has a spare s-range Brunswick drummer (BrN 6s?), please get in touch - I'll be very interested!

New Unit - Dragons à Pied

With a considerable amount of help from my friends, here's a new unit - an unexpected bonus for the army.


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!

Mystery Figures

I've had these for a year or so. I bought them as part of a mixed lot of Royal Horse Artillery figures, but they are obviously Waterloo-period British Horse Guards, and the style of figure is like nothing I've ever seen before.



They were shown on the Old Metal Detector blog a while ago, and they generated some interest and a few photos of further examples, but no positive ID.

I'm now selling them on eBay, just because they aren't going to serve any particular purpose in my armies. They are attractive 20mm figures, proper little, shiny toy soldiers - factory painted, hand-animated, soldered on to sheet-metal bases and fitted with soldered wire harness. Entirely because they fit the description in the narrative in VINTAGE20MIL, I have a suspicion they might be very early Greenwood & Ball figures, from the days when Mr Greenwood hand-cast them and Miss Ball painted them, but I admit this is a wild guess.

Of course, they might be out of a Christmas cracker, and they're going now, anyway, but I thought I'd have one last go to see if someone can identify the maker. Any ideas?

My French Army - new pics

I recently got some new units based up, and am now in a position where, once I get a single battalion of foot dragoons ready for garrison duty, my French army has finally attained the organisation target I set myself about 30 years ago. Admittedly there has been a little scope creep over the years.

To celebrate this landmark (saying nothing at all about all the limbers which are still to be built and painted!) I thought it was time we had some more soldier pics on the blog - there's been an awful lot of words lately!

They are all set out in order, staff and artillery at the front, skirmishers at the rear. From left to right (as we see them), the columns are

King of Spain's Guard

Spanish line troops

Italian brigade

1st German brigade

2nd German brigade

6 French line brigades

Reserve artillery, plus garrison troops and artillery and engineers

Heavy cavalry

Light cavalry

With a couple of minor pieces of wargamer's licence, the army is a representative section of the Armee de Portugal with a rather more colourful reserve contingent, dating from around Spring 1812. The Emperor (who doesn't get out of The Cupboard very often) has obviously flown in from the frozen north to review the troops.

Hope you enjoy these - see how many figure manufacturers you can identify!

Art Miniaturen

Another manufacturer who is still doing well, but a rather different style of figure. Jorg Schmaeling's super 1/72 metal figures are, in my view, diorama-style, and very nice too - a little pricey, but lovely. Art Miniaturen are also nice, helpful people to deal with. Herr Schmaeling is happy to provide odd figures from his listed sets, and I understand that he will even consider spare parts - hats, pelisses and so on.


Apart from the price (which is not astronomical, by the way), the only other slight snags are

(1) there is occasional flash trouble - these figures are very detailed, but no compromise is made in animation to ease the casting process - some of the older figures can display signs of mould damage, particularly swords and muskets, and horses' legs can require a bit of dremelling to make them perfect

(2) Schmaeling does not accept payment by credit card or PayPal (at least he didn't a couple of months ago) - this is a bit of an issue for UK residents, since the good old British banks still make it very expensive to transfer money internationally. It is not a real stopper, but how you choose to work around the problem is up to you. I would never, of course, advise anyone to send cash euros in a registered letter. Perish the thought.


I have only one unit which is entirely Art Minaturen - my beloved French 3rd Hussars. These cost me a real arm and a leg, since I felt that my painting could not do justice to such fine figures, so I commissioned the very talented Jez Farminer to do the full collector-standard paint job on them. I am very pleased with them, but I cannot afford to follow this route very often!

I have some French voltigeurs, and a good number of command figures. Here are a few pictures, which I hope speak for themselves.




Finally, here's a conversion - I produced this Spanish colonel by grafting a Les Higgins British Light Infantry head on to an Art Miniaturen Belgian officer figure. The width and quality of the range make these figures ideal for conversions.

Kennington

Unusually among the figure manufacturers I have featured in this series, Kennington are still in business. The figures are available in packs from SHQ, and they are inexpensive and have a very decent range. They are at the smaller end of the size range I can use - maybe 22mm average height - but have acceptable proportions, apart from a tendency to big hands(!) and tiny bases. Hands apart, they are a good size match for Hinton Hunt, for example.


I like them - I don't have many complete Kennington units, but they are an excellent source of command figures. I decided quite late in my collecting career to add mounted colonels to most of the infantry units, and Kennington have been very useful, especially for the French. They make a little French infantry colonel on a rather tubby horse who is a pleasing little character, complete with bristling moustache - I have a lot of these. Kennington are also the only 20mm source of rarities such as proper flank-company Highland skirmishers - their range is certainly worth checking out.


French light infantry - these are pro-painted, as you can probably tell.


Nassau infantry (the colonel is a mixture of bits - Minifigs horse, Art Miniaturen figure with an old Garrison head).


Portuguese artillery - the howitzers are by Scruby.

Foy's Sixth Law

This was considered earlier as a possible addition to the list. After comments and emails following recent blog postings, I see now that this may, in fact, be the greatest of all of Foy's Laws.


Foy's Sixth Law is:

If there are wargame figures which you want, and they are available, buy them now. Sell the house if necessary. The manufacturer will be history by next month. Your wife will understand.

Lamming

Lamming are one of the great figure makers from the classic 1960s-70s period, so, if this seems like an inappropriately sketchy treatment of them, it is entirely because I have never really bought much of their stuff.


Lamming British infantry, with giant mounted colonel and Minifigs ensigns

For one thing, rightly or wrongly, I always regarded them as specialists in medieval subjects. For another, my local shop (Archie Alexander's Toytub in Edinburgh) didn't stock Lamming - certainly they didn't do the Napoleonics, so it wasn't untill the eBay Age that I got to see any. For a sensible presentation of Lamming's output, visit VINTAGE20MIL or The Old Metal Detector - this is just going to be a peek through the keyhole, which about sums up my experience of this manufacturer.

For reasons which I can't quite put my finger on, I subconsciously group Lamming with Garrison. Apart from the fact that I actually had some Garrison figures about 30 years before I had any Lamming (though they were roughly contemporary in anyone else's real world), there is the scale creep thing which was quite similar for both. Later Garrisons, from about 1975 on, got bigger and bigger, presumably to cope with the general inflation of the Wargame Millimetre, as 25mm came to mean something entirely different. Lamming appear to have done the same thing, only their later figures got fatter as well (there is a nice pictorial demonstration of this aspect of Lamming's history in Lazy-Limey's blog). I tend to avoid the two makes, not because there is anything fundamentally wrong with them, but because I don't understand the ranges well enough to be able to predict whether a specific model is going to be of a suitable size. I have made a few blunders on eBay.


53rd Foot, with ensigns and mounted officer by Art Miniaturen

I like Lamming's very early 25mm Napoleonics - the French have hats which are too big for me, but the advancing British infantryman is a nice little, ectomorphic figure which stands nicely alongside Les Higgins men in stature. I have, I think, 3 battalions of these chaps. I don't care much for the very tall standing officer that goes with them, but the drummer is fine, and it seems right to keep them together where possible. Right from the outset, there is a recognisable facial style - thin faces with high cheekbones. As time passed, this family characteristic (because they are clearly all related) developed into the full, and very distinctive, "Easter Island" look. My cousin used to say that the early figures reminded him of the Treens, from the Dan Dare stories in the old Eagle comic - it goes without saying that my cousin must have been far, far older than me.


Apart from the infantry, I once had a (now rare) mounted officer to go with them, but he was far too big, and a couple of batteries of RHA, which were very nice but so obviously different from everything else I had that I sold them on.



That's about all for Lamming, really - I very much like the look of their cavalry (nice horses!), but fear of the unknown and my eBay experiences have prevented any closer acquaintance - thus far, anyway.

NapoleoN Miniatures

I am not going to grind any axes here. I thought, and still think, that NapoleoN Miniatures were underrated. I bought a lot of them, and am still hoping that they come back from retirement so I can buy some more.

First problem is - what do you call these guys? You can't stress the final capital in NapoleoN, so I tend to refer to them as NapoleoN 20 (their original name) or NapoleoN Minatures, as they became. Based in Murcia, Spain, and set up by a small group of real wargame enthusiasts, their range included, in addition to 1/72 white metal figures, hex-based rules (still downloadable from the website) and army lists for the Peninsular War.


The first, considerable attraction for me is that the chief sculptor (Ventura?) is a real talent. The horses, cannons and general officers are especially lovely, though there were also odd figures which are clearly the lovely ones with a spare head tacked on. They produced a limited range of positions - infantry are marching, with flankers, officers, standard bearers and drummers (plus loading and firing skirmishers for French, British and Spanish armies), cavalry are also fairly calm - sabres shouldered, walking horses. They added a nice touch by casting variations of the figures with differing head angles, and there was a choice of horses - they sold the figures primarily in multiple packs, though they were also available singly, and a pack would normally contain a mixture of poses to make the units interesting.

They did have a tendency toward extreme optimism when announcing launch dates for new products, but they were really nice, courteous people to deal with. They sold the figures directly, or through online dealers like Kamar. It was wonderfully refreshing - quite nostalgic, in fact - to be able to browse through a catalogue and say, "I'll have 70 of those, and 30 of those, and I'd better have some of those...", and just order them! Shades of Hinton Hunt in the Old Days, except - for a while at least - the stuff that came back through the post was a bit more predictable than HH.

The muskets on the British infantry were a bit fragile, a problem that they sorted out with later releases. At the time they ceased trading, they had just re-launched the old Les Higgins/PMD range, were bringing out some terrific Spanish cavalry, and were talking about diversifying into other campaigns - helmeted Austrians with separate heads were mentioned.

Sadly, it didn't happen. I understand that they ran into problems with the casting facility and, especially, the courier service which handled their shipping. Also, their new, improved website-cum-online-shop, which was always a little clunky, got choked to obliteration by the inevitable moronic Russian spam engines (I have fantasies about being locked in a room with one of the degenerates that write these things, and a baseball bat...).

Around the beginning of 2009, just as they announced changes in the packaging, some new 15mm Spanish Civil War figures and the first Les Higgins re-issues, things suddenly went quiet. Presumably the economic unpleasantness didn't help - maybe someone just got fed up. The intention was to get themselves sorted out and then start trading again, but since then Angel, the main man, has started a related business elsewhere, so I guess we just wait and see.

I am uncomfortably aware that I brokered the sale of the Les Higgins moulds and masters to NapoleoN, so I do not propose to say very much about that - I cannot believe that they are lost forever, so I have to trust that they will reappear sometime in the future, though I have nothing definite to base this view on. We all need a little faith.

Like composers, wargame figure manufacturers seem to acquire status after they have gone. I do not propose to present any sort of cod eulogy - I am simply putting out a lot of pictures here - admittedly with my painting! - to let the figures speak for themselves. Please enjoy, and perhaps shed a little tear with me.