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.

Size Comparison

Since I was asked, here's some size comparisons - from left to right, in each picture, Les Higgins/PMD, NapoleoN, Hinton Hunt.


I have to say that the NapoleoN infantry are bigger than the HH by more than I thought - I think the British infantry may be a bit taller than some others in the range.

Hinton Hunt

Deep breath. I haven't really been looking forward to this posting - I could easily get into a lot of trouble here. There's something oddly sacred about Hinton Hunt figures - open criticism could earn me a lot of hostility, or an excommunication - I might at the very least get my windows broken.

Yet this is the right time to talk about HH. Once I started putting together armies using Higgins as the principle maker, I had to source all the things which Higgins did not make, which at that time meant drummers, staff officers, highlanders, Portuguese and - well, cavalry, since Higgins had not started their cavalry yet. Hinton Hunt were an obvious supplier. They had a vast range, they were very highly regarded, and some of the figures were very attractive indeed.

Since then I have bought and fettled and painted and fought and sold a great many Hintons over some 30-odd years. I do not regard myself as an expert, but I am certainly well acquainted with them, and the pounds and the hours I have invested over this time must surely earn me the right to express myself honestly. So I shall attempt to be fair but realistic.

My problems almost certainly stem from the fact that, though 1973 does seem like the Dark Ages now, I suppose I was actually fairly late on the scene as an HH customer. Many of the moulds - especially rank and file of popular nations - were knackered by this time. Further, since no shops (at least no shops near me) stocked the things, you couldn't sift through a tray and choose good ones. This was mail order of an extremely risky nature - orders came back incomplete, or incorrect, they might be months late, quality control was negligible, and the castings and the flash content were often really poor. Also they were expensive. If I hadn't somehow felt it was a privelege to be dealing with them at all, I would have been sufficiently impressed by all this to have given up on them.

They were ground breakers in customer service. I once phoned up to ask about an order which was a month overdue, and was given a lecture about how busy they were. While on my way to a holiday in Austria (in 1974) I took advantage of a 2-hour delay before my connecting train to Dover left London and I dashed along to Camden Passage in order to genuflect at the Shrine. I was met at the door by a man with a bunch of keys, who asked me was I thinking of coming into the shop. I admitted that he had identified my purpose with breathtaking precision.

"Nah - sorry - I have to go out for a while - can you come back later?"

This was 11am on a Thursday, and I couldn't.

I once treated myself to some factory-painted general staff figures which were even dearer, took even longer to arrive and were so badly done that I still get angry when I think about them. I repainted them.

And yet - and yet....

I have seen some of the ex-Peter Gilder cavalry OPC figures which Clive has. Beautiful. Heavily tweaked (wire harness, sheet metal bases, flat wire sword blades, etc), individually animated and superbly painted, I can easily see why such things would inspire devotion. I can even see why they might now change hands for high prices, though some of the prices have become obscene rather than high, in my very humble opinion.

So I have some HHs in my armies - I very much like the OPC French general - I have a number of these - it is a simple, elegant, useful little figure. I have a unit of highlanders (though it does have Art Miniaturen command figures) which I like - they have been with me for a long time. I have a unit of Brunswick hussars - again OPC. I have a unit of Portuguese cacadores - they are OK - if I could get something better I would replace them, but they are fine for now; since I cannot get HH command figures, these cacadores are led by Kennington Rifles figures, which appeals to the inverted snob in me. I have HH eagle bearers in my Higgins French Guard units, though I have provided them with paper flags. One or two (dismountable) generals. That may be about it now.

I had a brigade of Portuguese infantry, but I replaced them. Broadly speaking, the infantry are a little small for me, and I do not care for their weasel faces or their awkward posture. As for the dismountable cavalry, I really do not like the stumpy little legs, so have gradually sold and replaced what I had. True enthusiasts distinguish between original HH and later, David Clayton reissues - I accept that this may be significant, but I am unmoved. Clayton owned the rights and was the licensed manufacturer, so I am not sure why his figures should be regarded as in any way inferior. I am sure someone will put me straight!

Righto - the shutters are in position.

Figures & Figure Scales - take what you can get

Here's a recent picture of my Allied army - that's Anglo/Portuguese/Spanish/Hanoverian etc. They are not quite all present, but it gives an idea of where I've got to. However, I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

So - as I was saying - I plumped for Les Higgins miniatures. I was introduced to them by Archie Alexander, who had The Toytub in Raeburn Place in Edinburgh. The speciality of the shop was really dolls' houses, but he stocked a vast range of wargames figures, which was just as well, since he was all we had locally. I spent many happy Saturday mornings trawling through huge boxes of mixed spares - I would usually go away with two buglers and a horse, or something. Sometimes Archie would get fed up and throw us all out. 

 

The 20mm size was kind of a standard then; the history of this hobby and the figures is documented excellently elsewhere, but I suspect that it was no coincidence that Airfix figures were about this size. Naturally there were things that Higgins did not do, so I used Hinton Hunt for staff figures, for highlanders and Portuguese, for example. I also used the old Garrison 20mm figures, which were pleasing though the range was limited. And the "intermediate" Minifigs (the ones which followed the S-range) were useful, though I didn't care for the oversized hats on the French troops (and still don't) - I used to graft Higgins heads onto Minifigs eaglebearers and gunners with good results. And - maybe best of all - I used Hinchliffe's wonderful 20mm artillery. 

 

Which brings us to a consideration of what the scales mean. I like my armies to be pretty homogeneous in this respect, but it's a hard thing to define. 1/72 scale makes an average man without a hat a little less than an inch tall - 22 to 24 mm is fine for me. This works out well for Higgins, and is OK for Hintons, though they are toward the shorter end of this range. This is a tricky subject - you'd think that, since it's numeric, it would be straightforward, but some figures just look wrong, even though in theory they are the right size. I've read numerous times over the years that it is perfectly acceptable to have figures of different sizes, since men are different sizes anyway. Well, I can't argue with that, but it's also evident that big men don't normally get supplied with big hats and big muskets, and that is the area where the mismatches are noticeable. I regularly see plastic figures which are exactly the right height, but the figures are slender and the hats are small and they just don't fit well with my metal troops.  

 

Which, in turn, brings us to Foy's Third Law: Never mind the millimetres, two figures are the same scale if their hats match. 

 

My armies grew nicely until something fell off the rails in the late 70s or so. For a start, the world was suddenly full of Ents and Wood Elves, but the other thing that happened was that Hinchliffe suddenly started making big skinny 28mm figures, and Minifigs started making big fat chaps like garden gnomes - and, of course, they did very well out of it - the market never looked back. The bad news for me was that some makers I relied on suddenly started making figures which were too big (notably Garrison, though if I'd been familiar with Lamming I would have noticed the same effect), while others (specifically Higgins/PMD) went out of business. 

 

Disaster. The Plan went on hold, I rationalised what I had, fought battles with the armies I had, but the collection was dead, and I was really rather bitter about the whole thing. I spent many years wishing I had just bought in loads of the figures I needed while they were still available - a strategy which is still tempting if you can stand the mountains of unpainted troops - in fact this came very close to getting put forward as another of Foy's Laws, but it would not always be a practical approach. Then came the years from 2005 to now - early retirement, eBay, a sudden (and brief) flowering of new 20mm manufacturers, and I was suddenly in business again. 

 

The armies are shaping up nicely, thank you very much. Over the next few weeks I'll do a short feature on each of the makers I have used. This is not going to be any kind of quality reference job - there are a good number of such things out there already, and some of them are excellent. What I shall do is give my own view of what the figures are like, their strengths and weaknesses (i.e. the things I like about them!), and illustrate them with examples from my collection. There will be some things that you don't see very much, and I'll include a few oddities such as conversions here and there.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To end, here's a picture of part of The Cupboard, which really speaks for itself.