Tuesday 12 November 2013

Cavalry reinforcements from Scotland!

Fresh recruits have arrived from Scotland! Well, by way of my brother's new mini-forge works anyway. He found a Prince August mould on eBay and made me a casting of this lovely kettle-drum horse-mounted musician (sorry, not sure what regiment, but he looks like a hussar of some sort)...


Even inventive my brother scoured eBay and eventually found a cheap pewter tankard which was then melted down to provide the metal for this kit. He told me that Prince August don't do this as a stand alone figure any more, they just make the mould now.

As far as scale goes it's another one of those very loosly defined '54mm' figures - I've sort of given up on expecting a consistent standard scale for 54mm metal toy soldiers now, but this figure comes in at the taller end of the spectrum...

Here I compare one of Black Hat's '54mm' toy soldiers to the
Prince August figure. The cavalrymen's face is a little thinner but
otherwise it's a good match for this taller '1/32' scale soldier.
My rule of thumb these days is to define '54mm' as generally relating to the smaller traditional toy solder's based on Britain vintage models - as exemplified by those produced by Dorcet Miniatures and Irregular Miniatures - while I use the term '1/32' to indicate the taller modern figures made by the likes of Armies in Plastic, Airfix, Black Hat, etc. It's just my own definition, but it saves me from getting muddled!

As a nice 'one off' piece this cavalrymen will come in very hand as a mini-project to be slotted in between my more intense obsessions. I don't intend to create a complete horse-mounted band!

Many thanks go to my brother, Ian, for making such a wonderful job and providing me with this piece.

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Edit: My brother came back with the following information about the regiment of the cavalryman:

"It's a 10th Hussar ( Prince of Wales Own) Kettle Drummer. Uniform seems to be early Napoleonic. They changed to the Shako around 1813."

I'm trying to track down some better colour reference guides for this uniform, there's bound to be an Osprey book on British Napoleonic cavalry.

1 comment:

  1. Great figure.
    Then of course there is 40mm,42mm And 1/48 for example too...

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