F is for Foot Chasseurs, of the Imperial Guard - Historex No's 637 / 703

I'd just about got my head round mounted Chasseurs not being Hussars, while being Hussars, and now someone takes their horses away! As Obelix would say "Those Wellintonians are crazy"!

Still the numbering is more straightforward; so far I'm guessing the 700's are an earlier or alternate numbering system and the 600's a newer/expanded range, but that doesn't explain the 100's, or the fact that the colour plate refers to the previous post, as will the next one - it seems 703 is all Guarde Imperiale!

Young Guard are rearguard today . . .

I is for Imperial Guard Grenadiers - Historex No's 635, 636 and 703

Of course I know 'all about' the Imperial Guard, I was raised on Airfix in the 1970's and every other issue of Military Modelling seemed to have at least one guardsman, usually a few, liberally spread through the articles, painting competition reports and adverts, but beyond that I know nothing and knew even less about the Dutch ones!

Two colour plates and only one sheet-set throws these together for now.

Foot Chasseurs next and thanks again to Mr Foy.

B is for Bobbly Bunker!

I drove past this the other day, at Edenbrook, near Dogmersfield, and noticed it had an interesting roof, so stopped and took a few pictures, now there's a car park - it has been a field most of my life - and despite being still quite away outside town, is being turned into an 'end destination leisure facility' for the denizens of the new developments which are turning Fleet from a small Victorian dormitory into a larger town lacking facilities of most kinds!

Facing Northward, it seems to be a pretty standard Type 22, but they are hexagonal, while this in an octagon; more commonly associated with the much larger Type 27, even to the added entrance block off one wall, but the variation between bunkers - of any type - was vast and the common instruction from the ministries was "do what you can with rationed materials, local supply/construction problems, manpower availability and the lie of the land."

Looking Southeast, this would have been part of the GHQ-A Line, one of several lines of defence against invasion from the Germans, and I shot another a couple of miles away ages ago which I'll try to get up here shortly. The door is obviously a modern one, and I suspect the town council is using it to store tools or community activity stuff for the bike track and allotments being constructed in the field.

Due West, this could be modeled from the unit embedded in the old Airfix play set Gun Emplacement although that plastic one doesn't have walls of the same length, but it would look OK! In fact you could remove the ventilation shafts and door over-hangs of both bunkers in that set and glue them together to get the basic for this one!

Heavy-wire/reinforcing bar has been set into the cement/mortar courses to attach camouflage netting or foliage too and you can see that with a lot of these bunkers, the corners were left unfinished to save time - in peacetime a join like that would be pared-back flush with each face.

Dead South, and you can see a heavy concrete roof has been added and given a look I haven't seen on others round here, perhaps at the whim of the builder, in his own time at the end of the day, perhaps for a specific reason, like breaking up its outline in a bare-arsed field - the trees may not have been there then, just a low/trimmed hedge?

The light was muted and with uniform weathering it was not the best conditions for photography, but you can see the bobbled effect of 20 or so pimples rising out of the body of the concrete.

The positioning of the bunker - which would have had a section of ten men when fully manned with a couple of LMG's and maybe some anti-tank capability, Boyes .55" A/T rifle or one of the Home Guard 'contraptions' (The Northover Projector) - is ideal for covering the tunnel under the main-line to Basingstoke to the West (upper image) and the bend in the road coming up from the South (lower image).

Although the positioning of the door without an additional protective blast-wall suggests that the main expected role was to cover/counter enemy advance up the road from the south - the Odiham area. Once the Odiham/Alton area was in their hands, they would have several air bases to bring in troops, and would be heading to Farnborough and Blackbush, to take/neutralise the air bases there?

And/or indeed - to neutralise the vast garrison/training area of Aldershot-Farnborough-North Camp, Arborfield, Camberley-Frimley, Chobham, Crookham, Deepcut, Pirbright/Bisley and Southwood-Minley (hell - it was all military round here!), before turning-right for London!

By some chance twist of irony, there are at the same place, three modern, civilian, triple-spike 'containment' barriers, aping the old dragons-teeth, but probably presenting little challenge to a Challenger II! They join-together like jig-saw puzzle pieces!

T is for Two - Hobbycraft Rack Toys

These are fun, one being a copy of previously seen stuff, the other a rather weird take on millinery! It's funny, you can go to one of these big-box stores regularly for several years and find nothing beyond a mould-your-own pirate fort to shelfie, or you can go three times in three months and walk away with something after every visit! I was in Hobbycraft the other day for a multi-compartment storage tray and left with three, and these two!

"Throw an egg in it; that'll make it Easter-bonnet'ty!" Yeah, seriously . . . but a nice set of mini dinosaurs married to a scenic space-taker and a couple of bits of greenery, Easter bonnet's are all about the greenery!

The two on the right are from forthcoming posts on kids comic giveaways, and while the Hobbycraft ones are similar they are 'new' copies rather than pantographed clones, and - it has to be said - of slightly poorer quality/finish.

The palm trees are fascinating - from a technical point of view - as they are a single moulding (that frond is growing out of the trunk), which must be shaped with heat, probably while still hot from the moulding process? The shrub is clearly a fish-tank thing with a weight-basket attached to bury in the gravel at the bottom of a tank!

And they both have this bi-colour single-shot moulding which pushes the paler colour to the extremities, which have looked at before, again coming our hobby via aquaria? 

While these are branded to Unique, who we've seen before as purveyors of fine novelty tat! They are smaller copies of the Henbrandt ones we saw here, the originals going to five poses, to which we added a sixth pose here.

I don't know if these knock-offs have copied all six sculpts as they are only sold in fours and all the bags had the same contents? That's it; a couple of rack-toys in Hobbycraft now.

I would add that House of Marbles are carrying the Henbrandt set in new colours, so we will see these again here at Small Scale World.

H is for How They Come In - While in London!

I managed to get up to the party shop at Clapham Junction again this year, it's a routine now, I don't really look at my watch on the second troll round the show (after the pub!), but once it's obviously dark and heading for five' or six'ish, I get the over-ground back to Clapham and wander up to the party shop (which closes late).

I have a little mosey round, and head back to the Station, find an hour or more's the wait for a Fleet stopper, so get the next up-line to Waterloo, grab a burger and get the fast-to-Woking service out of there which slides through Clapham without stopping! It used to be every half-hour from both stations, but since privatisation it's got steadily harder to go anywhere conveniently - thanks Tories!

But before all that shenanigans, Mr. Evans handed me a pack from The Toy Project (one of several toy charities both sides of the pond) as soon as I arrived! They actually weren't at the show this year - having not been invited - but Peter had been up and picked me a handful of useful figures, among which were another Beatle (Macca-moneybags is the left-hooker isn't he?) cake decoration, some Lucky Toys (et al.) figures and a farmer from one of the sets Pagett/A-Z were carrying a couple of years ago.

The Piratical chap in yellow might be from a board-game, he seems to have a cocked or tricorne-hat designed to stack something (counters) on and a very board-gamey base? A Disney princess type and small PVC farmer (New Ray?) make up the lot - thanks Peter, and you can support The Toy Project here.

So to the party shop; they had moved everything around and while the novelty/party-favour section was larger, there was less there of interst to me/you, but I managed a set of Iwako knock-offs including a third iteration of the micro-tank, this time branded to Symex and the same guns we saw last time (The Works) as a single, but now three!

I also bought these as they were dirt cheap, and I think they are a re-shoot of an old 1970's tool; the 'rubber jiggler' / hollow finger-puppet dinos', here a bit stiffer, but still rubbery! Actually there's a fair bit of dinosaur stuff gathering in the queue so we will have a dino-fest soon! And note they have been bought-in as Asda clearance (I vaguely recall eschewing them in Asda as too expensive around the 4/5-quid mark a year or two ago?), so they may still be findable in Walmart 'over there'?

As it happens, the Iwako and 'Rock Star' boxes were both still here, they went to storage last week but I quickly shot these 'cumulative' shots before I shipped them out!

C is for Chasseurs - Historex No's 634 & 641

You see the first plate here is what I think of as Hussar uniforms, but they are definitely Chasseurs, and Nappy himself thought they were cheaper than Hussars so . . . whatever!

Remember, although I'm cropping-out the odd dog-ear, these are all roughly A4, and {print to screen} will produce A4 sheets for you, even of the colour plates which are actually closer to A6 in the original.

H is for Hussars - Historex No. 198

Probably could have been tacked onto the previous post, but it has a separate number so one hopes a separate colour-plate will turn-up for it at some point? The sheet lacks detailed sketches too, but is a four-pager.

H is for Hussards - Historex No's 632, 633 & 698

Two things have reared themselves up since yesterday; firstly, I jumped in too quick on Sunday after finding the papers, and they will need a separate page (above, in a day or two) to link to the posts by code number as some sets - like this one - carry several numbers! So we will be building a check list for transfer to the A-Z entry as we go! It will also help us work out what papers are missing?

Secondly, I am shit at Napoleonic uniforms/unit designations, these are 'Hussards' right? Well they are - it says so, but there is a 'Hussar' sheet as well! Then there's lots of 'Chasseur' cavalry who look like what I think Hussars should look like! They are all light-cavalry - as far as I can tell, but I suspect some are lighter than others and some may be considered medium (if heavy have breast-plates) in the absence of that designation as anything other than vague (Dragoons). but . . . look, the Napoleonic war-gamers and figure painters will know what they are looking at, which is one of the points of publishing these!

I was for a short while in the late-19980/early-1990's a bit of an expert on armoured cars and half-tracks, but have forgotten most of it, as I'm now filling the filing cabinet with toys, toy figures and toy-company stuff, and when that cabinet is the grey matter between your ears, there's only so much room! I could Google it and try a bit of bluffing (my PM would!), but what's the point? They are what they are and people will get what they want from them!

If I were to try bluffing it I might have used this page, which seem to be a reasonable preamble through the types, but even he confuses it by using both terms in the same section! I think 'ard is an occasional French version (pretention?) of 'ar? Anyway, the Chasseurs (who will come last in this group of posts) are described as having cheaper uniforms and horses, despite being the ones looking most like my idea of Hussars!

H is for Historex Ephemera - Louis XV and Some Polish Posh Totty

Ages and ages ago, I won a competition ran by MSFoy over at the excellent (and far better written than my wittering's) Prometheus in Aspic Blog, which was for a bundle of old Historex sheets, which variously include English and/or bi-lingual guides to the regiments and uniforms of the Napoleonic wars, and/or some B&W 'detailing' or reverse aspect sketches and/or a colour-plate painting guide.

I thought they were in storage/the garage, but they turned-up last night in a box at the back of the attic! I already had a few of the colour plates, while Mr. Foy sent some extra B&W sheets, so between the two lots a pretty good run of the - mostly French - subjects has been assembled.

They were going to go on a separate Blog, but the last thing I need is a ['nother] separate Blog! So I will proceed to start getting them up here, as nostalgic ephemera, which may be of use to figure painters, with many thanks to Tony, and apologies for doing so little with them, for so long.

Starting with the easiest/smallest, 'Louis the Beloved' who actually seems to have been both ineffectual and corrupt! And his babe from Poland!

There's no set number with these papers; most of the sheets are tied into the catalogue numbers of the various kits one could purchase, remembering also that you could buy separate accessory sets for converting, and larger boxed sets were sold, with various individual numbered kits and some accessories in the one outer, Tony believes that a lot of his haul came from those sets, while I don't know if this pair were catalogued items, or something to be built-up from the other civilian models in the range?

The files for the A-Z listing on Historex are still in storage, so a complete (or as complete as I can get it) listing of Historex's product range will come along later!