It’s been a week or two since I started this skirmish game and today I had the chance to conclude the final moves.
The story or scenario so far of my 1:1 skirmish game using pound store plastic warriors converted into colonial infantry and natives – photos and blogpost 1
The native spearmen attacking from the ridge on the right had done serious damage to the numbers of Redcoats relieving the Gatehouse patrol.
It was fairly obvious that the Redcoats would be unable to hold out at the Gatehouse to the Pass for long against the massed native rifles on the ridge.
Turn 4
Once most of the native spearmen had been dealt with, the cleverest solution for the Redcoats was to run for cover beneath the ridge that the native riflemen were on or remain across the other side of the valley beyond rifle range.
Turn 6
By Turn 6, many of the Redcoat troops had perished in the melee fighting against the Native Spearmen, leaving mostly the militia rifles to attempt to reinforce or rescue the Highlander patrol at the ruined Gatehouse.
Turn 7
Turning the gaming board round to get my painting seat back in action, this time we are looking from the native rifle positions on the left ridge down the valley.
Turn 7 to 11 saw the Militia and remaining Redcoats reach the Gatehouse. Several Native Riflemen left the ridge to attempt to cut off the retreat of the Militia but were fought off in melee.
Redcoat orders: What to do on this confused situation with so few men?
A d6 dice roll sorted this out. 1-3 retreat, 4 occupy Gatehouse or 5-6 attack the native ridge.
The Redcoats and Militia rolled to retreat, aiming to return with reinforcements. They remained below the ridge or out of rifle range. Their flag or colours were safe.
The Redcoats and Militia retreat out of rifle range.
The surviving Redcoats, rescued Highlanders from the Gatepost and the Militia halt out of rifle range. The heliograph operator flashes back a request for reinforcements.
Likewise the natives rolled for their next action and also retreated, melting away from the ridge to watch from the hills.
A most satisfactory game, albeit a game that soon proved unwinnable for the Redcoats after the heavy losses against the native spearmen. It proved interesting enough despite being shelved twice, played over three short occasions, all part of the convenience of a portable game board and of solo gaming.
It was a joy to finally be handling figures that I had been converting and painting for many previous weeks. It was the good looking game I had been working towards and envisaged. I liked the Old School / Featherstone / Wells look of the game and of the rugged desert Heroscape Hex terrain.
Blogposted by Mark Man of TIN on Pound Store Plastic Warriors, 25 February 2018.
What 1-48 means and how big are these figures?
1:48 is an exact scale, it means that the scaled models are 48 times smaller than the actual size of the real object.
It is sometimes referred to as quarter scale because a quarter inch represents one foot and is equivalent to the model trains 0 scale in USA (note that in the UK 0 Scale is more commonly 1/43.5 or 7mm to the foot and in the rest of Europe 0 Scale is 1:45 !).
Tamiya and other scale model makers offer a wide selection of military vehicle models and figures in this scale and there a number of ready to play die cast models available too. (1-48 Tactic website)
This is useful to know, even though I don’t think I have any 1:48 scale materials. There will be plenty of bashed ones online.
An average standing man in 1:48 scale is approximately 36mm tall, 1-48TACTIC figures are therefore fairly close in size to the commonly called 32mm (when measured to the eyes) or “heroic scale” wargame figures, but are more realistically proportioned. (1-48 Tactic website)
Other websites also suggest that 36mm high figures like my Poundland plastic warriors are similar to 1:48 scale. Big Lee’s Miniature Adventures BLMA website http://www.blmablog.com/p/scale-guide.html suggests that:
1/48 is 33.5mm to eye line, 36mm to scalp, equivalent to US O Gauge which is 0.25 inches to the foot and referred to as “quarter inch scale”. Popular for plastic aircraft kits (Tamiya). (Translated from a table on BLMA website)
Wikipedia suggests that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1:48_scale is also (close to) the scale of Lego Minifigures! I checked and the Lego figure looked a little bigger to the head top / scalp. “At this scale, 1/4 inch represents 1 foot. It is similar in size to 1:50 scale and 1:43 scale which are popular for diecast vehicles.” Quarter inch scale is mentioned again.
The Miniatures Page TMP website article on scale seems to agree that somewhere between 1:43 and 1:48 scale is about 35/36mm and also O Guage, This is useful to know if I need some railway components to my figure gaming. Unpainted O gauge or 1:48 civilians for railways sold en masse also offer conversion figure possibilities. http://theminiaturespage.com/ref/scales.html
Tamiya 1:48
Tamiya 1:48 kits have been mentioned several times and I checked their website. Figures appear about 36/37mm, so slightly taller than my Poundland plastic warriors (35/36mm) and obviously far more finely detailed. There are tanks, planes and a few useful battlefield accessories. http://www.tamiya.com/english/products/32512g_infantry/index.htm
Doll’s House scale 1:48
1:48 seems to be a dolls house size as well, with some rather fine and expensive accessories
Malcolm’s Miniatures models has 1:48 scale wall and paving moulds for air drying clay (Das) which look very useful at £5 each. Presumably it works with FIMO too. http://www.malcolmsminiatures.co.uk/1%3A48+moulds
Being some illustrations of ‘The Dumb Soldier’ poem by Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), as featured in our recent garden games post:
I was fascinated by the discovery by Tony (of the interesting Tin Soldiering On blog) of this type of crude wartime or postwar hollowcast figure, the plastic pound store warriors of their day, buried in the garden of the house he grew up in whilst digging the garden
He is about 54mm (2″) scale, I’m not sure where he has come from, my parents moved into the house in about 1946 shortly after it was built and I have lived here all my life and can’t remember ever owning him as a child so he is a bit of a mystery, but he will stand guard on my painting tray from now on … it ties in with the age of the house which was built just after the war, my mother and father moved in on his demob in 1946 I think . Tony, Tin Soldiering On blog
So I was curious to see the same type of figure unearthed and turn up for sale on an online site and bought this “Dumb soldier” to go with several others that have turned up in joblots.
54mm-ish WW2 or post war lead hollow cast, discovered in Bristol by Dave Hough, now in my collection. The pound store plastics of their day. Looks like it’s been buried a while ….
They are very similar in style to the crude moulded figures that I produced from vintage metal moulds.
First is a three page spread by British illustrator Hilda Boswell (1903 – 1976) in watercolours, from her illustrated version of a Child’s Garden of Verses, published in 1963. The first two pages are a double page spread, broken down to page by page to see more details. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Boswell
Archaeologists of the future might see this toy soldier burial as some kind of strange ritual practice. (In my experience anything Archaeologists do not understand is linked to strange ‘ritual’ practice).
Her “Dumb Soldier” looks much like the 1960s Herald Plastic Guardsman I grew up with, first introduced in the early 1950s as plastics steadily took over from lead figures for children. So this Herald figure could easily have been the model.
One of my Britain’s Herald Guardsman (1950s-1970s)
The other illustration in my collection is from the late Brian Wildsmith (1930-2016), a well-known British illustrator.
I was amazed and pleased to see that his 1960s illustrated version of A Child’s Garden of Verses is back / still in print (Blackwells, 2017). So you can own a copy too!
‘The Dumb Soldier’ poem from my old bashed family copy of RLS Child’s Garden of Verses with illustration by the late Brian Wildsmith.
Lost or deliberately buried in the garden?
My late Dad as a wartime child was given some ‘lost’ metal figures including a coronation coach dredged up from his father’s employer’s garden pond, presumably unwanted by the previous, possibly careless child owners. Long lost again many years beforei was born, I often thought of these treasures whilst launching amphibious assaults across our garden pond and then sometimes having to root around in the pond bottom mud for the heavier casualties.
I lost plenty enough small Airfix figures in the pile of builders sand we called a sandpit. Digging one into the lawn, however good his trench or fire pit, would have led to pretty quick decapitation by 1970s hovermower.
B.P.S BlogPostscript
I was amazed and pleased to see that Wildsmith’s 1960s illustrated version of A Child’s Garden of Verses is back / still in print (Blackwells, 2017). So you can own a copy too!
Looking for #FEMbruary inspiration, I found in my scrapbook an old Victorian photograph of the King of Siam’s ornate bodyguard. I wanted to know more about these exotically costumed figures.
Dahomey is now known as Benin and these were the “only female soldiers in the world who then routinely served as combat troops.”
As Mike Dash writes “Dahomey’s female troops were not the only martial women of their time. There were at least a few contemporary examples of successful warrior queens, the best-known of whom was probably Nzinga of Matamba, one of the most important figures in 17th-century Angola—a ruler who fought the Portuguese, quaffed the blood of sacrificial victims, and kept a harem of 60 male concubines, whom she dressed in women’s clothes.”
With so many different types of female Warrior, a Generic female warrior troop is probably the best response to the FEMbruary challenge using Pound Store Plastic figures.
But what about the Siam Warrior Women?
“Nor were female guards unknown; in the mid-19th century, King Mongkut of Siam (the same monarch memorably portrayed in quite a different light by Yul Brynner in The King and I) employed a bodyguard of 400 women.”
“But Mongkut’s guards performed a ceremonial function, and the king could never bear to send them off to war.”
Dahomey Amazons in Action
Mike Dash made the distinction between these ceremonial female troops and the Dahomey warriors.
“What made Dahomey’s women warriors unique was that they fought, and frequently died, for king and country. Even the most conservative estimates suggest that, in the course of just four major campaigns in the latter half of the 19th century, they lost at least 6,000 dead, and perhaps as many as 15,000. In their very last battles, against French troops equipped with vastly superior weaponry, about 1,500 women took the field, and only about 50 remained fit for active duty by the end.”
Who had heard of this one, The First Franco-Dahomean War“, certainly a new one to me, “which ensued in 1890, resulted in two major battles, one of which took place in heavy rain at dawn outside Cotonou, on the Bight of Benin”, quoted from Mike Dash’s article. This pitted French colonial troops against male and female Dahomey troops.
From the Daily True Delta newspaper, New Orleans, USA, March 15, 1857
These details seem to tally with John Thomson’s photograph (below).
The photograph came from torn out part of a magazine page in my scrapbook of a tiny picture by John Thomson, Victorian pioneer photographer. (Stephen White wrote the featured book on Thomson). Exotic, fantastic and ceremonial uniforms. Part of the Victorian and ongoing fascaination with the exotic and the Orient.
Famously Mongkut the King of Siam offered elephants to the US President for use as heavy transport in the American civil War, featured in The King and I film
The idea of these women duelling in front of the other splendidly dressed women soldiers clearly caught the attention of the American journalist for the Daily True Delta newspaper in 1857. This would fit with the Gerard De Gre / Bartitsu duelling rules that I featured last year.
Some of these ideas can be brought into creating a fictional women’s troop made from Pound Store Plastic Warrior Conversions. They would serve well for Bronte inspired Imagi-Nation troops in the Pacific or African realms that the Bronte family created as part of their Gondal, Angria and GlassTown sagas.
So as part of my FEMbruary challenge on Pound Store Plastic Warriors blog, I will be attempting to turn this Poundland penny dreadful Plastic Warrior into a Generic Amazon warrior within the next few weeks? Tissue paper, PVA, Scalpel at the ready.
This pound store plastic figure has a suitable ‘hairstyle’ and with some tissue paper robes, which should make a female Warrior with spear or sword. The breast pockets or pouches even add to the appearance of what Donald Featherstone coyly calls “feminine attributes.”
Blogposted by Mark Man of TIN blog on his Pound Store Plastic Warriors sister blog site, FEMbruary 15 2018
Ross Macfarlane of The Battle Game of the Month blog wondered what my Pound Store version of my #FEMbruary challenge might be?
Interesting ideas – not sure what #FEMbruary Pound Store figure conversion I might attempt yet.
Looking back through this blog there are a fair number of female plastic figures ranging from pirates to space princesses, pioneer women and native Americans, zoo staff and visitors, to police officers.
Late last weekend my Colonial pound store plastic desert warrior conversions went into action against my Redcoats.
I have been working on these figures for many weeks and finally it was a chance to use them on my 192 Hexes of Joy game board, complete with extra added pink deserty Hexes.
Somewhere in the foothills of Generica, a patrol is overdue.
The initial dispositions are shown below, a Redcoat column marching up the valley to rescue the missing Patrol of the 3rd (Foot and Mouth) Highlanders, who were camped at the old gatehouse in the Pass.
Either side on the high ground of the valley are amassed Generican desert Warriors with rifles (bottom left) or long spears and shields (top right).
A heliograph operator flashes back information, summoning reinforcements. The Redcoats look to be outnumbered!
Generican desert riflemen with their long jezails or muskets line the rocky valley walls.
Will any reinforcements arrive in time? A slouch hatted company of local Militia are in Reserve nearby.
Will Private Widdle and the other 3rd Foot and Mouth Highlanders be rescued and the Pass held?
Being bunched up by the terrain, the first few volleys from the Redcoats were ineffectual before the Generican spearmen charged down the right hand Valley slopes into melee. With no savings throws, the initial casualties were high for both sides. Fixed bayonets met sword and shield. The Redcoat officer, leading from the front sword in hand, was soon downed.
Luckily, the d6 was rolled for when the Redcoat reinforcements of rifle militia would arrive in game turns. They rolled a two, so soon more rifles and boots on the ground will be stomping up the valley.
The following blogpost part 2 shows the conclusion of the skirmish:
Rules are my hexed up Close Little Wars, some of the simplest Donald Featherstone rules designed for natives and troops in cluttered terrain, originally in North American forests but here used in rocky desert. The cluttered terrain is made up of Heroscape hex tiles, now many percent extra deserty with the help of some painted Hexes!
Previous posts illustrate the conversions of cheap Pound Store 32-36mm plastic modern infantry into colonial figures.
Blogposted by Mark, Man of TIN on Pound Store Plastic Warriors, 3 February 2018
Pound Store Plastic Warriors 