Reinforcements

I did say a couple of posts back that I had stopped buying figures as I have far more than I could ever paint. Well, thanks to Mark and his offer of vintage figures, I am pleased to announce that another 50+ Hintons have made it into the fold. I couldn’t resist these as they came with a pedigree – Mark bought them in person from the Hinton Hunt shop in Camden Passage in the early 1970’s. I visited the shop myself around 1974 but they only had the larger collectors figures on display at the time so I came home with a 54mm Caledonian Warrior – not very satisfactory.

Receiving a batch of vintage figures is the height of geeky excitement for me as I never know quite what I’m getting and this lot did not disappoint. Many of the figures still had big chunks of flash metal attached – HH figures were notorious for the amount of flash they came with but now instead of being annoying it’s actually endearing to see! My favourite figures to arrive were four British Dragoons that had been painted as French Dragoons. The code number under the base (BN40) is the lowest for any of the HH British cavalry so I guess it must have been one of the first figures issued. They are certainly very crude in comparison to later castings but I think they’re great. These lads will eventually join my Scots Grey’s in the Union Brigade.

Another gem included were twenty of FN244 French Fusilier Charging. This figure is listed in the Hinton Hunt catalogue as a Fusilier for the period 1807/12 and will give me a second unit of Fusiliers to go with my Battalion of the 45th. Mark had painted these as Swiss Infantry and added in nine Old Guard Grenadiers in the firing position (FN23) to go along with them. As I have mentioned before, finding French Line Infantry figures has proved surprisingly hard so I am very pleased to have these.

Also received were five British Royal Horse Artillery gunners (which means I now have plenty of men for my lonely RHA Officer to boss about), four British Household cavalry troopers, two French Guard Engineers, seven Hungarian Grenadiers and a spare horse for Napoleon - could things get any better?