More Dragoons

Having been inspired by the final look of the Inniskillings I decided to fish out my DK British Dragoons and give them a make over. These are more of the figures supplied by Don in the US which I have touched up and re-based rather than give them the full re-painting treatment.

The figure is listed in the Der Kreigspielers catalogue as 825-215 British Royal Dragoon and seems fairly unique in that it does not bear any resemblance to its Hinton Hunt counterpart. It does however have the same general look and stance as a generic one-piece HH charging cavalry model (although obviously this is pure coincidence). As with all DK figures they are a bit thin when stood next to HH models and are very definitely 2nd line troopers.

This unit will represent a Squadron of the 1st Royal Dragoons and join the Inniskillings and Grey’s to form a proper Union Brigade. I’m still working on the Blues and I also have a battery of Royal Horse Artillery in the pipeline so all in all General Ponsonby will have a respectable force of British Heavy Cavalry to command.

1980’s Flashback

This picture was taken around about 1981 and shows some of the Hinton Hunt Prussians from my original collection in action against a motley bunch of French (including dare I say it, unpainted Airfix). This was taken after I disposed of the figures to my good friend Malcolm and before he disposed of them to some bloke he met in a pub. You really will have to click to enlarge this image to make any sense of it.

In the centre, defending the Airfix cottages (how old school is that eh?) are a square of Prussian Infantry (PN4) and a square of Silesian Landwehr (PN19). In the foreground are some Minifigs Cavalry (also painted by me) although I can’t remember what they are. You can also clearly make out a Prussian gun, crew and limber supporting the squares. It actually looks like I painted a six-horse team for that gun complete with both horse and limber riders, sigh…

If you put your glasses on and peer carefully to the top of the picture you can see the awful sight of my HH Hussars (PN85) being routed by unpainted Airfix Cuirassiers. I have decided that in the rules I will be using with my new HH armies they will add +1 to any die roll against plastic troops!

Inniskilling Recruits

Thanks to the arrival of some recruits sent by Clive I have been able to make up my small troop of British Dragoons to a full six figure Squadron. If you remember (and why wouldn’t you?) I originally had only three of BN40 British Dragoon Trotting in Helmet so the extra figures have been a boost to the British Heavy Cavalry contingent. I have said before that these Hinton Hunt one-piece castings are a bit of an acquired taste being of variable quality and detail. This particular figure is one of the oldest offerings from Marcus Hinton with less animation than his latter work but perhaps this is part of the reason that I like it so much. These castings suffered badly from HH flash metal syndrome and each one took me half-an-hour with an array of files to transform from an almost solid block of metal into the fine looking troopers you see here. It’s no wonder that the original owner of some of these figures had just painted over the flash rather than remove it – he probably had something better to do with his time than I do. This latest addition to the British Cavalry now leaves my three Household Cavalry Troopers out on a limb as they had been amalgamated with the Inniskilling’s into a single combined squadron. Fortunately I have also received a couple more spare figures that will enable me to increase the Blues to a full Squadron as well.