Perusing Prussians

I spent many happy hours as a teenager thumbing through my copy of the Hinton Hunt Figures 20mm catalogue drawing up lists of potential purchases. It was necessary to buy a minimum of 100 figures at a time to get them at an affordable price so the lists tended to be quite long. In addition to my Napoleonic wish lists I also toyed with the idea of ECW (foiled when my school mates opted for Minifigs), ACW (rejected because the figure poses sounded limited) and even Norman Conquest (what an investment that would have been!). In the end I decided to stick with the Napoleonic Prussians that Dave and I had already started to collect – a rare example of restraint.

A well thumbed page of my original Hinton Hunt Figures catalogue - click the image to zoom in for the full 'anorak' experience.

Back then I only got to see the figures poses I actually bought as the catalogue wasn’t illustrated and Miniature Warfare magazine had just the occasional fuzzy black and white picture that might (or might not be) Hinton Hunt figures in action. Now though, with my second wargaming childhood, I have examples of most of them and those I’m missing I can at least get to see pictures of.

Der Kreigspieler 139 Landwehr Lancer - an almost perfect (and contemporary) copy of Hinton Hunt PN.39.

One example that I hadn’t seen before dropped through the letterbox this week (thanks to Don) namely PN.39 Landwehr Lancer Trooper (mounted) charging. I now have a 6 figure squadron of these (they are actually the Der Kreigspieler equivalent of Hinton Hunt but this is one of those occasions when DK is of a quality almost as good as HH) and the plan is to combine them with a squadron of HH Uhlans – but first those fusiliers!