This link to the recent Country Life article by Charles Harris includes pictures of Wells’ grandsons as youngsters playing with his collection came from the BMSS website
Country Life,www.countrylife.co.uk magazine of 8 December 2021 “We all fall down like toy soldiers” by Charles Harris. copyright Country Life Etc. Etc.
The article (above) ends with the writer’s nostalgia, their family memories and point of view, along with concerns about the toy soldier collectors of the future.
Before Alan Tradgardland Gruber mentions it, where has the BMSS wargaming section of yore gone?
Another lucky bid online for a few pounds brought this haul of battered and colourful American Indians.
17N Britain’s brave with rifle or the similar posed John Hill Co. (JohillCo) post War Indian on Guard.
I wanted to pick up a cheap and colourful opponent for my Redcoats or Bluecoat Troops, a wily native ally to match my Zulus.
A few broken spears and rifles are no problem to fix.
These rifle, bow and spear toting native warriors should prove great for garden and tabletop games once repaired and mounted on tuppenny bases. They are almost perfect for Donald Featherstone’s simple Close Wars skirmish rules (in his appendix to his War Games 1962).
More correctly these figure should be known today as Native Americans, First Nations or First Peoples but the ones you can see here are pure Imagi-Nations, wily natives straight out of Hollywood B Movies and Wild West TV shows.
A mixture of makers – Johillco, Britains and Crescent 50 and 54mm. Bottom row 2 is a slim thin Crescent 1950s die cast, covered in cracks. FiguresA wide variety of figures from a range of makers: top left first 2 Britain’s figures , top row 3,4 and 6 are otherwise Crescent 1950s. Bottom right damaged Timpo archers, 1950s.
Nicely animated crawling Braves sneaking up on an unwary opponent!
I get the feeling that some manufacturers might have quite enjoyed sculpting the animated poses and bright colours after producing regiment after regiment of increasingly khaki figures.
I’m sure after World War 1 these Indians also fitted a need to get away from the reality and aftermath of modern war off and away to the lawless and heroic but imaginary frontiers of the ‘Wild Wild West’, so popular in its many formats in fiction, cinema and Buffalo Bill shows.
1950s Timpo Indian Drummer (left) and Crescent chief seated right (prewar?) Johillco Indian with Tomahawk (postwar)Right – Johillco crawling Indian.Not a Red Indian more of a bronzed one with this unusual red bronze metallic painted skin tone – Crescent 1950s figure with broken rifle. I have also seen this paint finish used on Crescent postwar American GI mortar crew troops stripped to the waist that may have suggested African Americans?An animated Indian Chief figure on the hunt from William Britain 16N Crown Range of figuresElaborate head dress on a Britain’s chief or Medicine Man with Tomahawk on movable arm (Pre and post war).Fine Crescent 1950s Indian chief dancing with shield minus tomahawk and (right) medicine man with snake curled up leg!
A curious hole which may have held a pin to attach a shield? Not sure of maker yet.
Two of the T and B (Taylor and Barrett) figures were a bit smaller scale, around 40mm. They blend quite well with the 40mm Holger Erickson Prince August Homecast moulds.
Taylor and Barrett Indians can be seen alongside my home cast and based 40mm Prince August figures.
ID of figures based on figure markings and Norman Joplin’s wonderful The Great Book of Hollowcast Figures.
Army Blue troops after repair and repaint – Johillco buglers, Herald Guardsman kneeling firing on Fimo base and a modern Home cast mould version of Guardsman en garden alongside an original hollowcast version. Emerging shiny from the box, a set that never existed – Army Blue troops
Here are more of the damaged and paint bashed play-worn scrap or repair figures to join Army Blue (as H.G. Wells would call them).
These are Imagi-Nations paint schemes, channeling mixed uniform influences of American Civil War Union infantry, Danish Guards and late 19th Century Belgian, Prussian and Danish Infantry.
Close up you might notice a range of Army Blue troop types.
Above: The first two were once Britain’s Redcoat Guards marching with rifles at slope, followed by two Britain’s Redcoat Line infantry, a Fimo base repair to a damaged footless US Marines figure, (Home cast? type) Officer with pistol and one of my recent Home cast infantry.
From the back – The simple white belts, equipment and cross belts show up more than practical black and gives a proper toy soldier look.
Basing and Painting
A variety of basing can be seen, experimenting with bases for these soldiers to be part of future Close Little Wars skirmish games on the games table or in the summer garden.
Four of them are based on 2p coins, although I am still experimenting with the best adhesive. Wood Glue might not be strong enough. Whilst it was still wet and white, I mixed in some flock to see how this worked. Flock basing is not very traditional toy soldier but then the two pence bases are practical, suitably light but weighty enough, inexpensive and more importantly, to hand.
Figures still need their final coats of varnish and any final details.
I wanted to get a shiny factory first-grade everyday paint look, not overpainted with fine details, to look as if they might once have appeared from a toy soldier factory.
Failing to find an acrylic Gloss flesh, the faces were a Matt Flesh Revell acrylic mixed with some of their Fiery Red Gloss and some Revell Clear Gloss. The Matt Flesh in itself is too pale.
Eyes and moustaches were put in with cocktail sticks. Other fine line details such as chin straps and cross belts were put on using the fine points of cocktail sticks as well.
The Before Photos
The original state of some of these figures can be seen in the following ‘Before’ photo, before restoration, repair and repaint.
Rather than strip them back to bare metal, I gave each figure a quick wipe over to remove ancient play-dirt and dust and then used several layers of Revell Gloss Acrylic for depth of colour.
Part of my Christmas horde of figures to repaint and repair. Some require new heads and arms to be ordered.
Some of the unusual colour schemes such as the green bonnet and kilt legs and red coat Highlander will stay as they are, for future reference.
Some of the half finished figures can be seen on a previous blogpost:
More rescues and remounts from the Lead Graveyard …
Damaged and second grade paint quality figures from my Christmas horde – some will appear in the Army Red blogpost.Emerging Shiny from a Toy Soldier Box Set that never existed – as shiny as the day they were first made – Army Blue troops.
A sneaky peek at some of their shiny renewed Redcoat opposition saved for another blogpost:
I really like the Army Red White inspiration over at the Tradgardland blog: Guaaards!
A pile of Zulus and natives ready for the painting table …
Recently I have been experimenting with using Revell Gloss Acrylic paints as they are not as smelly as the Matt Humbrol or Airfix enamels that I used in the past.
Just one whiff of enamel paint brings back happy memories of childhood and teenage years busily painting in a tiny fume filled room.
A spot of gloss painting is a change from several post Christmas weeks of “F and B”, Flocking and Basing (or rebasing) vintage Airfix and Peter Laing figures.
I am finding it difficult to get a dark brown gloss Revell acrylic for painting savage natives defending their tribal lands against imperialist aggressors.
Whilst I have been doing this, several interesting batches of Zulus have popped up in wargames blogs.
My fierce but motley playbashed bunch of Britain’s natives have been slowly collected together over several months from job-lot, damaged, scrap or for repair lead hollowcast figures bought mostly through EBay. Such damaged figures have little value to collectors. So it doesn’t really matter if I repaint or repurpose them.
Original paint play bashed or palely repainted, ready for the brown gloss paint.
I bought some Humbrol Gloss Brown Number 10 and used this only very briefly on a couple of figures before I got fed up of the fumes … not very family friendly! Next time I will paint with these enamel paints outdoors or with doors and all the windows open.
The end gloss results look promising already, even before gloss varnish, and suitably toy soldier like.
Shield designs aside, a suitable weapon such as a spear needs to be added to the hand. I have tried filing and adding a wire spear but on first attempt it did not stick.
These chunky Zulu figures are second grade Britain’s figures that were sold in A Series sets or singly. The fragile knobkerry on each of these figures is usually found broken, the original is shown in Andrew Rose’s excellent The Collector’s Guide to Toy Soldiers (Salamander 1985/97).
Zulus with arms – Detail from Page 89 of Andrew Rose’s The Collector’s Guide to Toy Soldiers (Salamander, 1997)
Andrew Rose’s book also shows various arm versions of the Britain’s classic running Zulus of Africa Set 147, 1906 to 1959 and another version of the set into the final Britain’s lead year of 1966.
Handy to see these more slender Zulu figures as shortly before Christmas I bought a Britain’s Zulus “jigsaw puzzle” in the form of a job-lot of bashed legs, bodies and bases. This should keep me busy fixing throughout the year. Recast Britain’s type arms with spears or even rifles can be sourced from firms like Dorset Model Soldiers.
A Britain’s Zulu “jigsaw puzzle” ready for repair and repaint.
Interestingly these loincloths on these jigsaw Zulus seem to have been painted by their owners in stripes and spots for a more tribal animal skin look.
Spotty or striped loincloths added by owners? on these Britain’s Zulus.
Britain’s used to indicate ‘native’ or ‘non-uniform’ troops by using at random three basic colours of yellow, red and blue for clothing – “The loincloths were painted in three different colour schemes, as Britain’s always did for native troops or irregulars who might not be expected to wear uniform.” (Page 107, Britain’s Toy Soldiers 1893 -1932 by James Opie, published by Victor Gollancz, London, 1985)
Rough repair and rebasing using polymer clay (Fimo / Sculpey) of a Britain’s running Zulu and (left) Crescent Zulu A162, a former Reka product.
Not sure whether to preserve (if I can) the strange ‘Black and White Minstrel’ style extraordinary face painting on some of these Britain’s Zulus.
Not sure yet what to do with the shield designs as I don’t really intend these to be Zulus, rather more Generican Natives or Ashantee tribes.
Ashantees?
In the Bronte juvenilia of Glasstown and Angria, these tribes are the savage Ashantees.
The Bronte family juvenilia stories feature various tribal forces such as generic ‘Arabs’ or also Ashantee warriors, for their map of their Glasstown Confederacy and Angria ‘Imagi-Nations’ was based on West Africa, the natives based on early 19th Century journals and prints (pictured in the blogpost shown below)
The Ashantees are led against Angria by the fictional Quashia Quamina Kashna, son of the equally exotically named King Sai Too Too Quamina.
Quashia was adopted as a baby by the Bronte’s fictional Duke Of Wellington and a rivalry grows up between Quashia and his stepbrother Zamorna, Wellesley’s eldest son who becomes King Of Angria.
Quashia and several Western characters successively invade Angria including Branwell Bronte’s fictional alter ego ‘Northangerland’, Ardrah (who opposes the creation of Angria by Zamorna) and MacTerrorglen.
Confused? So am I, still slowly figuring out the complex and intricate Game of Thrones style cast of characters and events created over many years by the young Bronte sisters and their brother Branwell. If it proves too difficult to create scenarios, I may keep the places but fast forward the Bronte “Imagi-Nations” a few decades clear of the Bronte’s main fictional characters that populate their Gondal, Angria and Glasstown sagas.
Stranger than fiction?
This fictional story of Quashia is not that dissimilar to true stories of how native princes were assimilated, educated or westernised such as Alamayu, the son of Theodore, King of Abyssinia (buried in 1879 at Windsor Castle Chapel and commemorated on a plaque by Queen Victoria). Alamayu was captured in the Magdala Campaign of 1867-68.
The Magdala campaign in what is now modern day Ethiopia is described in fascinating detail in Ian Hernon’s Britain’s Forgotten Wars: Colonial Campaigns of the Nineteenth Century (Sutton, 2003), republished as a compilation of a trilogy of Hernon’s books. You may have also read this as the first part of the trilogy previously published by Ian Hernon as ‘Massacre and Retribution’ (Sutton, 1998).
So the Bronte juvenile stories, albeit fictional, are not much stranger than some real life Nineteenth Century events.
The Bronte family Gondal stories (devised by Emily and Anne) are based on North and South Pacific islands (mixed with a bit of Yorkshire for good measure!) so the islands of Gondal (North Pacific) and Gaaldine (South Pacific) no doubt have their own tribes.
Ashanti Chieftain c.1819 Wikipedia source
Ashanti warrior c. 1824 Wikipedia source
Illustrations from the Ashanti Empire Wikipedia entry show left an Ashanti warrior and right one with a simple musket and powder horn.
Plenty of scope for many interesting scenarios. That’s why I’m keeping the figures “Generic” rather than “Zulu”.
Still lots of lovely repair and repainting work to do … I will post photos of the finished results.
Close up scan of the Britain’s toy soldiers on the table. Spot the first casualty on the right.
I came across this Edwardian / WW1 postcard by Underwood the photographers featuring some delightful and familiar toy soldiers.
These look like the Foot Guards, marching at slope, firing, drummer and officer, some of my favourite Britain’s toy soldiers manufactured from their early days in the late 1890s /1901 onwards (wearing gaiters) right through to the 1950s / 1960s but ones which are still in production from time to time today, date on their base 1990.
The boy and the toys give this a look of H.G. Wells’ 1913 book Little Wars, mixed with Edwardian children in woollen Jerseys such as Christopher Robin from Winnie The Pooh and other children from A.A. Milne poems illustrated by E.H. Sheperd.
The bearded old soldier has a military style greatcoat, a hint of a Chelsea pensioner, opposite this curly haired boy (or almost girl?) Maybe the postcard suggests he is not only reliving his past battles with the Britain’s toy soldiers and bell tents but looking at his once eager young self. This is a motif repeated in famous Victorian paintings like Millais’ The Boyhood of Raleigh:
You know how you buy something, start researching it and come up with some unrelated unusual stories?
This postcard led me to discover more about early stereoscopic photographers in America, Edwardian penny magazines and one of the BFI’s most wanted missing silent films by a pioneering British woman film director. A film which started a court case between one early female film critic and the female director about whether women could direct proper films or not …
The toy soldier postcard was given away free in 1d weekly magazines, so there must be quite a few of these cards around, posted and unposted.
It was given away in Smart Fiction magazine published weekly 1d by Shurey’s of London which was published or flourished between 1913 and 1924 before merging with Smart Novels. It published short stories by a range of authors: http://www.philsp.com/data/data433.html#SMARTFICTION
The Underwood photograph was also given away in the similar Yes or No magazine, published weekly by Harry Shurey of London from 1904 – 1922, interestingly entitled in a 1917 (sample copy online) edition “A favourite in the trenches”:
Short story magazines for the boredom of billet and trenches must have been a welcome distraction. Would the soldiers have been sent these magazines and postcards by their families or would they have been bought and posted home by the soldiers to their children?
The Shurey family and lost British films …
The Shurey family were an interesting or pioneering bunch from publisher father Harry, editor Charles through to Harry’s daughter the 1920s silent movie producer Dorothy / Dinah Shureyhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinah_Shurey.
On the BFI most wanted lost films, Dinah Shurey’s final film The Last Post 1929 (sound added 1930) has an intriguingly Underwood style photo of children dressed as ‘toy’ soldiers.
Brief Plot Synopsis: Soldier takes the blame when his Bolshevik brother shoots a soldier during the General Strike (which was in 1926). All for the love of the same woman … childhood sweethearts etc … you can read more of the plot at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Post_(film)
Looks like this postcard has been well cared for in a scrapbook or album, having well marked triangular mount corners.
This Space for Communication?
A collector I know of animal and zoo postcards named Alan Ashby, author of We Went to the Zoo Today: The Golden Age of Zoo Postcards, pointed out to me once that postcards with the space on the back to write your message were permissable only from 1902 onwards in the UK. Hence the reminder “This Space for Communication.” Before then the short message had to be written squeezed into the caption space on the front of a picture postcard. The back was all for the important business of the address and postage stamps.
The cost of a postcard postage and the stamp give some you a rough idea of date if no postmark date can be read – the 1/2d or halfpenny postage mentioned on this unposted card changed to 1d round about 1918 onwards. If this had been posted it would likely had a George V stamp from the WWI period.
Alan Ashby also pointed out that many early postcards were mounted in albums, rather than posted, as they were bought as souvenirs of a visit or collected for scrapbooks.
Two of the different poses featured in the postcard. The Britain’s drummer is a restored or repaired and repainted one of mine, the others were recently acquired from Britain’s stockists and online. Note the recent 1990 shiny detailed paint work compared to the front older Britain’s second grade or lower quality three / four paint restricted palette.
The Toy soldiers?
These look distinctively like early Britain’s figures and bell tents. These look like the Britain’s Foot Guards, marching at slope, firing, drummer and officer, manufactured from the late 1890s /1901 onwards (wearing gaiters) right through to the 1950s / 1960s. Some are still in production from time to time today, dated on their base 1990.
This boy or girl and toy soldier or soldier daddy motif is obviously a sub genre of postcards across the whole of Europe at this time of war.
Lots more interesting WW1 era toy soldier postcards in his fascinating June 20, 2012 blog / Article “The Search for Identity in a Smaller World” by Alan Petrulis in his Metropostcard blog:
The Edwardian child in the postcard is not that different in appearance from the poorly child in an illustration of the Land Of Counterpane poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated here by US artist Jessie May Wilcox.
Robert Louis Stevenson himself was a poorly child who went onto become not only the famous novelist but also an early wargamer, writting up his battles in the Yallobelly Times maginatively about in the 1898 Scribners magazine article Stevenson at Play. http://vintagewargaming.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/robert-louis-stevenson.html
But collecting illustrations of this (my favourite?) poem and the difficulties of wargaming with toy soldiers in bed is a whole ‘nother story for a future blog post …
Now that’s what I call imaginative terrain! Jessie Wilcox Smith’s illustration to The Land of Counterpane. Wikipedia image source.
Posted by Mark, Man of TIN blog, 25 November 2016.
This Father’s Day gift this year has a double significance.
My late father had a small and much loved collection of lead toy figures during the Second World War.
Somehow these figures did not survive the war, given up for the war effort or passed on to other children. I can’t recall how they vanished but I kept a look out for suitable lead toy soldiers for him as possible birthday presents.
My grandfather was a professional driver and later chauffeur and probably handyman / gardener to one of the directors of a prosperous southern English building firm. My grandfather was given some lead toys to pass on to his little boy such as a 1930s coronation coach that had carelessly been dropped by his employer’s children into the garden pond.
This driver grandfather went on to serve in the RAF, driving airfield vehicles such as petrol bowsers throughout the bombing of airfields during the Second World War.
My father as a wartime child in his Morrison shelter played with a plaster and lead barrage balloon toy, hoisting it up through the mesh sides. (William Britain’s made such a toy). He also had a small plane carved out of aircraft crash turret Perspex, long since lost.
I recall my father talking about a boxed set of Britain’s RAF firefighters that he was given amongst his lost legions, but never found such a replacement figure for him as a present.
The choice makes sense with his father’s RAF ground crew wartime experiences, who would have seen these RAF firefighters in their protective Asbestos Bestobell Suits.
Maybe these strange figures were all that was available when the supply of toys became scarce as companies including Britain’s turned their factories over to war production. I think he also had some Britain’s peaked cap khaki infantry firing.
Apparently this Britain’s Firefighters of the Royal Air Force set no. 1758 of 8 figures (or 2 in larger display set 2011) was only produced for a short while, introduced circa 1939 /1940 to 1941, which explains why it took too long to track one down.
I wonder if my interest in toy soldiers, replaced by plastic by the time I was born, came from my father’s lost legions?
Dad was always keen when I was small to join in toy figure games on the floor, garden or tabletop. Later he encouraged my collecting of yet more Airfix or other plastic figures with the gift of history, modelling or gaming magazines; I’m sure he enjoyed reading the history articles on the train home.
He had many stories to share from his National Service years in the British Army, which I will save for another figure and another blogpost.
This link to the recent Country Life article by Charles Harris includes pictures of Wells’ grandsons as youngsters playing with his collection came from the BMSS website
Man of Tin blog 