Here is a selection of my stalwart, red-coated soldiers of the Queen. I've collected these guys for years. The very first box of Victorian plastic 22's I ever bought I actually purchased in Vienna, Austria. I had always lived in rather out-of-the-way places (and was usually quite cash-strapped), and Vienna was the first real city in which I had ever lived. I had bought boxes of ACW, WWII, Napoleonics, and some other more common types here and there, but I had never been to a store where there was a large selection of plastic 22's. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when after jaunting down a pleasant little street off of the Kenyongasse, I happened upon a small, out-of-the-way shop with little plastic toy soldiers in the window. Intending only to look, I went inside and found entire walls stacked clear to the ceiling with box upon box of old Airfix's, Matchbox's, Hat's, Esci's, Revell's, and Italeri's, among others. I spent two hours in there, just looking at everything they had. Ultimately, I took the 4 euros with which I had intended to buy dinner and purchased an old Esci set (the box was of the old style with the little triangular window of clear cellophane) of British infantry for the Zulu War. The following picture is of some of those guys, along with subsequent purchases, all Esci. They're formed up into one corner of a battalion square. I probably have enough of them to build a complete square of kneeling and standing firing figures. I painted them up to be 24th Foot.
Next are two photos of a British rocket section for the Zulu War. I put it together from the explorer figure from Eagle Games' Age of Imperialism game, an Esci British soldier, and Hat's Napoleonic British rocket set. There are some obvious problems with these figures. Firstly and most obviously, the figures should be Royal Artillery and therefore all in blue, rather than in the infantry regulation scarlet tunic. The Napoleonic rockets are also incorrect. The rockets used in the Zulu War would have been shorter, and the stands from which they were fired would have been knee-height, rather than these tall tripods. Still, it was one of my early attempts at a conversion so I can't bring myself to scrap it.
Here is a photo of one of Hat's new brilliant sets, British mounted infantry. Mounted infantry were just that: detachments from infantry battalions mounted on ponies. They almost never fought mounted, using the ponies strictly for mobility, and for this reason Hat's addition of the horseholder figure was excellent. The mounted infantry were absolutely criticial in defeating the Boer commandos during the last phases of the Second Anglo-Boer War, but were also used in earlier conflicts, such as the Zulu War. These fellows are painted up as a mounted infantry detachment from the 24th Foot for that conflict.
Eventually I'll have to base these guys so that I can actually game.
