An Unexpected Guest!

Well, it’s taken two years to get round to visiting, but this week COVID has been an unexpected guest in our house! And as unexpected guests have a habit of doing, it’s overstayed it’s welcome! For my wife and myself it’s been halfway between flu and a nasty cold and (hopefully) it’s now preparing to pack its bags and leave. This has meant that I’ve done nothing hobby-wise this week, but I did manage to get a handful of figures finished last weekend (see below).

These are B & B Miniatures 20mm WW1 Indian cavalry, painted here to represent Ist Bengal Lancers troopers for the Boxer Rebellion period. I’d already got three of these figures painted years ago to use as a scouting unit but decided to increase the unit strength to six figures to let it function as a full cavalry unit. I’d misplaced the horses over the years so had to use some spare ACW horses for these three but I’m happy with how they’ve come out. The figures are quite nicely detailed.

With Britain involved in the Boer War in South Africa at the time the Boxer Rebellion broke out (1900), by far the greatest number of “British” troops involved in China were Indian army units, so I’ve tried to reflect this in the units I have – I’ve got one British infantry battalion, one Indian infantry battalion and the Bengal Lancers completed and another Indian infantry battalion in progress. I’ve already featured the other Western powers troops in a post a while ago but still need to do one on the British forces.

Three more figures finished, for the same conflict, are the Royal Navy sailors in landing rig shown above (picture’s not the best I’m afraid). These are 1:72 scale HaT plastic figures from that company’s Colonial Garder Gun offering, but they paint up fine for 1900. Altogether I’ve got a couple of units representing naval landing parties, so once again I’ll try and feature all of them in a future post.

Completing these sailors, though, has more significance for me! With one of my very long term goals being to make some steampunk/VSF forces, these sailors mean I’ve now got enough troops to accompany land ironclads in a steampunk setting – after all, steam-powered land ironclads just have to be manned by navy crews!