Minifigs, Sir - hundreds of 'em!

I have recently made an interesting acquisition, which I am very pleased with - and here is a picture of it (or rather, them). 

 

What we have here is a selection of vintage Minifigs 25mm figures, painted as units of various nations from the Seven Years War and American War of Independence (or Revolution, if you prefer) periods.  How I came about them is a story that began at the recent Broadside show at Gillingham last month. One of the 'flea market' stalls there was run by the Whitehall Warlords club, and I noticed a box of figures on their table - Minifigs 25mm, painted as Bavarians of the War of Austrian Succession, I was told ( see below, but  note, they seem to have fictitious French regimental colours ) 

 

I admit I was interested, especially when the chap  (Bob Walker) doing the selling  said 'if you like those, we've got loads more we want to dispose of, 7YW and AWI mostly'.  After a bit of chat we swapped phone numbers, and over the course of a few days Bob sorted them out and 'Whatsapped'  me a series of pictures of several boxes and tins full of vintage Minifigs. - French, British, Americans, Germans, Austrians, Prussians, Russians.. The range of different nations was quite a selling point, for me - not just big contingents  of one or two armies, but manageable numbers of various nations, so loads of scope for campaigning with multiple or coalition forces,  perhaps?  Or perhaps  a sort of 'Imagi-nations' approach? All ready-painted, in a nice old-school style and easily as good as I would be able to achieve myself,  they would go perfectly with the 'mostly Minifigs' 7YW period figures I already have.

So, after a little time to think it over, I decided to buy the whole lot - the price was very reasonable, I thought - so earlier this week, on a very warm afternoon,  I took a trip to Basildon to collect and pay for my new/old recruits. In the course of looking through them and a pleasant conversation about them, I have learned their 'back-story', which itself is of some interest to me.  

As stated earlier,  these figures were being sold by the Whitehall Warlords club, and it turns out that they are from the collections of several of their members - in particular the sadly now deceased Seamus Bradley, Phil Hoare and George Warren,  and (very much alive)  current member Andrew Maxfield. It so happens that for a short period in the late 1980s I was a member of the same club - they met in the Civil Service staff sports/leisure club at Marsham Street, Victoria, and I worked nearby.  As I've mentioned before, I remember Seamus very well, and I can recall Phil and George too. I'm not sure I wiould have been involved in games with these figures ( in my memory they were having a Marlburian phase at the time ),  but all the same I think that acquiring them  is a nice connection with a piece of my wargaming past.  It's also, I hope, great  to be able to offer a 'good home' to this collection, lovingly painted long ago, and be able to make use of them and give them a new lease of life.  And from a purely practical point of view, at a stroke I have quite large forces available, for much bigger games and campaigns than I have been able to put on before - it would have taken many years to acquire and paint anywhere near this sort of collection!              

For now, of course I have the mother of all 'sorting out' jobs to do, going through them box by box and identifying nations and units - I should here give many thanks to Bob, who has given me quite a lot of information and organised the boxes and tins sensibly.  One of my early favourites is this box - Russians! 

 

I do like the green and red colour scheme, and especially the grenadiers, and these will be a great opponent for my existing  Prussian forces.    

There are some interesting features of the collection which are worth mentioning; as you may have noticed from the pictures infantry predominate, but there is a good number of assorted cavalry, and at least a dozen guns and crews of various nations.  There are indeed AWI/Revolution forces - a box of various Americans including some Native Americans, and British, French  and Hessian units. So I can have a go at refighting that conflct, while also using many of the figures for Seven Years War in Europe games - I'm not that fussy about absolute uniform accuracy! In the course of discussions with Bob we recalled how Charles Grant in The War Game etc would happily use historical French, Austrian and Prussian regiments in his fictitious  'VFS' and 'Duchy of Lorraine' armies, as well as for re-fighting hostorical battles, and that approach has some appeal for me, too. Another feature is that there are several alternative command stands with different regimental colours and standards, so the original owners were clearly going for multi-purpose forces themselves. Indeed, it seems that from Bob's inspection of the Minifigs  code numbers engraved on the figure bases, quite a large proportion  are from the AWI range, simply painted as different nations  - I wonder if some bulk buying was done, or were the AWI figures the only ones available at first, perhaps the specific 7YW ranges came later? A question for the real Minifigs nerds out there  ( it seems likely that some of  thesefigures may date from the 1970s).

All in all, I am very happy indeed to have these chaps in my collection, and look forward to putting them together on the table with my existing troops ( many of which were  from another  deceased veteran wargamer, Eric Knowles, so there is a common theme emerging - 'legacy armies'?).  I'm quite tempted to just try to put on a large and entirely fictitious  game with some old school rules, as simple as possible - the basic rules in Young and Lawford's Charge! would seem ideal - simply to enjoy the spectacle!  I'm also thinking about a multi-nation  7YW campaign, probably going back to the Soldier King boardgame  that I used a couple of years ago.  For dipping a toe into AWI, I have treated myself to a copy of  Osprey's  Rebels and Patriots rules, and I had a fortuitous find in my local Oxfam shop the other day too - a nice vintage Osprey 'Men at Arms', published 1972 and written by none other than Brigadier Peter Young.  

So that's my update - quite a big update, as it turns out!  Many thanks once again to Bob Walker and the Whitehall Warlords, very nice doing business with you!   I'm very much looking forward to 'sorting out' and organising the new troops (and I have to work out a storage solution too..) and getting them into action. As I do that, I will post updates showing what I've got, so watch this space.  

For now, we have something of a heatwave in the UK, and the best place to be is sat in the garden shade with a good book ( Washington's Army, perhaps? ) - I hope everyone else is keeping suitably cool.  I suspect my next post may feature Minifigs 7YW figures, inevitably! Meanwhile keep well, everyone.