Another (biggish) batch of 24th Foot

Well, as I struggle with my new ACW project I decided to take advantage of the good light here at present and finish another fourteen British today.  This brings my total number of British to around two dozen.  This means I probably should do another Zulu unit next.  However, I have just bought the box of the new Warlord Games Natal Native Contingent and so may have a crack at these instead.

For The Sword and the Flame you have units of 20 British but these are really just a jumble of figures at present so I need to pick the next ones out specifically so I can have tidier looking companies.  I also have a bugler and two officers under way so will try to get these done soon too.  It's very satisfying to finish what for me is a big batch!

Warlord/Empress Zulu War plastic British

I've just come across these pictures of Warlord Games planned plastic Zulu War British which they are launching with Empress miniatures.  Apparently, these were on display at Salute but I never saw them.  I am not convinced I saw the whole of the Warlord stand.  It just seems to have been a few packs on a wall and a table, which was empty.  I was rather disappointed by it as I was looking for the new Hail, Caesar rules but never saw them.  Maybe I missed a bit.  Not sure.

Anyway, I am not overwhelmed by these figues as they have the usual awkward looking arms of many plastics.  Empress's metal figures are so superb, and you are never going to need that many British, that I don't see the point, really.  They still look like four panel helmets, though.  On the metal figures I have to file them all down and paint on the panel lines in the correct places.

More interesting will be the look of the plastic Zulus.  I haven't been too happy with the Empress Zulus but maybe the plastics will be better.  Due out in the Autumn, it seems.

Some more British

I've managed to finish another half dozen British this month so I am progressing, albeit slowly and I have lost my fear of these figures.  Sometimes, when figures are very complex or detailed (as is the case, often, with Perry figures) I actually put off painting them.  Despite having finished a few of these I was starting to think about these like that.  The real issue is often between painting the initial "test" figure, on which I usually lavish a lot more time, and the rank and file.  However, in this case I am pretty happy with them and I think they look OK.  My main worry has been how to do the stained helmets but I have dealt with these by actually painting them white and...well...staining them, with a Citadel wash, Gryphonne sepia. 

I have another half dozen or so started now so will try to move these along a bit.  I have also now started the necessary Zulus to finish my second unit and will do those in tandem with the Darkest Africa askari, as they share a lot of colours.

I'm going to have to start thinking about how to organise the British and what units they will represent.

Royal Artillery Hale Rocket team

Amazingly it is over a year since I started my "small Zulu Wars project" to get me painting some of the Empress Miniautres British.  This is well overdue but here it is: a Royal Artillery bombardier and his assistant from the 24th Foot with their Machine Rocket, War (the trough) and a 9 pounder Hale rocket.

The British Army had first thought about developing military rockets when they had experienced them in Mysore India being fired by the army of Tipu Sultan. William Congreve (1772-1828) adopted from the Indians the metal casing for his rockets and used a stick for stability. By 1806 the British fired an amazing 25,000 rockets against Copenhagen. I was surprised, on my first visit to Copenhagen a few years ago, to discover that some of the residents still have quite a resentful attitude towards the British for this bombardment!

The Hale Rocket: showing details of the fins used to spin it in flight

Congreve's rockets were not very accurate but the accuracy was greatly improved in 1844 when Colchester-born William Hale (1797-1870) did away with the stick (which increased the range) and developed a vectored exhaust and fins which made the rocket spin in flight like a rifle bullet. Hale tried to sell his rocket to the British army but they clung to the old fashioned Congreve. Instead, he sold the rights to his rockets to the United States for the then enormous sum of $20,000. So it was the US expeditionary force to Veracruz in 1847, during the Mexican American War, who used Hale's rockets first. The Russian, Hungarian, Austrian and Italian armies all adopted the Hale rocket in the 1850s. The British army did experiment with Hale's rockets during the Crimean War but didn't officially adopt them until 1867, by which time they had seen much service in the American Civil War. Whilst other countries dropped black powder rockets by the early 1870s Britain, which was fighting a series of colonial wars, found that rockets were much more transportable than field artillery in the sort of wild places that they were fighting. The Hale rockets would remain in active service for another twenty years after the Zulu War and wouldn't officially be removed from the army's inventory until 1919.

Brevet-Major Russell

In the Zulu War each section of two field guns was allocated one rocket trough. At Isandlwana there were three rocket troughs under the command of Brevet-Major Russell of 11/7 battery. Under his command was a Royal Artillery bombardier, 2766 George Goff, 'N' Battery, 5th Brigade, and eight allocated soldiers from C company 1/24th foot.

A 24pdr Hale rocket showing the original colour

The black Royal Artillery rocket troughs fired 9 pounder rockets which were painted a dark red colour. The Navy used closed tubes for their larger 24 pounder rockets. At Isandlwana the rocket section only got off one rocket before they were overwhelmed by Zulus from the iNgobamakhosi regiment who formed the tip of the left hand horn. Major Russell was killed but bombardier Goff escaped on a mule with one of several of the rocket battery soldiers to survive.

On the whole, the Zulus treated the rockets with the contempt they deserved. It took some time in flight before the spinning effect stabilised the rocket and so a wayward initial part of the flight meant that the improved stability was largely worthless as regards overall accuracy.

9 pdr rocket trough and rocket, with a 24 pdr rocket below in the Natal Museum, Pietermaritzburg.

Two Bromheads!

Michael Caine as Lt Bromhead

I don't know. You wait ages for one Zulu Lt. Bromhead to come along and then two come along one after another!

After Black Scorpion's version of Michael Caine, in the cape he wears at the beginning of the film, Empress Miniatures have announced an excellent set of Zulu characters based on the actors in the film. They will be doing historical versions as well!

Left to right we have Private Hook, Lt. Chard, Lt. Bromhead, and Colour-Sergeant Bourne. Its difficult to see how well their faces have been captured but the painted version of Hook on the Empress website looks just like the actor!

James Booth as Private Hook

Stanley Baker (Chard) and Nigel Greene (Colour-Sergeant Bourne)

The biq question is do I wait for Salute and risk them running out or do I go ahead and order now and pay the postage? I may just wait, in that perhaps they will have the historical set ready for Salute too. In the meantime I can paint my Black Scorpion Bromhead which I received today. I am painting him as an exercise as he is much too big to go with the Empress Figures.

Black Scorpion's Bromhead. Already under way!

First British Figure: 24th Foot

My first British have been sitting on my workbench for a year now. To be honest I have been a bit frightened of them and happier painting Zulus. This weekend I decided to try to finish one figure to see how it looked. Well, I needn't have been worried; he was very easy to paint. Now I love the Perry figures but sometimes they can be tricky to paint but the Empress one was very easy. So much so that I immediately started on a few more including my rocket team. While watching Strictly Come Dancing with the family I assembled the rest of my first batch of Wargames Factory plastic Zulus and based a few more Empress British. One thing, though, I can't think that too many British soldiers would be fighting Zulus without fixed bayonets so I am going to make sure all my subsequent figures have them. I am going to approach the Zulu war slightly differently than the Sudan in that whilst I will try and reproduce every regiment at something like 1/33, for the 24th foot I will paint more figures so I can do Isandlawana and Rorke's Drift with rather more figures on the British side.

I was hoping to finish three Zulus and Masai warrior today but my daughter hogged my desk all day doing GCSE course work (she claimed!) so I didn't quite get them done. This is doubly annoying as I go abroad on Tuesday and am not back until October 14th. Grr! Just when I was getting into my painting again too. Oh well. I will just have to take one of my Zulu War books away with me to keep me inspired!

A small Zulu Wars project...

Contents of ZWB 09: Bombardier, infantry "hired help", rocket trough and 3 9pdr Hale's rockets.

I haven't got any painting done at all this month as I have been away in the Gulf and Washington. Any spare time I have had has been taken up with Guy's D-Day project. This weekend I am transferring all my files from my old 80GB computuer to my shiny new 750GB computer. Hopefully all those long waits whilst things process will be a thing of the past as they jolly well should be for £1,000 without a monitor!

However, I am keen to get started again, especially with Salute coming up, and I just took delivery of some more of Empress Miniatures lovely new Zulu War British. I bought the new officers set which includes two figures in patrol jackets (hooray!), the infantry firing with fixed bayonets and the rocket set. I have decided to make the rocket set my next project as it has only two figures in it!

The first stage was to attach the rear legs to the rocket trough. Sounds simple but what a nightmare! I used superglue and just couldn't get the thing to stick. After 10 attempts I gave up and decided on an alternative approack of sticking the legs to the base first. It kept falling over so I sellotaped a match to the the base so I could lean it on it at the right angle while the glue set. There is just too little surface contact to make this easy I suppose. Anyway, this worked and then I could glue the trough on top and let gravity keep it in place.

The trough (the technical designation was "Machine Rocket, War) set up.

In the picture on the Empress site they have the rear legs at 90 degrees to the ground and the trough is, as a result, horizontal. They also seem to have cut off the bent end of the leg which also stops it pointing upwards. As you can see from the diagram below the curved end to the leg was part of the design.

Machine Rocket,War: note angle of the rear legs

In reality the rear legs were at an angle to the trough. Changes in elevation were made by shifting the upright (on the right in the picture above) along the arm at the bottom, but of course it doesn't move on the model. This isn't a problem as the maximum elevation of the trough was only 15%; we're not talking a howitzer-type trajectory here!

Here is the team ready for action. Some people like to make little diorama type bases with figures like this. I don't! For some reason I have always wanted my soldiers to be individually based. No element basing for me! This is why I will never play Field of Glory, DB whatever or anything else that involves "stands". Warhammer and The Sword of the Flame are much more my style!

More about the Hale rocket in the next post.

Rorke's Drift in 54mm: 2

By John 54 on the Miniatures Page has put up some photographs of a Zulu War game they put on at theMuseum of the Royal Logistics Corps in Camberley, Surrey, last weekend (annoyingly as it's only about 20 miles from where I live!). It looks great!

http://s183.photobucket.com/albums/x189/byjohn54/Rorkes%20Drift/

I have a box or two of these Call to Arms figures http://www.acalltoarms.co.uk/132_2.html somewhere in the loft and I might dig one out to paint for fun, as I haven't painted a 54mm figure for years.

A birthday anniversary

The site where Number 3 Column's crossed the Buffalo at Rorke's Drift on January 11th 1879

Today (January 11th) is my birthday and also the 130th anniversary of the beginning of the Zulu War in 1879. Lord Chelmsford's 5,000 word ultimatum had been delivered by John Shepstone, acting Natal Secretary for Native Affairs, to the Zulus on 11th December 1878 giving Cetshwayo 30 days to comply. January 10th arrived and went and no compliance was seen (or expected).

Col Richard Glynn of 1st Battalion 24th foot. Photographed in 1878

At dawn on January 11th Colonel Richard Glynn's number 3 column crossed the Buffalo River at Rorke's Drift. The column consisted of the first battalion 24th foot, seven companies of the 2/24th, a battery of Royal artillery, two battalions of the natal Native Contingent, some European Mounted Police and Volunteers, 2,000 oxen, 67 mules, 220 wagons and 82 carts. In just over a week's time the force would make camp close to a mountain called Isandlwana...

More Zulus on the way..

Heads you lose..

I have nearly finished my first sixteen Zulus from Empress miniatures. They aren't perfect but look very good en masse. The faces are good, some very, very good. They are a little small some of them, compared with the British, and the anaotomy is not as good, say, as Copplestone's Ngoni (particularly the arms and legs). The real problem is the chest area where the relationship between the deltoid, pectoralis major and clavicle is not quite right. Odd, as the sculptor has modelled the stomach area really well and caught that pot-bellied look from contemporary photographs. Still with a shield and weapon it shouldn't be too noticeable.

Empress have come out with two more releases in the last few days. Firstly, some Zulu's with the classic cow-tail decoration on arms and legs. I am going to use these as unit leaders as in battle these decorations were unlikely to be (but not never) worn. Secondly, a set of British heads, four with Glengarrys and four with the (white) helmets with badges on (as seen in the original film Zulu and also worn by the 99th foot). This deals with the issue raised by Lt Col Mike Snook, in his review on the Rorke's Drift VC site, regarding the trumpeter having a helmet cover, which didn't come in until later in the campaign.

http://www.rorkesdriftvc.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1301

I have ordered two packs of the cow-tail Zulus and the head set. My experience co far with Empress is that their dispatch is very fast.