Big Men With Tall Hats

Hello again.

It is done. Not partly done. Not almost done. Just "done".

After many weeks of scratching away at a few figures at a time between work, sleep, Winter light conditions and the odd festive celebration, I have finally completed the second unit of troops for my "proper" Seven Years' War/ French & Indian Wars collection with the Combined Regiment of Grenadiers. Obviously, I have built up a reasonable collection of the skirmishing types for games such as "Muskets & Tomahawks" already, but these are "proper" troops because they stand shoulder to shoulder!

For those who have missed previous posts on my schemes in this area, I am building 24 figure regiments of British, using mainly Eagle Figures, which nicely devolved into "companies" of four figures and six "companies" per regiment. In truth, I simply cannot remember how many companies per regiment British units had at this time (and nor do I really care!), but I like the aesthetics of 24 figures in two lines using six bases. That is my raison d'etre in this case, as simple as that.

Anyway, painting six bases each of four figures from six different regiments nicely tied in with the sort of size of force I wanted to create for a show game set within the French & Indian Wars. A teeny bit of research later gave me six different regiments that fought in North America and Canada at this time, all with the desired different facing colours, thereby keeping a nice, distinct definition between contributing parties for this unit but maintaining a sort of homogeny at the same time with their nice, red coats. I now have to paint the parent unit for all except the Royal Americans, who were the first ones I did for this project. (What do you mean, you missed the posts on that???)

I selected:
27th Inniskilling Regiment - buff facings, white lace;
35th Regiment - orange facings, white lace;
43rd Regiment - white facings and lace;
46th Regiment - yellow facings, white lace;
58th Regiment - black facings and yellow lace;
60th Regiment (Royal Americans) - blue facings and no lace.

All of them featured at one or more of the battles/ encounters in North America at this time according to the various orbats I have.

Purists will no doubt argue that lace and other distinctions would have disappeared very quickly on campaign in the wilderness of North America, but I do not care, as this project is as much about aesthetics as anything else. I suspect that there are one or two inadvertent errors in the uniforms too, but then even sources cannot agree on what some of the troops looked like, especially the French, who did not necessarily wear their usual uniforms in North America as they were supplied differently for this conflict. I do have a 30+ year old copy of "Military Modelling" lying around somewhere with a detailed coverage of British grenadier caps in it, but do you think I can find it anywhere? Nope! So these at least are a tad conjectural in some cases. It is also a departure from my usual fare as I am painting red, which is not exactly my favourite exercise! Besides which, it is important these guys look their best when going off to engage in every Englishman's favourite pastime of fighting the French!!!

So, in all their "glory", I give you the Combined Regiment of Grenadiers.

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The complete regiment. I was going to deploy them in regimental order from right to left, lowest number first, but gave the 27th the honour of the command element instead. The rest are on order, however.

Right flank

Left flank

Centre

The contingents from the 58th and 60th regiments

The contingents from the 35th and 43rd regiments

The contingents from the 27th and 46th regiments