Sunday, 31 January 2016

20mm unreleased Jacklex figures

Here's a bit of a teaser, Bob and I visited Jack today to take some more pictures of his collection.  I have been having a bit of difficulty casting some figures from the moulds I had and asked Jack if he could have a go.  

Whilst we were in his garage and he was casting, Bob had a hunt through all the moulds on his work bench and draws and came across three 20mm Colonial Jacklex moulds which neither of us had ever seen before:

a Mounted British Naval Officer, 
a British Colonial Infantry Standard Bearer and 
a Colonial Highland Infantry Standard Bearer.

Jack couldn't remember making the standard bearers - never part of his original range as he points out the British never took flags into the field at that time.  However, I do remember Jack saying to me that many years ago our mutual friend Stuart Asquith asked him to make a standard bearer for his armies.  These may be them.  Anyway we got Jack to cast some up.  I'll be painting them up and the Mounted Naval Officer in the near future, so watch this space.

20mm British and Sudanese/Egyptian Camels

In the lastest reprise of Jacklex figures I thought I would share his 20mm camel troops with you.  

The mounted 'Sudanese' camel is available from Spencer Smith Miniatures, although it is listed as Egyptian Camel Troops (E6/E7), but it works for either.

Jack and I were playing the Fire and the Sword Campaign and he decided he wanted to have some British Camel troops so he made the British Camel Corp figure.  I remember him agonising over the sun galsses on the helmet and trying to get them right.  Having made them, we then both decided that being able to dismount them would be fun.  So off he went and made the kneeling camel and a British and new Sudanese dismounted figure. I know that firing over the heads of camels was not on, but they look fun. 

Unfortunately, Spencer Smith do not list these British figures and dismounted camels in the range.






Sudanese Camel troops

E6 and E7

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

54mm British PomPom Gun

I still have more 20mm Jacklex models to photograph, but I thought you might like to see some of Jack's 54mm work.

This is a British 54mm gun crew and pom pom gun.  I think they are available from Little Legion.




Sunday, 17 January 2016

Is Jack an antique?

See in an antique shop in Main Street, Gibraltar


Jack's 20mm colonial figures.  Does this make him an antique?

Tuesday, 5 January 2016

Jacklex 20mm Artillery and Sailors

A belated Happy New Year.

Continuing my trawl through Jack's boxes of colonial figures here are some of his artillery and Sailors.  As with the previous posts, these were painted by the man himself nearly 40 years ago.  There are more wagons and machine guns and light guns I have yet to take pictures of, but for now......


These are shown with 4 horse teams, but because of the way Jack set this up horse teams could be as big as you wanted.  The RHA in my British Zulu War army is a six horse team.


Colonial Gun and British crew...



.....and now the same gun with the Indian crew.


More 4.7 inch guns than you would know what to do with.  Gunners are shown in both Khaki and Royal Naval uniforms.






As with the artillery teams, you could add as many pairs of oxen to this set as you wanted. It looked pretty spectacular with 6 pairs of oxen although it took up masses of room on the table.


The great thing about Jack's colonial range was the breadth of it.  He made sailors to go with the infantry, making naval landings and support possible.  My apologies as these are not the best pictures.



Slight adjustments to the arms creates a variation on the running figure



Jack's ship's crew.  I am not sure this was ever produced commercially.  Jack made these a few years ago to go with a paddle steamer.  You can see the origins, the figure designed to hold the ships wheel looks very like it is based on the Boer horse holder and the ship's captain on a British officer with binoculars from the colonial range.