About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

A is for A Call to Arms

Which gets them top-billing in some lists, but doesn't stop them coming late to the blog!

Very much a Picasa-clearing, desktop-tidying, box-ticking exercise this - at a time when small scale collectors like myself were celebrating the renaissance in plastic toy soldier production with the output of HäT (I still have two mint sets of Marmalukes!), ACTA and latterly Strelets*R, the larger scale collectors were celebrating too, and these were in that late 1990's/early 2000's vanguard.

(set '4' above is actually set 5, but I can't be arsed to re-do the collage!)

There have been eight ECW sets issued so far by this one-man-band of an operation...

1 - Royalist V Parliament (separate drums and flag-arms)
2 - Pikemen (separate pikes and scabbards)
3 - Royalist Musketeers
5 - Parliament Musketeers
13 - Cannon
14 - Royalist Artillerymen
33 - Cromwell's 'Ironsides'
34 - Haslerigg's 'Lobsters'

...of which; the above photo' shows one each of the foot, excluding the four artillery poses, so we'll have to come back to them one day to tick the other half of the box!

Link to Kent Sprecher's ACTA page;

Angelfire

They were later issued in 1:72 scale in different combinations with two extra poses (nice dismounted cavalrymen looking figures in the 'Command Set'), but the cavalry have yet to appear in the smaller scale which is a shame as the Revell cavalry of the same period have become quite collectable due to their limited availability and the numbers swallowed-up by war-gamers!

Links to the PSR small-scale revues;

59 - English Civil War Royalist Artillery
61 - English Civil War Royalist Infantry
62 - English Civil War Command Set
63 - English Civil War Parliament Infantry

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