"71st HLI Lost in a Wheatfield now!" Topic

After the "Mamelukes lost in a Wheatfield" I always wondered if the basing would work better for skirmishers. I also wanted to try Battle Flags transfers (decals, to the Rebel Colonies) and they worked great for the hat band and the back pack. I could not get anywhere with the canteen application though……..and was not convinced by the shade of blue.

The officer is a Victrix Highlander with a spare head I had (thanks Niels R!) the rest Front Rank, mostly Reinforcement newer figures

The transfers are tricky to use. You do need the white base and especially the decal fixing solution. The lads were watching West Ham as I did this work and I can only say that Mrs F roared at all of us "Will you all remember I am in this house and stop using that language!"

Now I also have the kilts and French hussar decals………

Hope you like these. I am a button counter and genuinely want to know if any errors here! I always prefer the plume to the pom pom on these figures' headgear.

Wow! That looks spot on, beautifully done

Amazing. Great work!

Beautiful. All buttons correct and accounted for. :-)

The basing is effective for skirmishers.

Well the chap in the bottom picture does not have white trim to his coat tail turnback, I now see! It is photography vs the naked eye!

Of course at one stage these had silver metal badges on the front of their "shakos"……..spotted in time!

Finding an officer took some time. They all come with a waist sash. Creating the new over the shoulder look would have been easy, but getting rid of the existing waist decoration…………..

Thanks again to Niels Rullkotter for giving me stock of spare heads some time ago……one already appeared in the Waterloo Dispatch vignette

Very nice brush work and basing!

Deadhead you are true master Sir! I have the 71st as well in 28th, also Front Rank but they don't look nearly as good as yours. Keep up the good work, it is always a pleasure and an inspiration to see your vignettes.

Nice!

Great again but remember if 1815 wheat would have been green!

Great height though….

Chris

Once again, lovely work Deadhead.

Thanks folks.

Oh yes, I have shown Waterloo so many times with ripe crops. It works so well in photography. Five times I have been to the field…always in late summer. July/August this is how it looks.

Oh hang on…June 18th……hmmm my Hgmt orchard has apples on the trees…not in June!

What is brilliant is that folk can spot that sort of error. I love the IMDB thing that spots such. You do not have to take it seriously, (so many do), it is brilliant that someone has even looked, let alone worked it out as wrong!

I have the stems, stored, in green. I have the tip dust (stored) in greenish, I have never done it yet, though. This is more colourful, if wrong. Only snag, it is not high enough actually!

Really like the feedback! Thanks

Just to clarify…

Absolutely….should have been much greener on 18th June (loads of recent pics to show that)…but also twice (at least) the height we see now. GM has done much to increase yield, but reduce the wasted vertical growth!

My growth is understated! (I tell all the girls that)

Deadhead superb……………cant see any Mamelukes
………….concerned re your love of wheat….corny I know
lol

well done matey…how could you watch WH and contruct these wonders …control two over enthusiastic lads..and the Mrs..!must be your Celtic blood!

Great! Shako dicing really works!

LOVELY!
If not even JOLLY GOOD!

Jolly Good……….I said that on my first day at the University of Michigan in 1983, when told, by Prof's secretary, where my lab was to be. It caused hilarity…….the response was "I never knew that you really do say that!" Gosh, I'll even split an infinitive, to cleverly impress.

Corny…wheatfield………groan………boom boom…..

The dicing band is brilliant, when it works……..Battle Flags. Definitely needs white base and gloss would have been better. You do need the decal fixative solution too, but the transfers are tough and excellent print quality. I would love to have used the canteen ones, but had no success at all.

I wonder if these are intended for any particular range of figures, eg Perry, Warlord or Victrix? OK, you could use flank companies as Light Infantry….but the shako? Rob the 95th of heads I guess………

"pom pom"….?

That funny green woollen ball that they wear on the top of a Tam O'Shanter, with a diced head band around the crown.

The suggestion was that this was not a shako at all, but traditional Scottish bonnet…without the ostrich feathers to crown it as in kilted regts. Instead it had a stiffener of some sort inserted to raise the crown, like a shako. Hence a woollen ball would appear centrally on the top. If, instead, it was the bonnet shrunk to fit over a usual LI shako, they might have had the feather in front.

Personally I think the former, but prefer the latter look (and it was easier). Would love to know if any clue which is right.

or?

Ah, I wondered if that's what you were referring to: it is known as the 'toorie'(or 'toory', if you prefer). I thought it would have been unhelpful to point out its absence.

Oddly enough, it hadn't occurred to me that, in the case of the 71st, a green toorie might have sufficed as a distinguishing emblem to denote their Light Infantry status. I am not sure how the evidence stands with regard to colour-coded toories on the Highland bonnet, as per regulation cap tufts. Similar coloured hackle feather plumes were ordered for Highland bonnets as well.

It seems to be a general consensus that the 'shako' of the 71st was a knitted bonnet blocked to resemble the light infantry cap, whether or not an actual felt cap was involved underneath, so I think a toorie would have been visible in any case. That's not to say that a green tuft wouldn't have been worn in addition. Certainly that was the practice with the Bell-Top shako of the post-war period.

My understanding always was that the tourie would have been red in any case, but I now realise that might have been my supposition.

Looking into it. For my own satisfaction if not yours!

Beautifully done figures, by the way

Would love to learn more. Never ever heard of a Toorie before, but that sounds right. The kneeling figure above seems to have a tie around the base of the cap, suggesting the peak is detachable and secured thus, as in kilted regts. In other words, no shako beneath the bonnet, just some kind of stiffener or frame…..just as you said!

Well observed. Yes, a detachable peak would certainly tally with the notion of a knitted felt bonnet blocked by other means to resemble a shako. This practice continued in increasingly sophisticated manner, with a bell-shaped shako.bonnet remaining in use even after the introduction of the so-called 'Albert' shako in 1844.

link

twitter.com/matthew_mallia

Here, FWIW, is an occupation print of a 71st Light infantryman flanked by a Rifleman and what I think is supposed to be soldier of the Black Watch. It's a judgement call as to whether the original artist painted what he saw but I can't think why a green tuft would have been added out of whimsy, even if the Black Watch hackle has erroneously been coloured the regulation white-over-red.

On balance, the consensus of 20th-century illustrations to be seen on the internet suggests a tuft was worn on the cap, at least by officers. The most authoritative of these, I guess, being Haswell Miller, who shows an HLI man of the period 1809-15 with a green tuft in his cap (top left rather small; in the centre).

link

It depends of course what period of the war you are thinking about. By the time Wellington's army crosed the Pyrenees they were lucky to have a cap at all. let alone any ornamentation on it. At Waterloo they should have been kitted out in fairly regulation fashion, if a little bedraggled.

The general subject of the 71st is kicked around here on a couple of threads with some links you might find interesting:

link

link

You have done some great work here, finding some excellent sources new to me. My understanding has always been that the officers did not wear the bonnet, but instead the regulation conical shako of Light Inf, with a green feather of course.

Mine is bareheaded as I had no head to use with a shako!

Sorry, yes, I believe so. Officers: cap, not bonnet. I was meserised by green tufts.

Bareheaded. And there I was thinking you did it for dramatic effect…