More Norwegians

 

In order to create more Norwegian invaders l turned to the Perry plastic 1870 Prussian skirmish set.

I had to cut off the blanket or greatcoat roll , too Prussian and definitely not Norwegian.

In this photo you can see the blanket/greatcoat clearly. It was removed with snips and a penknife.

                                                             This is the figure I was striving for.

So how did they turn out? Judge for yourself below-

All in all quite pleased with the results…

The great invasion of Craigshire: the invaders !

 I’ve been doing some uniform research into the invaders of Craigshire. I settled upon Norway, then part of the United Kingdoms of Norway and Sweden.

Great variety of uniforms on display in this photo.

Period photo of someone wearing the uniform displayed below.

Great group photo full of uniform details.

I think the Norwegian Army museum sent this and the one below to me years ago.

Illustrations from the time, including some winter equipped soldiers.

These gave me ideas to help me make some Norwegian troops ready to invade Craigshire-

I added a Norwegian flag of the period , l thought it interesting and unique. When my new recruits arrive ( they were meant to arrive yesterday, never turned up and are now scheduled to arrive by the tenth) l will add to the Norwegian forces.

More Craigshire volunteers

I have made up some bases representing small groups of cyclists engaged in scouting activities. They observe , note down salient information and return to their unit or headquarters.

Here we see the command elements of the Craigshire Volunteer Brigade. They are fortunate to have motorised transport. The bellicose figure with drawn sword is the O/C of the brigade. Observant viewers may notice the unique habit of the Volunteer officers of Craigshire - they wear their sword on the left or right as they wish. Regular officers find this to be insufferable in the extreme.

 

On the workbench- The great invasion of Craigshire or Volunteers stand ready !

 One of the classics of railway modelling is by P D Hancock . He is the Grant or Young of the hobby. In his most famous book he created another county in Scotland, Craigshire and used it as a place to create layouts around . Here is one of his maps-

The second map shows how he added land to the map of eastern Scotland in a clever and creative way.

This is the book the maps came from. It is a terrific read and I come back to it again and again. Recently l have been reading these books-

An idea began to form. What if Craigshire had volunteer units and they were engaged in trying to repulse an invader. After all the late 19th century saw Volunteers come to the fore and fears of invasion were rife. I found this in the plastic mountain and I was away gluing and painting-

This handy box of figures provides home service helmeted heads as well as the pith helmets . A look on the internet for volunteer uniform ideas and this is what l produced-

Initially l raised five figure units for  The Portable Wargame with a possibility l might make them 10:man for skirmish games in the future, we will see…

Also l have done some thinking about the identity of the invaders but that is for another day…