1746 - Battle of Culloden - Entire British Army - 10mm

It's been a little longer than anticipated since my last post.  With the lockdowns I thought that I would be spending much more time being able to write blog posts.   In reality I found that having to home work for two jobs from behind my desk, left me with little enthusiasm for spending any more time at a keyboard.  I am glad to say that the painting has been coming on leaps and bounds and I have done something that I have never yet been able to do.  I have finished an entire army.

Yes, a planned project went to plan and it's not taken 20 years to get close to a respectable level like most of my armies.  Nope, this one really took shape this year.  I finished the final touches at 3am yesterday. I was determined to complete it before going to bed.

The figures are all 10mm Pendraken figures.  I have shown a little bit of progress before in an earlier post but in the next photos we have all of the British Army.

Planning took the form of working out a ground scale using maps of the battlefield and deciding what figure scale would look the best.  I wanted the largest figures possible so that I could enjoy the painting and see the detail.  I knew that 6mm would have worked and with lots of space to space, but I have yet to enjoy painting 6mm figures.

10mm appeared to allow me to create units at an approximate 1 figure represents 10 men scale, so that a 300 man battalion would have 30 figures.  Some regiments had more, others had less but I stuck with 30 figures for an Infantry Battalion.

In 10mm I also had space for moving formations of troops and open areas on the flanks.  The decision was thus made and Pendraken's figures seemed to fit what I needed.  

I used the Osprey books extensively for the research and also used a book called 'Like Hungry Wolves' by Stuart Reid. This has a vast number of battle maps showing the evolution of the battle and provided a lot of background information.  The plates are also excellent reference material (painted by Gerry Embleton, so the standard is very high indeed).

I must also mention the website https://www.kronoskaf.com/ which is a superb reference source for the Seven Years War.  This being slightly later of course, but still providing much needed information which often gave me clues when I was stuck for source material.

I have tried to give an overview with the photos of the British positions at the start of the Battle of Culloden.  Some of my terrain is lacking so I have had to make do as best as I can to give some approximation of walls, hedges and buildings etc, but the positions are pretty accurate.

It was an absolute joy to get all of the units in their Divisional groups under their own commanders and see them all formed up.  The desire to see this - and check that my ground scale calculations were correct - have been a massive driving force to completing these.

The cavalry posed an interesting conundrum for me.  Normally I don't worry about things like Squadrons and Troops and just have my cavalry organised in Regiments.  However, at Culloden it seemed pretty fundamental re-think this as the Squadrons were separated off, certainly for Cobham's Dragoons, so I needed to find a solution.

The solution was to use one stand and then form 2 Troops on that stand to form a Squadron.  So a standard Regiment was 3 Squadrons of 6 Troops in total.

Historically, the 10th (Kingston's) Horse in their blue Volunteer coats were understrength so were re-organised into 2 Squadrons of over sized Troops.  I have tried to reflect this by giving them more figures on a Squadron stand compared to the other Horse Regiments.

I also needed a way of differentiating between all of the officers.  Here we see Lt Gen Hawley the Commander in Chief above and the Duke of Cumberland as the Captain General of the Army below.

I decided that the number of staff officers (plus the main man) would indicate importance.

4 Staff Officers for the Duke of Cumberland

3 Staff Officers for Lt Gen Hawley

2 Staff Officers for Divisional Commanders

1 Staff Officer for Brigade/Reserve/Advance Guard Commanders

The artillery is also represented. I really like the officer aiming down the barrel (below).

It has been challenging getting the close ups.  Sometimes these images look ok until one tries to expand the photos!    The flags were from Pendraken sheets which I have painted over the top of to customise for each regiment.

10th (Cobham's) Dragoons above.  Plenty of detail here for the avid painter to enjoy.

Above and below here are the Duke of Kingston's 10th Horse (as opposed to the 10th Dragoons).  The uniform is conjectural but Stuart Reid has clearly carried out plentiful research and has changed his mind from the red coat in 'Like Hungry Wolves' to a blue coat in his later Osprey book 'Cumberland's Culloden Army 1745-46.' 

I do really like seeing a good red-coated infantry regiment formed up and ready for action.

Above we have a Coehorn mortar.  These were used at Culloden but not reported to have had great effect. Presumably the boggy ground absorbed the explosive effect of the shells.

Somewhat obsessively I do create under base and back of base labels for all of the figures.  I use a colour coding system on the back of base labels for small scale troops to ease keeping track of who is in which Brigade.

The 64th Highlander's above.  The bonnets appear very light in the flash of the camera.  I do tend to use lighter colours, the smaller the scale I use to try to show a more realistic reflection of light.

4th Barrells's Foot above.  The British Regiment that probably bore the hardest fight on the day

...and finishing off with the 21st North British Fusiliers.  

There were plenty of challenges with this project. There was a lot of research and decision making constantly.  Early on I needed to decide whether to go for the original 3 ranks or a more scale accurate 2 ranks (I went with 3 as it just felt right).  One tough decision was finding that I was 3 'hat men' short in a particular pose.  My option was to swap heads with some grenadiers and use Grenadiers but with hat heads instead, or buy another packet of 30 figures for 3 men!  I went with the head swap. It worked but that was fiddly in 10mm.

Of course...this isn't really the end.  Now I need their Jacobite opponents.  I had better buy some tartan paint!