A Start

For quite a few years I collected and made my own kitbashed 1/6 scale British figures - mostly WW2 Paras.  The amount I spent on them (16 in total) was and still is rather scary.  As prices went up so my interest in the hobby waned... only really resurrecting itself as I became interested in the Cold War - that period in Earth's history from 1945 until the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, building 1/35 models of the period.
Unfortunately it's one of those situations were there are too many subjects to model and not enough space, so I decided to specialise in one area - figures.  Most of the figures from this period are either based on troops serving in Northern Ireland during the troubles, or the Falklands... and being on the small side would be rather a small collection.
So I returned to the world of 1/6 scale poseable figures... or as deriders would call them: Action Man.

In fact a closer comparison would be the short lived Tommy Gunn soldier figure by Pedigree (1966 to 1968), which had a body very similar to Palitoy's Action Man (1966 to 1985), but was apparently slightly better.  There was also another difference between the two... when Tommy Gunn was on sale Action Man was still copying the releases of his US cousin GI Joe, and as such most of his kit in the '60s had an American flavour... not so with Tommy Gunn.  Tommy was a British soldier through and through - he wore a heavily simplified version of the 1960 combat suit, Mk4 helmet and '58 webbing, while he carried either the L1A1 SLR or the Stirling SMG (both of these later appeared in Action Man sets looking amazingly similar).  Tommy had lace up boots, elasticated gaiters and a whole plethora of kit modelled on the then-current British Army issue.  There is talk that Pedigree were given access to actual kit to allow them to model some of the items, such as a very good (for the time) No 4C Mine Detector.

These three photos show the Tommy Gunn Equipment Manual (basically a small catalogue), the second shows the basic boxed figure as a painting... and the third shows what the stuff was actually like.  Pockets were just stitched outlines, but the rest was pretty decent.

This Vectis photo shows how the figure would look in his box...

Sadly I don't yet have an original Tommy Gunn to put inside the clothing yet... they are quite hard to find at decent prices.  It would be more of a curio than a serious part of my collection, but it would be nice to have as it shows where things started as far as modern 1/6 British soldiers go.

After two years of defending bedrooms from the Red Menace Tommy retired, replaced briefly by Captain Scarlet, and later by a range of bizarre spacemen and aliens.

Where does this have anything to do with this blog's subject matter?  Well, it got me thinking about trying a modern collection of British soldiers representing those from the Cold War period.  Of course there would be a Falklands War figure... that goes without saying, and luckily I had one that I had kitbashed many moons ago, and still stands up to scrutiny now.
It's not an easy genre to model... there is very little clothing specifically from the period, although some later garments can be adapted.  Equipment, such as the 1958 pattern webbing is available on the spares market, as are Stirling SMGs, the SLR is very rare, and the GPMG even more so.  A late model Bren can be adapted to represent the L4 variant adapted for 7.62 rounds.
Of course the 1950s can be represented with minor alterations to the classic battledress used in WW2, combining it with '37 or '44 webbing (the latter would need to be built from scratch as no figure has been released with it), Mk3 helmet and the No 4 Lee Enfield (SLR came in towards the end of the '50s).

The 1960s is a problematic period as there are no representations of the 1960 pattern combat suit, apart from the trousers from a Falklands Para sniper uniform accessory set.  The jacket CAN be represented by some alterations to the US M1951 combat jacket, which is very close... mostly the pockets.

This blog will feature my attempts to represent soldiers and specialists of the British Army from the Cold War.  Because of the subject matter assembling figures will take time, so updates may not be as regular as some other figure blogs.

Apologies for the long rambling post, but I just wanted any readers to understand where I'm coming from with this blog.  Hopefully some people will find it interesting.