The World of Model Soldiers


Based on the World of Model Soldiers originally commissioned and paid for by André Deutsch in association with Rainbird Reference Books 36 Park Street, London, W1Y 4DE in 1979, but unhappily never published, due to the miners and Ted Heath and the three day week.

Granted an ISBN number of 0-233-96537-8 and with copies of the original manuscript lodged with the principal libraries in the United Kingdom.

Much of the original material has now been superceeded, but I hope that this work will be of interest to collectors of model soldiers throughout the world.
Copyright 2003 © John Tunstill, Calzolaro, Umbertide, PG, Italy

Part 2 : Model Soldiers from 1800 to 1939

In France in about 1790, a man called Lucotte began to produce toy soldiers in French army uniforms. These figures are reputedly the first to have appeared on the commercial market in the style which is termed ronde-bosse. Ronde-bosse figures (also known as 'solids') are three-dimensional figures, round in the sense that the human body is round, as opposed to the two-dimensional figures which are called 'flats'. Lucotte continued his work for the better part of 50 years, producing models of not only the French army but of many other European armies, civilians, Africans, and anything else which caught his fancy.

In 1825 three other Frenchmen, Cuperly, Blondel, and Gerbeau, founded a firm in competition with Lucotte to make their own solid figures. Their trademark was C.B.G. They eventually absorbed Lucotte only to be taken over by the firm of Mignot some years later. Mignot still produce toy soldiers of good quality from their works in Paris.

In Germany, manufacturers continued to produce flat figures. From these evolved the semi-flat, half-round figure, until, in about 1870, they finally started producing solids. Two firms, well known to collectors, are Haffner of Fuerth and Heyde of Dresden.

The round figures that were made at this time tended to be soft in appearance without much detail. They were made of lead or a lead-tin alloy, sometimes with the addition of some antimony, which is one of the few metals that expands as it cools, thus pressing into the contours of the mould and producing a crisper model. Very little attention was given to animation and the figures were normally cast in shallow metal moulds in a slightly spread-eagle fashion. The arms where then bent to the required position, the small flags often being soldered on at a later stage. This gives the early figures a somewhat curious appearance in that their arms don't have elbows but appear to be made of tubes, rather like a slimmer brother of the Michelin Type man.

The figures were attractively packaged in boxes often coloured deep red or maroon and embellished with a variety of gold medals won at exhibitions and fairs throughout the world, for the quality of their workmanship and the artistry that had gone into making them. They found a ready market in middle-class homes all over Europe.

Tin soldiers started to arrive on the British market in about 1850 and were received enthusiastically by the children. The market was dominated by the French and Germans for many years up until almost the turn of the century, the most prolific exporters being Heinrichsen, Allgeyer, and Haffner. The Heinrichsen firm had been founded in 1839 and for the next 100 years developed into one of the most important in this field. The company produced a book on war games for children and helped to standardize the height of 30 mm for foot soldiers, the other figures being in proportion. Not only was there an enormous range of models, but the style and standard of workmanship was superior to all their rivals, except, perhaps, Allgeyer, the master engraver of Fuerth. Competition, but only in quantity, was offered by Haffner, who worked in the same town.

By the turn of the century the situation was to change dramatically. In the 1890s the aptly named William Britain, of North London, who was already well known for his mechanical toys and other inventions, started to produce toy soldiers. He discovered that he was able to cast metal soldiers by what is called the slush-casting, or hollow-casting process, which leaves the centre of the figure hollow.

In the competitive Victorian world, any improvement in a product that would save money in what was rapidly becoming a mass market meant that its exponent must reap the lion's share of the available market. This had been created over many years by the continental manufacturers and the solid figure was selling very well throughout Britain and continental Europe, as well as in North America. William Britain, because he was manufacturing in England, could save time, transportation, and the inevitable customs and duty costs that any import would attract, and even if he had been casting solid figures, he could have marketed them at a cheaper price than his European competitors. As it was, he was casting a hollow figure, therefore using much less metal, which enabled him to make even greater savings.

Britain's figures soon became popular and within a few years his firm, in enlarged premises, had a catalogue of hundreds of different items. Not only were the figures cheaper than the German imports, they were more accurate in detail, were painted to a very high standard and attractively presented, and, most important to collectors of model armies, they were 54 mm in size.

By 1914 Britains were exporting to Germany and other countries. They continued manufacturing metal hollow-cast soldiers up until the middle of the 1960s, when a combination of prohibitive laws against toys containing lead, the availability of plastic - lighter in weight, with consequently reduced transportation costs - and the invention of the new plastic casting machines which greatly increased production while using a much cheaper material, all helped to bring about the death of the lead toy soldier as it was known to millions of children throughout the world.

The German firm of Heyde tried to outdo Britains and experimented with very large figures, 110 mm in height, not hollow cast but hollow pressed. These were true tin soldiers: hollow tin pressings soldered together at the seams, fixed to a base, hats put on their heads and weapons in their hands. The only examples that are currently available are of Prussian soldiers dressed in the Prussian uniform of the turn of the century, but painted in British colours, which was presumably to infiltrate the British market.

Heyde also made a range of solid metal figures with foot soldiers of up to 90 mm in height. Among some of the more extravagant offerings were sets of the Kaiser and his heroes, or his general staff. In all these figures the horse was cast without a base and was later soldered to a sheet tin stand, the bridle and reins were added separately, as was the cast saddle blanket, and the stirrups were also soldered on. The head of the man was separate from the body and had to be pegged in, and the sword, straps and slings also had to be fixed by hand. By having detachable heads, the same body could be used for a number of different figures and it was the heads that gave an impression of individuality as each head was carefully sculptured with or without moustache or beard, to give a reasonably accurate portrait in metal of the particular character intended.

Other manufacturers produced smaller and in some cases flattish figures. Haffner and Heyde had a range of figures of various sizes, some of the smaller ones becoming very flat. Britains made a 'B' series of figures which were about 45 mm high as opposed to the standard size of 54 mm. They made foot soldiers and horse soldiers as well as artillery pieces and limbers, and they were sold invariably with two fixed arms.

An innovation in the toy soldier field was that of the German firm of Hausser, who, realizing that mountains of sawdust were going to waste in the Black Forest from the wood-cutting industry, hit upon the idea of making what was in effect a papier máché figure. It was formed of sawdust and glue around a wire base, pressed while damp into a metal mould, heated in an oven until the glue had hardened, and then left to dry. In the 1920s and 1930s these figures, marketed under the name of 'Elastolin', were very popular all over Europe because of their cheapness of manufacture, their lightness when it came to transportation, and the tremendous variety in their positions. For the first time the manufacturers of larger toy figures were able to produce men in action that looked real. The disadvantage of the Elastolin figures was that they were generally made in the 65 mm size and therefore did not readily match in with the existing collections of toy soldiers of the standard 54 mm size.

The flat figures had always had a lively and realistic appearance about them, in the same way that a line engraving has, but the figures of the solid toy soldiers looked static and unrealistic. With their Elastolin figures Hausser attempted, as did the later model soldier makers, to create figures in lifelike poses. Because of their fragile components, glue and sawdust, very few of the figures survive to the present time; those that do are eagerly sought by collectors.

Elastolin also produced an enormous range of tin-plate vehicles and it would have been possible, had one had sufficient funds at the time, to have recreated in miniature the whole of the German army prior to the outbreak of World War II, complete with horsed and mechanized transport, half-tracks, tanks, artillery, field kitchens, ambulances, supply teams and wagons, and a whole host of the most beautiful model accoutrements.

Various other firms copied the Elastolin figures, the most famous being Lineol in Dresden. Firms such as Britains, Heyde, and Mignot also made numbers of vehicles, wagons, and guns to go with their soldiers and the flat tin soldier manufacturers very often made three-dimensional wagons or artillery pieces to accompany their small armies. The horse teams, instead of being engraved as two horses and cast as one item, would often be designed as separate horses and fixed into a three-dimensional harness in order to pull the three-dimensional cart, gun, or wagon which was often made from an assembly of tin castings, lead castings, and tin pressings: a combination of tin toys and lead toys.

Dear Reader,

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Best wishes

John Tunstill