The World of Model Soldiers

Part 3 : Model Soldiers Since World War II

The basic difference between model soldiers and toy soldiers is the market for which they are intended. Most toy soldiers were, or are, produced for children. As playthings, they had to be relatively cheap in order to compete with hoops, carts, books, toys, whips, train sets, and thousands of other delights that the child would see in any toyshop. (The fact that many of these toys are today worth hundreds of pounds is not a reflection on the quality of their manufacture, but it is due more to the nostalgia of an aging generation for the magic of their youth which has become associated in their minds with toy soldiers.)

A model soldier, on the other hand is usually created by a craftsman for the adult market. The figures are not mass produced as are toy soldiers, but are made in relatively small quantities, and normally, individual figures are animated and positioned by hand, either to the customer’s requirements, or to the individual taste of the animator. Consequently, the figure, even in its raw unpainted state is a much more costly item than the mass-produced toy soldier. The model soldier is then hand painted with extreme care, and whereas the toy soldier takes perhaps 10 minutes to paint, the model soldier will take two hours or more even for a standard commercial figure, and the gifted enthusiast may take up to 100 hours on one figure.

After World War II the hobby of collecting model soldiers started to grow. There had been model-soldier producers before the war, for example the firm of Greenwood and Ball, and two other manufacturers, Frederick Ping and Richard Courtenay, but generally these people were catering for a very small market and were unknown beyond their own small circle of collectors. After the war the collectors of toy soldiers began competing with one another in order to improve the quality of painting. They would buy painted or unpainted castings and repaint them to the best of their ability. They began to realize that shading ought to be a part of the painting process and also that the figures should be painted in matt rather than gloss paint. Gradually it dawned upon the collecting public that what they were attempting to do was not to make a fine array of toy figures, but to make miniature representations of the human form, clad in all the variety of military clothing that history has recorded for us.

Dissatisfied with the commercial products then available, artists began to make their own figures. They wanted models that were in the right proportions, not spindly-legged or spindly-armed creatures with thin weedy chests, but real little men. So from the late 1940s and early 1950s the model and the toy soldier started to drift apart and today, while the model collector avidly seeks the finest figures he can afford, the toy-soldier collector is quite happy to go rummaging through old boxes of broken and discarded toys in the hope that he will discover, more or less intact, an item that has been saved from a nursery to be added to his collection.

Most of the model-soldier manufacturers were artists who used to work in a spare room, attic, or garden shed, making their own moulds, very often from plaster of Paris, and cooking up lead on a gas stove in the kitchen. These early castings were sold to friends and other enthusiasts at meetings and society gatherings throughout the country, and gradually ideas were exchanged as people started to move more freely once the restrictions of World War II were lifted.

During the 1950s, in Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, there were probably as many as 40 or 50 manufacturers, all attempting to sell their soldiers by mail order, or through personal representation at model-soldier fairs, or the gatherings of soldier societies. Very few of them were ever fortunate enough to obtain an outlet through a retail shop as, generally, the only shops that would consider stocking such items would be toy shops and these figures were much too expensive to be sold to children. In addition, the makers could not sell to a fancy-gift shop items that were regarded by the owners of such establishments as toys.

One of the exceptions in the model-soldier world was the firm of Norman Newton Ltd who had the task of marketing the Charles Stadden range of figures. The director of Norman Newton, Roy Belmont-Maitland, approached Hummel’s, a shop which sold shirts in London’s Burlington Arcade, and persuaded the owner to stock, on a sale-or-return basis, a few Stadden figures. These soldiers proved to be so attractive to the shoppers in the Arcade that gradually Hummel’s dispensed with shirts and became one of the first model-soldier shops.

Whereas the toy soldiers were, and still are, invariably sold as finished products, with arms, heads, flags, rifles, and so on, the flat-soldier manufacturers in many cases put extra arms or legs on both men and horses, as well as different tails for the horses. From one basic casting, therefore, with perhaps six or eight legs on a horse and two or three arms on a man, plus three or four tails for the horse, a whole regiment of figures could be created, all in slightly differing positions.

The model-soldier maker, having made the initial figure and sold a few of them, painted, at a fairly high price, soon realized that there was yet another market open to him, that of the collector who desired his figures, but could not afford them in their finished state. To this customer, the maker would sell castings of the figures, together with separate arms, packs, pouches, belts, buckles, bayonets, and anything else that was required to put together a model soldier. These small pieces of lead would often be sold in a kit form or in some cases separately and the collector could build up, from a variety of manufacturers, a whole jigsaw of pieces to make the figure that he required. He could also, of course, rework the pieces in order to change the uniform or the facial expressions slightly and thus make something that was unique. These figures are still being sold today and throughout the world there are probably 50 or more established makers of model soldiers who, in almost all cases, are prepared to sell either painted or unpainted castings.