Another Classic Range Passes Away

Yesterday I received the following email from Mark Lodge that Jacklex Miniatures has ceased trading:

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PERMANENT CLOSURE OF JACKLEX MINIATURES

Unfortunately, I write to announce the permanent closure of Jacklex Miniatures from today (3 January 2025). This is, in the main due to the ever increasing costs of running a small hobby business including raw materials, postage, business insurance, electricity and EU regulation (I thought we had rid ourselves of the latter?) As many of you will know, my primary goal has always been to keep a fine range of model soldiers, sculpted by the very talented Jack Alexander and Andrew Stadden, available to the hobby. It is, therefore with a great deal of regret that I find that I am unable to continue to do so. 

Please be assured that any orders made through the site on or before 1 January will be fulfilled in the usual manner.    

Thank you for your custom over the last five years, it has been a pleasure to do business with you. I wish you the very best for the New Year and for all your future hobby endeavours.

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I would like to record my gratitude to Mark for all the hard work he put in keeping the Jacklex range in production.  He was also very helpful willingly breaking up figure sets to provide specific items and, in this way, provided all the baggage mules and oxen together with some of the drivers that made up my Spanish Napoleonic baggage train and pull my huge Warhammer Great Cannon for my 'The Pride and the Passion' project.  

I hope the following photos provide some idea of how nice this range was: 

A Treasured Memory on eBay

[Pre-Cabinette Archives c.2017]

One of my abiding wargame memories was discovering Miniature Wargames magazine when I came across issue 13 (June ’84) in a shop and snapped it up.  This magazine, set up by Duncan Macfarlane, was truly excellent and issue 13 a stand-out issue – the gem in the crown being Andy Callan’s ‘Landsknechts in Devon’.   Many of the pictures in Duncan’s magazines are fixed forever in my head – so I was delighted when trawling eBay to see some Hinchliffe ECW figures that I was sure had been featured in that magazine.

The figures on eBay included a two-figure base including a hand-painted standard which was clearly the same as that in an Ian Weekly article in MW13.  The hand-painted flag is so distinctive that there is no doubt it is the same figure.  Of the other figures purchased from eBay only the one directly behind the standard bearer also featured in the MW photo - see below.

Needless to say I couldn’t resist owning this piece of my past and acquired the figures, although back then I had no ECW army for them to join.

Having obtained these, for me, iconic figures, I wondered if their history might be even more illustrious than the pages of MW.  A quick search of the TTTV ‘Battleground’ episode ‘Edgehill’ soon revealed the figures were also stars of the small screen; the tell-tale flag can clearly be seen in the detail of the screen-grab shown below.   

Since then I have acquired a pair of ECW armies and these classic figures now take the field for Parliament as Sir William Tyrell’s troop, as that seems the best match for the flag that I can find.

Napoleonic Norwegian Ski Troops

First appearing in an earlier work in progress (WiP) post, I've finally called a halt on painting these guys.

I can't say I enjoyed painting these or am that pleased with the end result.  But I'm pleased to have finished them as the thought of them waiting on the painting desk was deterring me from painting.  The final trial was basing them on some MDF bases - first time I've ever used these.  It wasn't the MDF but the snow that caused the problems; it took me three attempts to get something passable.

Anyway, here are a couple of close ups:

As these figures were gifted surplus figures from a friend's participation game being prepared for Salute '25 I shall offer them to him as giveaways for players.  

On a more positive note, and as a beneficial side effect of basing these figures, I used the surplus Milliput (I always make up too much) for a sandbag emplacement and some shell craters for my 20mm WW2 figures.