I’ve been hinting at our next release of “Lost Scruby Miniatures” and now I can finally announce the availability of our 25mm Boer Soldiers. I’ve been wanting to release these for some time now, but couldn’t find the original masters and reworking the figures was very time consuming, so the project just never got done. Last month I was searching for some other masters and found the original master figures for all but one of the 25mm Boer soldiers (the lone missing master is JC-54 – which I have recreated using an original gravity mold) . Even with the original masters there was till some work to be done. First JC-54 had to be remastered from an original pattern mold. Next In order to cast J-52 I had to cut the master into castable sections. Cutting JC-54 turned out to be far easier than I expected, as I was able to disassemble to master at all of the original joints (left arm and right hand). As a result this is now a 3 piece model that you will need to assemble.
And now on to the figure listing. Our figure listing is taken from the 1967 Scruby Catalog:
25mm Boer Soldiers, 1899
- The Boers repelling the attack of the Inniskillings on Inniskilling Hill
The Boer soldier of the Republican armies of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State was purely a citizen, without uniform or pay and with no parade-ground training. “Whether opposed by man or beast, his sole weapon was the rifle which he grew up with, and he preferred to keep his distance, neither using a bayonet nor believing in the heroics of man-to-man struggle. He kept his pony close to the scene of the action so that he could simply run away if things got too hot – and live to fight another day.” (From: ‘Good Bye Dolly Gray’) “Almost all Boer officers were elected, but every burgher was equal, entitled to give advice and participate in councils of war.”
These two descriptive paragraphs should give the war game player some ideas on how to use his Boers in war games against the British. Below you will find a listing of the 25mm scale Scruby Miniatures of these famed fighters which, with the proper (rules to consider their peculiar fighting ability), should make for some interesting battles – whether using the Boers against the British, or using a ‘Boer Commando’ within the framework of your present African War (or Mafrica War) miniatures armies.
| J-50 | Boer infantryman, standing on guard |
| J-51 | Boer infantryman, standing, firing |
| J-52 | Boer infantryman, walking, rifle at the trail |
| J-53 | Boer soldier, to be used as an artilleryman (no weapon in hand) |
| JC-54 | Boer rider, firing from saddle |
| JC-55 | Boer rider, holding rifle on thigh |
You will find it fun to paint these Boer soldiers too, since they wore all kinds of clothing and did not wear uniforms. The Scruby castings are clothed much as the man swinging his rifle is, in the illustration above. One should remember too that although every Boer was mounted, they always fought on foot, so a judicious choice of our models can give you the correct figures to represent this – for example, one mounted man as a horse holder, several horses, and several foot fighters could be mounted on a moving try to give the idea of ‘movement’ on horseback, and fighting on foot.
If all goes as planned (no snow/blizzard expected) I’ll have photos to post early next week.
