CONVERSIONS VI - A PERRY OFFICER

The conversions on this blog have involved Wargames Foundry miniatures, except for Colonel Galbraith and General Samuel Browne, both of whom were done using Empress Miniatures. But this post is about a conversion I did using two figures from my favorite manufacturer -- Perry Miniatures.

I wanted a British officer for my 1st Bombay Grenadiers (which I'm still in the middle of converting the turbans of) but I didn't want to just use the British officer that comes with the Perry Sudan Bengal/Bombay Infantry Command pack. That officer is a beautiful figure, one of the nicest in the entire range, but he's so particularly posed -- with one hand raised high, waving his helmet above his head -- that using two of this same wonderful sculpt in the same game wouldn't work for me. I already have one of these guys serving as the Commanding Officer of my 72nd Highlanders, so I needed to find an alternative.

The answer was a Black Watch officer I had left over from buying the Perry Black Watch Command pack for the sole purpose of getting my hands on the bagpiper, who I wanted for my 72nd Highlanders (though officers & men of the 72nd wore trews during the Second Afghan War, their pipers, as always, wore kilts). As many of you know, in the old days of miniature wargaming -- which I guess for me means the late Seventies through mid-Nineties -- most manufacturers allowed customers to buy individual figures, usually at a slightly higher per-figure rate than they charged for multiple-figure packs of the same. Oh, how I WISH that were still the case!!! But the one good thing about being forced to buy packs of figures, three-quarters or five-sixths of which you do not need, is that you end up with extras, which can sometimes come in handy later.

From here on I'll let the pictures do the talking...

*NOTE: If I'd had one more of Empress Miniatures' loose foreign service helmets from their Anglo-Zulu war Accessories Range, I might have left this figure bareheaded and glued the spare helmet onto his base. But I used the very last one of my spares for another recent conversion, which I hope to post about soon, so I felt compelled to swap it out for the Highland officer's helmeted head. On the plus side it makes him that look that much less like the figure he started out as, which after all was the whole point!