Tuesday 9 March 2010

Scruby Figures

A recent post by Matt over on his In the Grand Manner blog reminded me of how difficult it is to find any images of these figures on the Internet, or even in print. The figures themselves are quite rare in the UK so it is very difficult to get much of an idea about them. For a long time the only pictures i had seen were black and white pictures in old editions of the Wargamers Newletter, John C Candler's wargames rules, and the occasional publication from Jack Scruby himself.

It reminded me that recently I had found a couple of pages of colour photos in an old catalogue. On digging it out I find it is dated 2001 from Ultimate Miniatures, one of the incarnations of Jack Scruby figures before their current manufacturer, Historifigs. All of the ranges are listed on their site, but without pictures, so I thought it might be of interest to post the pictures I have, below. As these are taken from a print catalogue the quality is not wonderful but I hope is worth doing.

If there is any interest I could also look to scan the black and white photos from John C Candler's rules. These are not astoundingly clear in print so will not be of particularly good quality on screen, but do have a greater variety of the figures.

One of the issues with Scrubies is that they were produced in a number of scales - 30mm, 25mm, 20mm and N gauge. Not all were available in all scales but it means it is not always easy to identify which scale figures in photographs are. The Ultimate Miniatures catalogue does not mention the scale of the figures in the photographs (apart from identifying a 30mm figure of a French officer converted into a Christmas ornament!). I therefore think the other pictures may be the 25mm range. These equate in size to British 20mm figures, such as Hinton Hunt.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Truly excellent posts! Yes please to the B&W images and definitely the Crimean figures. Thinking about it, I will try and identify each posting with the modern codes at the very least from now on.

Regards,

Matt

Anonymous said...

I still buy/collect Scruby Miniatures, having just completed my Zulu War project. I suppose they are more common here in California than other places.

I had a bunch of old Scruby Napoleonics that I brother of a friend admired.... I sent a box home with him one Christmastime during the late 80s. When his friend Joe Cocker (yes, the singer) saw them, he thought they were the bee's knees. Needless to say, I sent Joe some too, which he told me he kept in his "music room."

Just a story from the "Left Coast" (aka California)

Dave Smith

Unknown said...

I would love to see pictures of the old Scruby 20mm figures! I think I may have some!

Bob DeSilva