Airfix Guards Colour Party & Guards Band (A00702V & A00701V) 1:76

[Mike]

Guards Colour Party & Guards Band (A00702V & A00701V)

1:76 Airfix Vintage Classics

 

 

The Household Division is part of the British Army that is based in London, and consist of five regiments of Foot Guards, and two regiments of Horse Guards.  They are responsible for ceremonial and other public duties, such as Trooping the Colour, the King/Queens Birthday parade, and the State Opening of Parliament, amongst others, including concerts for the bands.  Although their duties are ceremonial in modern times, they were responsible for guarding important parts of the Capital, providing overnight guards for some unusual places, as well as the usual landmarks.  The Guards regiments all have their own bands, and it is the Foot Guards that form the Marching Band with their traditional Bear Skin hats, performing varying duties.  They have a long history both of playing music and of fighting in wars when needed, extending back beyond the 19th century.

 

 

The Kits

These sets of soldiers don’t quite qualify as kits, although there are a few parts such as drums and sentry posts that require a little putting together, and they are moulded in a flexible dull-red vinyl on small rectangular bases.  Each set has several poses, and in the case of the band, several instruments, and each set contains four sprues, while the Marching band has two two-part sentry boxes in addition.  The sets arrive in a small end-opening box in Airfix’s usual red theme, reusing the original artwork from the late 60s, although the original tooling dates back to the early 60s, which is why they’re being marketed under the Vintage Classics brand.

 

Each soldier simply needs nipping from the sprue underneath, and that’s the end of it.  The detail on the rifles is a little simplistic, and the sentry boxes are prone to having their fronts pop-off without some suitable help, but the nostalgia factor is off the scale.

 

 

Guards Colour Party (A00702V)

 

This box includes 44 parts rather than 42 as mentioned on the box, as the sentry boxes are each made from two parts.  There are three sprues of marching soldiers with their rifles shouldered, bayonets uppermost.  Another half sprue contains more marching men, totalling 36 in all.  The remaining four soldiers include a standard bearer, a Colour Sergeant or Warrant Officer who is carrying a ceremonial sword, and two soldiers holding their rifles in front of them in Present Arms stance for installation in the guard posts where there is no headroom for long bayoneted weapons over the shoulder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guards Band (A00701V)

 

There are 52 parts in this set, 44 figures, the remaining eight various drums.  The Drum Major twirls his baton solo, and there are 2 cymbal players, 1 bass drummer with apron, 7 snare drummers, 7 tuba players, 10 flautists, 4 trombonists, 7 trumpeters, and 5 saxophonists.  The drummers have separate drums that fit on pegs in the chest of the bass drummer, and on the hips of the snare drummers

 

 

 

 

 

 

Markings

There are no decals, and the soldiers were meant primarily for play.  You can paint them if you wish, although that can be problematic given the flexibility of the medium that causes inflexible paint to shell off, but adding a little PVA to acrylic paint can improve adhesion and flexibility.  I have never tried this, so it’s entirely down to you.

 

 

Conclusion

I remember these from my childhood, and I’m not 100% certain, but I suspect I had one if not both sets, so the nostalgia is there for me.  Moulding them in red was a good call, as my memory has them in a yellowish colour, but I could be thinking of the astronaut figures we reviewed some years ago.

 

Highly recommended.

 

Review sample courtesy of

[TheyJammedKenny!]

Wow!  Who did the paints on these figures?  They are really impressive, and I'd love to know what had to be done to them, prep-wise, to make them look this good.  I've purchased 30 replacement rifles, the L1A1 SLR, to replace the vague stick carried by the color party, and ordered decal rank insignia from a firm on the West Coast of the U.S., and hope to do something similar to what this modeler did.  

 

The hand of an artist was clearly at work, and I'm envious.

[mdesaxe]

My father had boxes-worth of these which he painted up so that he had a colour party (with both colours - the Queen's and the Regimental) and and a band from each of the five regiments of the Brigade of Guards. He even built a scale model of the parade ground at St. James Palace to display them. I was around ten years old at the time and found them spellbinding.

 

One thing I do remember, which might assist @TheyJammedKenny!, was that he applied a very thin coat of knotting shellac to the models with before painting them to make sure the paint adhered to the flexible plastic.

 

Maurice

[Mr T]

I never had the Guards, but a lot of the others, which in my teens I painted. I recall converting some WW1 German Infantry into 1879 British infantry from an article in Airfix Magazine. Would say happy days apart from my parents long drawn out martial breakdown  that seemed to take up most of my teenage years.