Hi to all!

With all the topical Falklands related news in the media lately, I decided to try and locate this golden oldie and return her to the daylight!

I made this diorama literally within a few weeks of the actual battle of Mount Harriet when the heroes of the battle 42 Commando were still based at Crownhill Barracks here in Plymouth. They left for war with the immortal phrase "42 Commando, to the South Atlantic, QUICK MARCH!"

There were none of the scenics, etched brass and third party add ons back in 1982 so please make allowances!
The base measures a tiddly 5 1/2" by 4" and is composed of a pair of wooden frames of 1/2" square, one for the outside edge and the other makes up the sunken well for the dug out. Over these was glued a top base of hardboard with a cut out for the pit and the actual ground surface was good old pollyfilla spread around with fingers and then stippled to represent the short moorland grass with an old toothbrush before boot prints were added on top using a Tamiya 1/35 scale figure (or at least the lower half of one)
The dug out was lined with Tamiya plastic sandbags with a couple more made out of milliput so they could hang over the top more realistically. Tamiya also provided the battlefield accessories littered about; some jerrycans in the bottom of the dug out, land mines, (the Argies loved land mines!) Yankee helmets, a bucket of frozen water and some hand grenades on the parapet. The surrendering conscript was a Tamiya figure, heavily modified with a milliput Parka and a blanket and white rag made from toothpaste tube lead foil. (It broke my heart when some rotter switched all the toothpaste tubes to plastic, they were a brilliant and free source of a great deal of modelling material! ) The granite boulders were in fact (I think, it was 31 years ago!) an early scenic material, possibly Expo from the model shop in town.
The British Commandos are simply the old Airfix soft plastic Modern British Infantry toy soldiers (did anybody else unite toy soldiers and bb airguns together? ). They were simply painted up after their bases were sliced off, given bayonets (Airfix multipose) and rifle slings from the toothpaste tubes before being glued onto the base with the addition of a length of sewing needle heated up and pushed up into the sole of the boots which was then glued into a corresponding hole in the pollyfilla base.
The base itself was painted probably with humbrol enamels (this was long before the rise of acrylics of course) and finally airbrushed with multiple very light coats of white to simulate the heavy frost on the ground. There is a layer of ice in the floor of the dug out which was just a few layers of clear varnish dripped in and allowed to dry before the next layer went on top.
Finally the Argy GPMG (which probably looks nothing like a GPMG but it did back then!) was made from an Airfix multipose 8th Army Bren Gun with bits cut off and more bits added on and the discarded SLR was simply cut away from one of the Airfix toy soldiers.
Oh, nearly forgot, the base was finished off with real wood veneer and varnished and the name plate was a strip of PCB copper track, the letters were applied with letraset rub down transfers and the background copper dissolved away with whatever it was I used to make PCBs with back then! Once done, the letraset was rubbed off with a polishing block to reveal the letters in shiny copper (a bit dull now but it will polish up again!)
So that's that!, Hope you enjoy it and don't forget- I've got better at it over those 31 yrs!

Robin

Sorry! I duplicated one of the pics, I'll try and delete one of them later!

Fantastic work Robin, good to see it has survived the years intact!