Sepoys on the Sands of Egypt : An East India Company Unit for Silver Bayonet

Googling for East India Company troops quickly led me to a page that listed Egypt in 1801 as one of the places that soldiers of the East India Company fought. I never knew that, and with the forthcoming release of ‘The Silver Bayonet: Egypt” my creative juices started flowing.

The thing that really launched me on this quest was reading the following :
“Although sepoys had served outside India before 1801, their participation in a campaign on the very borders of Europe was considered historic. It was, in the words of one British officer ‘a singular event in the Annals of warfare…’ ”

Fantastic: let’s look for miniatures.

My first stop was Perry Miniatures. I was very pleased to see that of course they have ‘Bombay Sepoy’ and ‘Bombay Grenadiers’ in their Napoleonic range (with ‘Corsican Rangers’ on the same page – Googling them is an interesting read). Unfortunately the basic troopers in both ranges aren’t in dynamic poses, simply marching in formation, which would look rather dull in a game of Silver Bayonet. The command units for both are in more interesting poses but they clearly are from Britain rather than India.

I couldn’t find Indian troops in any other Napoleonic ranges, so started widening my search. Although it’s 50 odd years later there are plenty of options available for The Indian Mutiny. I’m no rivet counter (or I suppose button counter in this case) so these will do fine.

After spending many happy evenings looking through various companies ranges, I decided to go for 3 packs of figures from Empress Miniatures: ‘Mutineer Command’, ‘Quatermaster Group’ and ‘Sepoys in tunics firing’ which will give me a good range of characters and interesting looking troops. I’ll show them in the next post