Following on from my recent massive Irregular Miniatures photo shoot just over a week ago I was shocked and saddened but not completely surprised. Ian Kay’s little company has been part of my wargaming hobby pretty much all of my adult life, and more so recently than most other 15mm figure manufacturers. In recent years they’ve provided me with several of my more exotic DBA armies, and fuelled my mid 19th century colonial armies. As I said in my post about my recently finished Sikhs I’ve got a whole load of 1840s British and Native troops to get on with, following on from the additions I made last year so I could cover the 1st Opium War. I was only pondering recently as to whether I should add any more figures to my Taiping army and trying to decide what I’d need to round out the rest of the mid 19th century East India Company campaigns. The decision now is whether to rush in a last order or to just cut my position where it is.

My first purchases from Irregular were farm animals and peasants in 25mm, in the early to mid 80s. These were put to use in a game called „The Harrying of the North“ which earned me some notoriety at the time. The only rules I have are a print out from my Amstrad PCW and dated 1989, but it says that’s a revision. I’m pretty sure the first set was hammered out on my old portable typewriter. In those days I bought most of my figures from shows, normally Triples or Derby Worlds. Stopping by the Irregular stand to talk to Ian and his father was always a joy. Always so helpful, always had something you could use to fill that odd need. I also visited their „workshop“ with Mrs T before the children were born when we were on holiday in North Yorkshire. I bought a pair of pavilion tents from his jousting set as a command area for my Henry VIII 1513 army.

I later invested quite heavily in his late 1500s 25mm Late Elizabethans as my French Wars of Religion armies and project expanded. I always thought these were massively underrated as a range. They were the only range at the time that actually looked like the woodcuts of Elizabethan troops. Nicely proportioned too.

When I started my SCW project, which was based on Peter Pig figures, the Irregular „Really Useful Guns“ range came in very handy, as Martin a PP doesn’t really do a vast range of artillery. Yes, the scale is off a bit, but they do look right, and you can get pretty much anything you need at a very reasonable price. Here’s the version of the 76.2mm Soviet AA gun used in Spain, for example:

Odds and sods got gathered along the way, like some rather nifty buildings suitable as South American casas:

I’m sure there are Irregular figures in a lot of my armies that I’ve overlooked (Charles VIII French – almost forgot those) and there are wagons in my baggage train box too, both in 25mm and 15mm, and trucks in the Great War collection. The Edgcote game has a Banbury Barmaid, who I’m pretty sure is an Irregular.

I think we all know that we will not see the like again. The hobby has changed so much, and the openings for the one man and his dog operation are few and far between. Also, who else is ever going to do such a vast range across every known size and period. Ian’s out put is frankly astonishing. And all of that done with the best customer service. Nowadays figures are all done with CAD and 3D printed. They’re slick and soulless. You can pick a modern figure up and you have no clue who made it. With an Irregular figure you could spot Ian’s work a mile off.

Before I sign off on this one I really should express my thanks to Ian for making the Taiping range, some of his best work in 15mm and surely barking mad to even try and sell such a thing. Well, I bought them, and wrote some rules which have sold as well as most of mine do. There’s 200+ copies out there, I think, at the very least, so hopefully he made some sales off the back of them.

So, thank you to Ian and his family who have brought so much joy to the hobby and done it so consistently over more than four decades. Irregular Miniatures will be much missed. 

Enjoy your retirement. You have earned it.