A British Dragoon 1743Thomas Brown, un soldat des Troisieme Dragoons, comme il pourrait sembler à la bataille de Dettingen en 1743. Il se est comporté avec beaucoup de courage, sauvant un drapeau qui avait été capturé par les Français, mais a été grièvement blessé dans le processus. Il a pris sa retraite de l'armée sur une pension, et a ouvert une auberge dans son village natal dans le Yorkshire, mais il est mort trois ans plus tard à la suite de ses blessures .. Il est typique de la cavalerie de la période, à la fois armé d'une épée et un fusil et une paire de pistolets.
The Battle of Dettingen, June 10th 1743 , is chiefly memorable as the last battle in which a British King was present in person .
Accounts are rather vague, which may be because bad things happened which are perhaps best glossed over….the training of the troops seems to have been inadequate , with horses bolting in all directions , including the King’s.
The French , initially succesful in driving back the Allied Line , were driven off, enabling the Allied army to continue its march.
You can read an excellent account here…
http://www.britishbattles.com/battle_of_dettingen.htmThe 3rd ( King’s Own) Dragoons were founded in 1685 ( later the Third Hussars, whose modern inheritor unit is the Queen’s Own Hussars ), were typical of the Line cavalry of the time.
Despite their designations as Dragoons, and a certain amount of training in musket drill , they very rarely dismounted in battle , being tactically indistinguishable from any other type of Horse .
The King's Own Dragoons were placed on the left flank of the Allied army, with instructions to protect an infantry force as it advanced. Exposed to French artillery fire for three hours, where it suffered heavy casualties, the regiment was eventually ordered to advance, and clashed with a larger force of French Household Cavalry .
After a fierce engagement and more casualties, it drove off the French . Shortly after this, the French army was forced to retreat, and the remnants of the regiment participated in a general pursuit .[
One of its privates, Thomas Brown, had an eventful day .
Because of the artillery fire, he had two horses killed under him. When mounted on his third in a melee with the French cavalry , a nearby Cornet carrying a colour was killed, and Thomas retrieved it from the ground .As he remounted, a French trooper cut off two fingers of his left hand, and losing control , his horse bolted into the French lines, where the standard was taken from him by a Gendarme.
He somehow retired from the fray, recovered his composure, then rode back into the French, where he pistolled the Gendarme and recovered the flag , rammed it between his leg and the saddle and rode back with it, in the process receiving eight sword cuts and two musket balls in his back .
For his outstanding courage he was offered a commission, which he could not accept because of his illiteracy . There is a myth that he was made a Knight-Banneret by George II in person, but alas there is no evidence to substantiate it . But he was given a pension of £30 per year , and he retired after the battle because of his injuries, and opened a pub in his birthplace of Kirkleatham in North Yorkshire , but only lived three years before succumbing .
An engraving was made of him which makes his frightful injuries all too apparent.
The uniform is based on the 1742 Cloathing book , and a modern Pierre Turner plate in Michael Barthorp’s indispensable “ British Cavalry Uniforms 1660…“ , which gave me the idea in the first place. The basics of the uniform come from the information in that book.
Saddlery : Before the sealed patterns of the later 19 century, we have to make intelligent guesses, because the real objects don’t survive , and the paintings are ambiguous . I have followed the 1:1 reconstructions made for re-enactors by Stuart Lillie. The saddle is little changed from that used a century earlier, or even now in Spain and Portugal.
Made of leather over a wooden tree ( I use walnut ) and padded with tow. It has a pillion , a little extra saddle behind the main one, on which the rolled cloak rests. The elaborate housings were embroidered .
Uniform :Each Dragoon carried two large pistols as well as musket and a basket-hilted broadsword .
The hat conceals a secrete , a cross-shaped iron head protector .
The coat is fairly plain compared with the Foot , with simple yellow cord buttonholes and the unusual mid-blue facing colour.
The pouch and belt are buff , with a separate powder flask on a cord.
He wears a shoulder knot of yellow cord, which denoted a Corporal in the Foot, but all Dragoons wore them , perhaps as a mark of the superior status of Cavalrymen .
Making the figure :The body is an HT slim. They sit a saddle beautifully.
I have reconstructed his pre-battle face from the engraving as best I can. His hair is mohair .
All the uniform cloth is brushed cotton , dyed and then painted to perfect the colour, and to stiffen it .
The buff leather is goatskin, the coloured leather is calf specially thinned.
The pewter metalwork modelled and cast by me ; brass work modelled by me , then cast in Birmingham by Beechcast .
Boots are wet- moulded leather , jacked into shape over a former, stained and sewn up the back like the originals.
The basket-hilted sword was a bit of a nightmare, since it had to be cast in bits and soldered together, a tricky business since it might melt… but I got away with it !
I have since discovered that there is a surviving brass-hilted sword possibly associated with Thomas Brown . But I’m not going to change it now !
The dating of mid-18th c swords is very imprecise anyway , since there are no official patterns in use, just Regimental ones .
The musket is the Short Land Pattern with a wooden ramrod, which was originally the Dragoon-length weapon , adopted by the Foot after 1768 .
The embroidered ornamentation on the housings and holster caps is embroidered by hand , then overpainted to tidy it up.
The horse: “Mad Jack “is a heavily rebuilt Cindy horse, made longer , wider and taller with plastikard inserts and with an entirely new head and neck. Black horses with savagely docked tails were the norm at the time .
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What an amazing fig one more time.
