Stuart Lecrerar paints a French Infantry soldier for his model of the Battle of Borodino. He's painted more than 1,500 soldiers already and his army grows by 12 each day.--NEWS PHOTO KELLEN TANIGUCHI
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Napoleon and the French army’s invasion of Russia during the Battle of Borodino is being re-created at the kitchen table of a retired Medicine Hat man.
Stuart Lecrerar, 65, has already painted more than 1,500 model French and Russian infantry and cavalry for the scale model battlefield, and he says he could see the army growing to as many as 5,000 soldiers. Lecrerar is staying home whenever possible because of the pandemic and says boredom led him to construct this project.
“It was the fact that I was sitting around the house doing nothing, twiddling my thumbs if you will, for months on end and I just got bored. I thought, ‘What can I do?’ And I thought I’d pick up my brushes again and set my sights on the Battle of Borodino … you don’t see many models of things like Borodino, which was the war of 1812 when Napoleon went into Russia,” he said.
The model army grows by 12 soldiers each day, and Lecrerar says he spends four to five hours a day at his kitchen table painting details on the tiny models. Lecrerar gets all of his one-inch model soldiers delivered from Georgia or Michigan.
He’s been painting and building models of battlegrounds for 45 years, including a model of the Battle of Gettysburg which he completed in 2005. The Gettysburg display included more than 31,000 soldiers and he claims it’s the world’s largest scale model. Lecrerar says he tried to give it to the City of Medicine Hat for a model museum, but the model ended up in the dump, with just a small portion of the project still on display in his home.
The front entrance of his house has 30-plus display cases with more than 5,000 soldiers and horses from different battles inside them, including a re-make of the Charge of the Light Brigade in honour of his late wife who liked horses.
Lecrerar says the finished product is what keeps him going and the current project is the first time he’s painted for four or five years.
“It’s the end product that I like. It’s the fact that you can start with a green piece of plastic and it ends up as an entire army,” he said. “This is my passion and this is what I’m good at. It’s taken me 40 years to be this good.”
He’s always been a history buff and interested in mass armies. However, the interest in military and war may have been introduced early to Lecrerar because of his father who was in the Royal Air Force in England. Lecrerar was born in Nottingham, England and moved to Medicine Hat in 1979.
“My father was military so we travelled all over the world. We lived in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malta, Germany and we got to go to different places, even Waterloo itself and many other battlefields I’ve been to,” he said. “I was always around military from when I was born until I was 18 when I finally moved again and again, I went to a military base in Germany.”
Lecrerar says he can see himself painting for another four or five months when he will likely run out of room for his Battle of Borodino model. Right now, Lecrerar has some model battles built on coffee tables in his home, so people can see them if they come over.
“I’d like somewhere to actually put them and display them where people can see them,” he said. “That’s why I build these things, not just for myself, but they’re always on about something new for Medicine Hat tourism … it’s here and I would put them on display at anytime, anywhere and if they want money that they would ask people to see them, it can all go to charity.”
Anyone with interest in Lecrerar’s work can email him at slecrerar@shaw.ca.
