Edited 29th July 2026 as more adverts/reviews found.
Edited 27th July 2026 with extra details from Chris Coxon.
Edited 28th July 2026 with extra ads etc from Military Modelling (1984 issues)
Back in the later 80's Chris Coxon moved on from working at Poste Militaire (alongside the legendary Ray Lamb) and formed Syntown Miniatures. I managed to snag a few of the sculpts on eBay a while back and recently found a thread on Planet Figure from which the information here comes. Most of the first images are off the website and c/o Chris Coxon, Ian Haynes and Mirosoft (who until recently had a wonderful site dedicated to old school model listings). They are put here purely for informative purposes and remain their copywrite.
Hi I worked for Poste Militaire with Ray Lamb in the 1970's then in the 8o's ran my own model figure company Syntown Miniatures, all 90mm white metal figures. I know Poste Militaire closed down a few years back now but I was wondering if Ray Lamb was still around? I'm now a works manager for a small engineering firm up in Birmingham UK
Cheers
Chris Coxon
This was back from 2017 and he managed to get back in contact with Ray Lamb.
Weirdly there is a note from an unknown mate above this Military Modelling review... 40 years ago and I've just posted about the miniatures now. Strange world we live in!
The miniature MP44 and MG34 were the favourite items I sculpted, the MG34 being made from no less than 27 seperate pieces of brass, copper, pewter & steel metals soldered together, the MP44 was not far behind it in complexity I will dig out some of my old photos if I can find them. Im amazed these ads survived - :)
Ian Haynes then posted pictures of a bunch of sculpts etc that had been passed to him. I gather they were passed back to Chris Coxon who had said there may be some news but nothing has been mentioned since April 2021... edit; unfortunately Chris has told me that the figures have not been returned to him which is unfortunate as they are his property.
And finally on to my own images... these are meant to be part of a four figure vignette so there must be (in theory) at least one more out there... let me know!
Edit - Chris told me the following;
The missing figure in the WW2 series Was PZC-1, a panzer officer running with a jerry can in each hand looking skywards, I was rather proud of the attention to detail, but the reviewer on military modelling rather panned it.
Edit - ad foud and posted below...
VGD-1 German Volksgrenadier Ardennes, January 1945
This one came with the photo below.
VGD-2 Grenadier of the 352nd Volksgrenadier Division, January 1945
A rather unflattering review from Military Modelling...
VGD-3 Volksgrenadier, Radio Operator. Ardennes, January 1945
PZC-1 Panzer Commander-1
Accessories
(no idea if this is complete etc)
So that's all the information I can get hold of. If you have any other listings or images please let me know. I've tried to contact the image owners but have had no replies, if there any issues I'll obviously remove their pics.
Chris told me a sad ending to the company;
When Ma died the garage where I did all my casting had to be cleared so I gave them permission to clear it all away scrap/ sell the molds etc. A sad day but life has to move on, One other piece of bad luck that befell me was falling victim to a Dutch con man who did a runner with all my painted promotional figures and over £2.4k's worth of stock kits, his name I shall never forget it was Harry Roemelling. Syntown never really recovered from that dent to the cash flow.
enquiries@deartonyblair.co.uk
