Thank you to Neil and David for your helpful replies. I have had a quick look at railway figures, including those by Preiser, and there is certainly a lot of useful figures there in the scale I want. I will come back to those when I have enough time to research them properly, and decide which to buy.

I have just bought some N scale figures this last Saturday from a local model shop. I went in there for something else and spotted these figures. They are by Graham Farish and made for railway models. There are no naval figures in this series but I bought a set of locomotive staff as they were the nearest thing amongst what was on sale in the shop to looking like sailors – they have uniform and caps. With a little bit of altering these figures can be made to look like sailors. I think they are just a tad too small for my frigate, which is difficult to gauge what scale it is exactly ; I built it from scratch based on a plan featured in Model Boats issued about four years ago, it’s called Palinder, but there was no scale mentioned if i remember. However, I judge 1/144 scale is very close. To get an idea of how close they are to being the right size I stood one of my Graham Farish figures beside the helicopter that I’ve carved to go on the frigate. I then compared these to a figure and a Merlin heicopter, both made by Airfix in 1/72nd scale and which i based next to one another. Even though they are in different scales the size of the man, relative to the helicopter on my frigate, seemed close to be right and compared well with the Airfix models. Maybe the figures for my model are just slightly under size, but someone would have to be very choosy to criticise. I look forward to adding them on deck. There’s only going to be 12 of them, the rest of the complement are going to be inside. Well, you can believe that’s where they are.