Delving deeply at the Prince Philip Maritime Collections Centre (Revised)

Sue and I have visited the Prince Philip Maritime Collections Centre twice before, a year ago and last September.

On this occasion, we were invited to attend a special ‘Delve Deeper’ after-hours tour of the Centre that concentrated on the National Maritime Museum’s massive model ship collection and their conservation. We arrived at the Centre in time to have some refreshments and to have a chat with other visitors before the tour started. I had a chance to meet Simon Stephens, the Curator of the Ship Model and Boat Collections. My fame (or should that be infamy?) preceded me, and I was introduced to him as ‘Bob the Blog’!

The was a good turnout, with some visitors coming from as far away as Barnet and Southampton. In fact, there were so many of us that we were split into two groups. Sue and I were allocated to the first group, and we followed Simon from the visitor’s room into the storage building that held examples of the museum’s model ship collection.

There he showed us the following models.

• The Grille, which served as a despatch boat and yacht during her service with the Kriegsmarine. After the Second World War, the Grille was sold off and used for a variety of roles. She was eventually scrapped in New York.
• A two-funnelled steam-powered warship from the so-called 'transition' era.
• A model ship made of bone that was probably made by American prisoners of war during the War of 1812.
• SMS Regensburg, which served in the Imperial German Navy during the Great War. She was then handed over to the French Navy, who renamed her Strasbourg. Her hulk was scuttled at Lorient in 1944.
• Brunel's SS Great Britain. The ship is preserved in a drydock in Bristol.
• HMS Powerful. She was a very large, protected cruiser, whose crew took part in the Boer War as part of the Naval Brigade. She was out of service by 1914 and used as a training hulk but was not scrapped until 1929.
• An Iron Duke-class superdreadnought.
• HMS Queen Mary, one of Beatty's battlecruisers, she was sunk at the Battle of Jutland. This ship and her half-sisterships (Princess Royal and Lion) were generally referred to as the 'big cats'.
• The latest addition to the collection, a model of the Grimaldi Line's new hybrid RORO ferry.
• SS Kenwood.
• HMS Dreadnought, the UK's first nuclear-powered submarine.
• The Brazilian battleship Minas Gerais. She and her sister ship (Sao Paulo) were designed and built by Vickers Armstrong.
• An oil rig.
• The Spanish cruiser Infanta Maria Teresa. She and her two sister ships (Vizcaya and Almirante Oquendo) were sunk at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba on 3rd July 1898.
• SS Dumra, which was built in 1946 for the British India Steam Navigation Company for service between India and the Persian Gulf. She had three sisterships and after being transferred to the P&O fleet, she was eventually sold in 1975 and renamed Daman. She was scrapped in 1979.
• HMS Captain, Cowper Cole's ill-fated attempt to build a turreted battleship that could also be powered by sail and steam. She sank five months after coming into service, and all but 27 of her crew were lost.
• RMS (later HMS) Almaznora.
• A half-hull model of a merchant ship.
• A model of part of Felixstowe Docks in Suffolk.

When we returned to the visitor’s room, Simon handed us over to Object Conservation Manager Karen Jensen, who took us up to the area on the first floor of the main building where model conservation takes place.

The first model she showed us was actually a diorama made for a Pirates exhibition held some years ago. It featured a model of the Hispaniola from Robert Louis Stevenson's book, TREASURE ISLAND.

The most common part of a sailing ship model that needs to be renovated is its rigging, and the conservators have their own colour chart that they use to get the exact shade of rigging right.

Also on show were two boxes of 1:1250th-scale ship models that had been donated to the museum, and which were in the process of being placed into specially made storage boxes. One contained a collection of post-war Royal Navy warships and the other included merchant ships from 1900 onwards.

Finally, she showed us examples of wooden framed and planked hull models, including the oldest in the museum's collection, which was made during the period just after the English Civil War. The actual ship that the oldest model is based on has yet to be identified, but research is currently underway to rectify this.

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The next ‘Delve Deeper’ tour will take place on 9th February and will look at the clocks and chronometers held and conserved in the Centre. It will be hosted by the wonderfully Whovian-named Curator of Time!