Dutch wooden toy ships

I was very taken with the wooden toy model ships that were on display at the Dutch National Maritime Museum (Het Scheepvaartmusum) and decided that more detailed photographs of them were worth sharing with my regular blog readers. The quality of some of the photos is not that wonderful, but I still think that they convey how good these wooden toy model ships are.

Road and Rail Ferry

The ferry has embedded railway tracks so that it can carry trains as well as road vehicles.

Motor Boat, Tug, Barges, and Docks

I loved the very typical Dutch-style double-beam drawbridge.

Cargo Ship, Barges, and Docks

Coaster, Warehouse, and Docks

Floating Crane

The cotton reel winch drums are both very simple and very effective.

Tug

Cargo Ship

As I wrote in my blog post about my recent visit to the Het Scheepvaartmusum in Amsterdam, these wooden toy ships were featured in an exhibition entitled Bruynzeel Havenspeelgoed.

The museum's website explained that Bruynzeel was a company based in Zaan (which is just north of Amsterdam) and that it was one of the largest manufacturers of doors, kitchens, cupboards, wooden flooring, and pencils in Europe in the 1930s, and that during the early part of World War II they supplied the German Army with doors for their barracks. At the same time, they employed workers who would otherwise have been redundant and therefore liable for forced labour duties in German with work producing these toy model ships.

The models were all made by hand using whatever surplus materials were available (e.g. offcuts of wood, bits of wooden dowel, wire, cotton reels). The shape of some of the masts would seem to indicate that a number of old dip-pen handles or artist' paintbrush handles may have been used to make them, and a lot of the detail on the models (e.g. the lattice framework on the crane jibs) was achieved using simple paint techniques.

The company is still extant today and still manufactures a wide range of wooden and other products.

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These wooden model ships put me in mind of the models featured on the GRID BASED WARGAMING - BUT NOT ALWAYS blog, and especially the models used in the re-fight of the attack on St Nazaire ...

... and the simple but very effective-looking landing craft he built for his D-Day landings wargame.