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Gallery: HMS Prince of Wales; laying the keel

August 19, 2018 / efoeth

The keel of HMS Prince of Wales was laid at Cammell Laird’s shipyard in Birkenhead on 1 January 1937. A number of photographs of the ceremony is being held by the Wirral Archives service; I order a digital copy for personal use. I was so excited by both the quality of the images and how the event was captured that I asked the archives if the images could be published in small format on my blog. They replied I would need the express permission of the copyright holder, BAE systems. As the archives explained “BAE Systems took over Cammell Laird, including its intellectual property rights, as follows: Cammell Laird was nationalised in 1977, and was then privatised again in 1986 when it became part of VSEL Consortium; subsequently the VSEL Consortium was the subject of a takeover and became Marconi Marine, which then passed to BAE Systems. The present company shares the same name and site as the old Cammell Laird, but is in fact a different company.” I contacted the legal department of BAE systems; they agreed to my request provided I would place the following disclaimer

I would like the express my gratitude to both the Wirral Archival Services and BAE systems both for their assistance and for making it possible to publish these photographs.

Unfortunately, the accompanying information regarding these images is no longer in the archives. However, the photographs are all marked “Stewart Bale, Liverpool”, a well-known photographer, with nearly 200,000 negatives in storage at the Stewart Bale collection of the Mersey Side Maritime Museum. I have not written to them, but they may hold some more information.

I’ve manually cleaned up the images, removing dust & scratches and repairing damage where I could. It’s not always easy to see the difference between damage or a pocket handkerchief as is the case with the gentleman standing at the bottom of the staircase—comparing with other photographs can rule such errors out— but I’ve tried to leave the images as close to the original as possible. Note that one of the photographers is captured , as well has a small furnace heating the rivets.

Gallery: HMS Rodney, main guns

June 24, 2018 / efoeth

Nearly all photographs of HMS Rodney could be classified under the “main gun” header with the main armament so prevalent in most images, so I made a small collection with either the barrel or the turret clearly in view (and not part of a larger series).

The crew receiving the following proclamation by King Edward VIII by the Captain (Wilfred Custance based on the date)

Royal Marine Guard for King Edward VIII

Hoisting a cutter

At the Canary Islands

Invergordon.

“Gun jam practise” (?)

Winches, part II

March 18, 2018 / efoeth

Continuing from part I

With the deck painting progressing nicely I had to finish one tiny item: the six steam winches scattered around the barbettes. They are quite small and usually covered; only a few pics show them properly.

These small parts are a combination of lathed parts and a collection of styrene strip and Albion Alloy tubes/rod. These small tubes are brilliant modelling supplies and I cannot recommend them enough. A few tricky items for these parts were the drums with the five holes that I made when I wrote part I (in, ahum, 2010). Another tricky part is the small block in the front with the two curved brass wires from the side and one brass wire sticking out on top; this is a 0.75×0.75×0.5 mm “block” that actually has three holes drilled though it using the drill press. And the rest was tricky too. I should have used more etched parts to make life much easier, but making life easy was not the goal of this mini model I suppose.

Gallery: HMS Rodney’s secondary armament

February 3, 2018 / efoeth

Here’s a collection of images of the secondary guns of HMS Rodney. I was fortunate in picking up a second album of HMS Rodney with photographs taken with the spring cruise of 1935 and the fleet review of 1936. I added the approximate years and mixed the photographs below a bit. The second album had normal postcard-sized images and isn’t of the same quality of the first album but still very much worthwhile to show.

I just missed out a third album that would have complemented a nice series of HMS Rodney refuelling a destroyer at sea, but it had many duplicate shots and had to let it go.

1937

1935-1936. A gunnery target with HMS Hood in the background.

1935-1936

1937

1936. Night exercise off Invergordon. Image appeared in the Times, 3rd of October 1936.