Wetherhorn

The Imperial War Museum is a treasury of collections of all sorts of things related to war/ One of those collections is a set of wooden ship models. These are not ordinary models. They are what remains of a major effort by the Admiralty to protect British shipping from the depredations of German U-boats during the First World War.  One of the measures used in that effort was camouflage, and these models were used to test various camouflage schemes. The lead photograph shows one being used in a testing laboratory environment.

The curators of this collection are not necessarily knowledgeable about naval history. For them, taking photographs of the models and putting the pictures in the on-line collection was already a major effort. The captions they prepared were mainly taken from hand written identifications scrawled on the bottom of the models. Add to that the problem of deterioration of the colors over the past century and you have a recipe for making unintended errors. I have been in touch with museum over the past few years since the collection went on-line and have sent them a large number of  corrections to the spelling of ship names. Most of those corrections have already been implemented. But there is another problem. These wooden models are old, and several of them have lost parts prior to being photographed. I suggested the idea of noting which models have parts missing in the captions about 3 years ago. That has not yet been done. One possible reason is the requirement for additional man-hours for a staff that is very likely quite overloaded, and probably short of funds. There is no on-line index of these models, therefore, I am presenting a list of the models here. It include notes on which models have missing parts.

I would be pleased to hear from anyone who has anything else to add on this subject.