Without a doubt, the largest and best repository of WW1 ship dazzle art in the UK is the Imperial War Museum. So why is it so problematic to get clear, factual, data about this subject from them?
At least part of the answer lies in their system of cataloging holdings. They have a special category for original Dazzle material that uses the identifier “DAZ” followed by a number. Photographs are given numbers using the “Q” prefix. Fine art paintings, often contemporary, are assigned to the Art department (“ART”) and their collection of wooden models that were actually used to test the designs belong to the curators of the “MOD”(models) department. The people on the staffs of these various departments may be conscientious, and experts in their specific fields, but they do NOT seem to communicate well with one another.
Over the past 8 years I have sent several lists of errors and problems to the IWM with regard to the MOD series models. The first list pointed out errors in the names shown on line. The original model makers in 1917-18 wrote the name of the ship on the bottom of the model with a pencil. Many of the names were quite difficult to decipher. My corrections were adopted. But then came the problems of incomplete models, and of colors. Many models are missing parts; chiefly funnels and bridge structure. The descriptions presented with each model never mentions that the model may be missing parts. The models do have an added numerical tag on a mast. There is no explanation of the meaning of the tag, only of its’ existence. Colors are mentioned in the description, but, sadly, often bear no resemblance to the actual colors specified for use on the ships. This mismatch could be easily resolved if the curators of the MOD models and the DAZ documents consulted with one another. The DAZ patterns are actually quite large and have a title in one corner that includes a list of the actual colors to be used. The inclusion of that list was necessary because many of the actual patterns were filled in with colors by art students at Burlington House. They had no idea what the actual colors were supposed to be. On many DAZ series drawings the colors of specific areas is indicated. The camouflage colors were intended to be standardized, but availability of pigments at some port facilities where the ships were actually painted during the war could have caused minor variations. The artists who designed the DAZ patterns used rubber stamps to indicate the colors to be used. The IWM staff in the MOD section appears to be unaware that these color guides exist. This is most unfortunate because there remain so many MOD items that are viewable on line. This is further complicated by the fact that the actual DAZ items are quite large, and those that have been made available on line often suffer from a scaling problem that, if the image is downloaded, makes the list of colors very difficult to read.
Photographs of camouflaged ships are black and white. There are two different types of film. One tends to accentuate blues and make reds lighter. The other does the opposite. This complicates the task of trying to identify a ship by the dazzle pattern it is wearing (and vice versa). The artists who painted images of the camouflaged ships were also not precise when dealing with the colors involved. The Americans faced the same problem. But the US Navy assigned artists (some of them women) to each large US port where they created images, in color, of camouflaged vessels that visited the port where they were assigned. Hundreds of the reports they created, in color, are stored in the US National Archives and are a largely untapped resource for students of wartime ship camouflage. Very few of these reports can be found on line. Those pertaining to American contemporary ship camouflage were used in the preparation of my book “The Easter Egg Fleet, American Ship Camouflage in the First World War”. I never made a similar book about British camouflage because I had no access to IWM resources (and the cost of acquiring reproductions from the IWM was much too high).
Wetherhorn 