Scale: 1:96. A radio-controlled model which is proportionately accurate above the waterline but has an exaggerated hull form below waterline to accommodate equipment and to aid buoyancy, which gives it a distinctly odd shape. Its been enthusiastically made with lots of bright, colourful, detail, suggesting the actual vessel’s career as a pleasure excursion steamer, though the style is not to everyone’s taste.

Built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead for General Steam Navigation Company, and commissioned in the summer of 1932, the ‘Royal Eagle’ was advertised as the ‘largest and most luxurious pleasure steamer ever seen on the Thames’. One of the new features incorporated into the design of the vessel was a large glass-enclosed lounge on the main deck, where passengers could enjoy the experience of sea travel without being subjected to the wind and spray.

Every day of the week, except Friday, between Whit-Saturday and mid-September the ‘Royal Eagle’ left Tower Pier at 09:30 bound for Southend, Margate and Ramsgate, returning to London by 20:45. The day return fare in 1934 was 11s (55p) and a hot luncheon could be purchased on board for 3s 6d (17½p). By 1940 the happy faces of day-trippers had been replaced by the weary faces of soldiers as the ‘Royal Eagle’ played an important part in the evacuation of Dunkirk. She spent the rest of the war in the Thames Estuary as part of the anti-aircraft defence chain.

The passenger service was resumed in 1946 but with increased competition from the motor car and the train and it never again reached the popularity of the pre-war years. In 1950 the ‘Royal Eagle’, by then the last paddle steamer in the Company’s fleet, was withdrawn from service and laid up in the Medway. In 1954 she was sold for scrap and broken up. The General Steam Navigation Company continued to operate a regular service to Southend and Margate until 1966 when the service was withdrawn completely.