Scale: 1:768. The model depicts a fictional scene of the battle-cruiser HMS ‘Hood’ (1918) with King Henry VIII’s pride and joy, the ‘Mary Rose’ (1509) passing the ‘Hood’s’ starboard side in the opposite direction. The title of the model is ‘400 years progress in the Royal Navy’.

Fanciful it may be but the model graphically shows the comparative sizes of these two iconic ships. The modelmaker, Charles Hampshire, does get two facts wrong about the ‘Mary Rose’ in his plaque in that she was not an ‘Elizabethan’ ship, neither was she launched in 1536 (though she did get a rebuild in that year). A convenient slip of the engraving tool perhaps, as the model was made in 1936.

‘Mary Rose’ is regarded as the cradle of the Royal Navy. Built between 1509 and 1511, she was one of the first ships able to fire a broadside, and was a firm favourite of Henry VIII. After a long and successful career, she sank accidentally during an engagement with the French fleet in 1545. Her rediscovery and salvage were seminal events in the history of marine archaeology and she is now on display at the Mary Rose Museum, Portsmouth.

Built by John Brown & Company, Clydebank, and launched on 22 August 1918, the ‘Hood’ spent the next two years being fitted out. When commissioned, she was the largest capital ship in the British fleet, at 860 feet in length and 45,200 displacement tons. She was popularly known as ‘The Mighty Hood’. Because three battle-cruisers had been lost at the Battle of Jutland she was built with an added 5000 tons of extra armour making her a grossly overweight ship, compared to her original design, with a highly stressed structure. In fact it had been seriously suggested even before her launch that she should be scrapped but post-war economies made the idea unfeasible. Because of her fame, she spent much of the inter-war years on goodwill cruises ‘flying the flag’. On one such cruise, between November 1923 and September 1924, she was visited by an estimated 750,000 people. In 1931 her crew took part in the Invergordon Mutiny.

Although ‘Hood’ had undergone a complete refit in 1929–30, she was in poor condition by the outbreak of the Second World War, but could not be taken out of service. She was initially patrolling the waters off Iceland and the Faroes, to protect convoys and to attack German raiders. News of the sailing of the ‘Bismarck’ and ‘Prinz Eugen’, in May 1941, was relayed to the ‘Hood’ and the battleship HMS ‘Prince of Wales’, and they steered a course to intercept the German ships.

In the ensuing Battle of the Denmark Strait, 24 May 1941, the ‘Hood’ was caught in a poor tactical position. As she turned to bring her guns on the enemy, she emitted a jet of fire from her deck followed by a huge explosion that destroyed the aft end of the ship. First the stern, then the rest of the ‘Hood’ sank, just ten minutes after first engaging the German ships. Of her complement of 1418 crewmen, only three survived. The dramatic loss of such a potent symbol of British sea power had a profound effect back home.