A BUILDER'S MODEL OF H.M. MONITORS M19-M28, BUILT BY SIR RAY...

Estimate

£6,000 - £8,000

A BUILDER'S MODEL OF H.M. MONITORS M19-M28, BUILT BY SIR RAYLTON DIXON & CO. LTD, MIDDLESBROUGH, 1915

the 43in. laminated and carved hull with lined and lacquered decks and silver fittings and armaments as appropriate, masts with radio aerial and lanyards, mounted on four silvered baluster supports, contained within original glazed display case with ivorine plates -- 26½ x 56 x 19in. (67 x 142.5 x 48cm.) on original stand -- 39in. (99cm.) high

The Worshipful Company of Shipwrights, presented in 1951 by Sir Gervais d'Eyncourt, Bt., in memory of his father, Sir Eustace H. Tennyson d'Eyncourt, Bt., KCB, Master 1928-1929.

The genesis of the ‘monitor’ – and indeed the very name itself – derives from the extraordinary ironclad designed by John Ericsson for the Union Navy in 1862 during the American Civil War, and its celebrated, albeit inconclusive, duel with the Confederacy’s Merrimack. This first encounter between ironclads clearly marked a turning point in naval warfare although, initially at least, the rest of the world’s navies proved rather unenthusiastic about the low freeboard, shallow draft vessels mounting a single big gun and christened monitors which were intended for coastal bombardment, The Royal Navy flirted with them briefly after the Franco-Prussian War (1870) had unsettled international relations, but the resulting four vessels built at enormous expense proved costly failures and the concept of the purpose-built coastal defence vessels was left in abeyance.

In 1912, Vickers received an order for three small river monitors from Brazil but, by the time they were completed in February 1914, the Brazilian Navy no longer had the funds to pay for them. Largely to prevent them being acquired by a potentially hostile state, the Admiralty decided to purchase them and took possession of them on 3^rd August 1914, one day before War was declared. When the somewhat ramshackle fleet of old battleships and gunboats then failed to make any impact on the outcome of the War from its bombardment of the Belgian coast in October 1914, the Admiralty, under its mercurial First Sea Lord Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher, decided the time was ripe to resurrect the idea of coastal monitors. Designs were tendered for rapid completion under relentless pressure from Fisher, too quickly in fact, and initially some basic mistakes were made; orders soon went out to yards across the country but many found it hard to keep up with the seemingly endless design changes. Fisher, as was his style, was so fired up with enthusiasm that he even resorted to seizing big guns from capital ships nearing completion along with any spare marine engines he could find.

By early 1915, the monitor construction programme had virtually exhausted the stock of heavy gun mountings yet Fisher still demanded ever more heavily-armed coastal craft for the various amphibious operations he was planning in his fertile mind. In March 1915, the fourteen M15 class monitors were ordered and laid down, ten of them in the Raylton Dixon yards on the Tees. Measured at 540 tons (650 deep-loaded), each was 177 feet long with a 31-foot beam and had a supposed but rarely achieved top speed of 11 knots. With a primary armament of 1-9.2in. gun, they should have made a worthwhile contribution wherever they were employed whereas, in reality, almost all the monitors were ungainly even in moderate seas and it remains highly debatable whether they ever justified the colossal sums spent on building them.

The service careers of Raylton Dixon’s M19-M28 were broadly similar, serving in either the Mediterranean or with the famous Dover Patrol. Most survived the Great War except for M25 and M27, which had to be blown up in the Dvina River during the abortive expedition to North Russia in 1919, and M28 which was sunk (along with another monitor, Raglan) by the German battlecruiser Goeben in company with the light cruiser Breslau in an action off Imbros, the largest island of Turkey.

Fine original condition; Stand fragile with old glue visible in the joints. Some dust in case.