Glasgow Museum Cutty Sark Model

Nice pics! cheers for posting them- very much appreciated. I have seen the model in Glasgow, but then again this from a chap who has also seen the Harland &Wolf drawings for titanic in Belfast and also forgot his camera!!

John Richardson's 'Cutty Sark- Ferreira' has a good walk-around of the ship as she appeared at Greenwich during the nineties. It isn't as authorative as other works, but the pictures are well annotated. He does at least mention when something is a restoration era change. 

On a related topic, has anyone converted a propriety kit of Cutty Sark into the Barquentine Ferreira? I haven't seen a model before!

Will 

 Jamie,

    Thanks! That's the photos I was talking about. I find some of the details useful but I see that the model is not a good source for building an accurate model. BUT that doesn't mean I don't like your photos. Thanks for putting them out on the web. No one else thought it was important enough to post. Thanks for being the exception. I enjoyed them thoroughly.

Hello Leftie,

I think those are my photos that I posted on webshots.  The rest can be seen here:

http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/album/144761500svybeH

Unfortunately the Glasgow Museum model is in a display case and was difficult to photograph so those are the best pics I could get.  I also posted my photos of the actual ship in Greenwich before the fire and maybe they could also be of help?  Unfortunately I linked a lot of the photos to the Airfix part numbers (i haven't got round to the Revell model yet).  You can see them here:

http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/album/224657237mYJiSF

Mia culpa...the error is mine, not Time-Life. I 'm the one who made the mistake in the name of the Captain of the Cutty Sark. It should be Captain Richard Woodget, not Woodridge as I had written in the previous post.

        Happy modeling to all and every one of you.

                     Crackers,  Jerome, Idaho

That all makes sense, except that Time-Life apparently made a typo in the captain's name (which was Woodget).

About the only way to take a picture looking down on a good-sized sailing ship in those days was to carry the camera up a hill.  One forms a mental image of the captain, trudging up a hill overlooking Sydney Harbor, at the head of a caravan of young apprentices lugging his camera, tripod, glass plate boxes, and developing chemicals.  (Those old plates had to be developed before the coating on them had time to dry.)  He took another famous picture of her under sail on the open sea - by balancing the tripod on a pair of planks stretched between two boats.  The apprentices had the job of rowing him and the equipment out to the chosen vantage point - and back to the ship afterwards. 

The ship's website mentions an interesting, recently-discovered journal of one of those long-suffering apprentices.  Here's a link: http://www.cuttysark.org.uk/index.cfm?fa=contentGeneric.fdvmyqknhxemnmvz&pageId=213 .  Let's hope that document gets published.

That Time-Life series makes a terrific introduction to maritime history.  All of us really lost something when the company quit publishing such series.  (I subscribed to four of them:  "The Seafarers," "The Epic of Flight," "The Civil War," and "World War II.")  The good news is that, because they were printed in such massive numbers, they're fairly easy to find on the used book market - at reasonable prices.  (I was still missing four of the WWII volumes when the series went out of print, but I eventually found used copies of all four on the web.)

According to Time-Life Books, The Clipperships, the photograph of the Cutty Sark at anchor in Sydney Harbor, Australia was taken in the late 1800s when the Cutty Sark was engaged in the wool trade. In 1887, Captain Richard Woodridge of the Cutty Sark, took up photography with enthusiasm. His camera was a big, full-plate, professional cumbersome camera that required a tripod support. To develop his 10X12 inch glass negatives, he used his cabin bathtub to mix photo chemicals and wash the develop glass plates.  The photograph was probably taken on shore, as the camera was too heavy to be hoisted on to the rigging of another ship.

                   Happy modeling to all and every one of you.

                        Crackers, Jerome, Idaho

Good point.  The caption has to be wrong - for at least two reasons.

First, as Leftie pointed out, the white paint wasn't applied to the panels on the deckhouses until some time well after she was launched.  (I'm not sure exactly when; the date may well be on the ship's website somewhere.)  Second, though her hull was launched in late November, 1869, she wasn't completed until early in the following year.  (She set out on her first voyage in February, 1870.)

Another hint about the date:  her rig has been cut down from its original configuration.  The main skysail yard and the studdingsail booms are gone. 

I've seen that picture in several places - including, if I remember right, the jacket of Basil Lubbock's famous book about the ship.  I think (though I'm not sure) it was taken in Australia sometime between 1883 and 1895, when she was working in the Australian wool trade.  Captain Richard Woodget, who commanded her during much of that period, was a photography enthusiast; I wonder if this is one of several pictures of her that he took in Sydney harbor. 

Woodget had at least two other hobbies:  raising purebred collies and riding bicycles.  The story is that, if the ship wasn't carrying cargo in her 'tweendeck spaces, Woodget conducted bicycle training sessions there for his apprentices.  Riding a bike on an enclosed deck of a moving sailing vessel strikes me as an exercise in insanity.  

  Thank you Mr Tilley. I ordered the Campbell plans today. I'm a slow modeler so a week or two won't be a big deal.

  One final question. The caption of this photo claimed it was the Cutty Sark in 1869. Does that seem correct. Were there white arched doors on her then?

If you're looking for straight information about the Cutty Sark you can't do any better than the set of plans offered by the ship's gift shop.  They were drawn by George Campbell, the naval architect who supervised the ship's reconstruction back in the 1950s, and they contain about as much detail as can be crammed onto three sheets of paper.  They're also, even at the current lousy exchange rate, one of the biggest bargains in ship modeling.  The set I bought about thirty years ago eventually fell apart, so I ordered a replacement a few months ago; it got to North Carolina in a little over a week.  Here's a link:  http://www.cuttysark.org.uk/index.cfm?fa=contentShop.productList&directoryId=6

That website is an excellent one, containing lots of good pictures and information.  It appears that the current restoration project is advancing remarkably well.  The tragic fire on board the ship just may have worked out to her advantage.  It apparently didn't actually do much serious damage, and it attracted a great deal of public and government attention that seems to have resulted in some very successful fund raising.

That model in the Glasgow Museum looks like an excellent one.  (I especially like such things as the fact that the rigging blocks are painted white - a point lots of modelers miss.)  I do think it represents, in some of its details, a transitional period in the ship's history.  (The trailboards aft of the figurehead, for instance, seem to be based on the configuration they had when she'd been re-acquired from the Portuguese and was awaiting restoration.)  It looks like photos of it would indeed be a good guide for a modeler.  But I strongly recommend the Campbell plans as a starting point.

the cutty sark museum at Greenwich still sells very detailed plans through their website. I forget now, but these are either Greenhill or Lubbock plans-good provenance either way!

I have a dismasted 1/72 cutty sark hull, probably from a 1970's kit, sitting in the workshop. The poor thing Has a few sprung planks, and no deck. The lines are so crude that I have actually given up trying to make her look like Cutty Sark. I think the hull will make the basis for a later 1870's barque of some kind, although I have yet to find one that looks similar.

Anyway, my point being- with Cutty Sark, I have always believed it is ALL about the lines. Something about the bow and stern shapes will always indentify this ship= hang the minor deck details- if youve got the hull right you'll know what ship it is a model of.

 My only word of caution would be that a lot of non-original (and even non-ninteenth century) additions were added to the 1930's=2000's restoration. Be careful if using modern photographs as a guide!