Scale: 1:50. A model of a pivotal ship in the history of naval warfare. Surmounted on its elaborate cradle-like supports and complete with its original baseboard and information plaques it is a good example of a German shipbuilder’s model. It has been made to a metric scale so is proportionately slightly smaller than its equivalent British counterpart, but in other respects it is stylistically similar. The ship has been depicted with port and starboard companion ladders rigged and with several of the boats swung out on their davits. The centralised nest of boats is all stowed though and we can see the means for launching them in the form of a pair of hefty, industrial-looking derricks. The paint finish on the model is superb throughout, perhaps the main difference between this and an equivalent British example being that most of the fittings here have been painted rather than plated.

The depicted vessel was the first of a class of five ships with which the great expansion of the modern German navy began. They established the standard layout for German battleships until the introduction of the ‘Dreadnoughts’ in the early 1900s. Their design was remarkable for the combination of unusually small ‘big’ guns with a very heavy secondary armament and for the large number of guns that were able to fire end-on. SMS 'Kaiser Friedrich III' was built at the Kaiserliche Werft naval shipyard, Wilhelmshaven; her length at the waterline was 396 feet 6 inches and she was 10,974 displacement tons. Her armament consisted of four 9.4 inch guns, eighteen 5.9 inch guns and twelve 3.4 inch guns. Her vertical triple-expansion steam engines, driving three screws, gave her a service speed of eighteen knots. She was partly reconstructed in 1908, her cumbersome masts and much of her superstructure being removed. She served in the Fifth Squadron of the High Seas Fleet in 1914, but was relegated to an accommodation hulk prior to the Battle of Jutland. The whole class had been sold and scrapped by 1922.