Scale: 1:768. One of a number of diminutive waterline models of naval and merchant ships by the miniaturist Charles Hampshire. This example is typical of his work, depicting HMS ‘London’ at speed on a bright and breezy sea. While accomplished in his craft, Hampshire was not the most accurate of ship modellers, his work being primarily decorative rather than a reliable source of reference. The table-top case reveals a fanciful, self-contained world at the amazingly small scale of 64 feet to the inch.

‘London’ (1927) herself was a ‘County’-class cruiser, built at HM Dockyard Portsmouth. Together with her sister ship, ‘Shropshire’, she helped with the evacuation of thousands of civilians from Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. During the Second World War, in May 1941, she took part in the hunting down of the German battleship ‘Bismarck’ and later served on Russian convoy escort duties.

In June 1949 ‘London’ was involved in the ‘Amethyst Incident’ or ‘Yangtze Incident’, in which a number of her crew were killed during duals with Chinese shore batteries in the unsuccessful rescue attempts to retrieve and escort to safety the grounded HMS ‘Amethyst’. On her return home she was laid up on the River Fal, Cornwall, in the hands of the British Iron and Steel Corporation. On 3 January 1950 she arrived at Barrow-in-Furness for breaking up.