Scale: 1:96. HMS 'Latimer' and HMS 'Sancroft' were Empire ships - ‘Empire Ridley’ and ‘Empire Baffin’ - both built in 1941 by Lithgows Ltd, Port Glasgow, which were converted to fuel pipeline-laying vessels. The model shows them post-conversion with their hulls camouflaged, pipeline stores open and a pipeline being laid from the stern. We can follow the complex arrangement of rigging, blocks, tackle, and winches that takes the pipe from the forward hold, along the ship, into the aft hold, out again, and fed over the stern. The model though, fascinating as it is, is a mediocre piece of work. The paint finish generally, is rather poor and details have been clumsily executed. The model was, for many years, owned by the company that converted the ships, R & H Green & Silley Weir, and it is possible that it was made at around the same time.

One of the reasons why Britain and her Allies were victorious in the Second World War is because they could maintain constant supplies of fuel to where it was most needed. The conundrum of how to deliver fuel to the Allied armies that were planning their invasion of mainland Europe was tasked to Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Corporation’s chief engineer, Mr A C Hartley. His innovative proposal was that since you can’t assemble the pipe at sea, why not manufacture it in one continuous length, and deploy it rapidly off the back of a ship, in the same way that telegraph cables are laid. Thus was born Operation Pluto (Pipe Line Under The Ocean), the daring, inventive, and top-top secret plan that eventually delivered a million gallons of fuel a day behind the Allied troops as they advanced across France and Belgium and into Germany. The pipe had to be of small diameter, to keep size and weight manageable. He approached Siemens Brothers to adapt the existing submarine telegraph cable to convey fuel under high-pressure. Joining forces with a rival manufacturer and the National Physical Laboratory, and working under Hartley’s direction, Siemens developed the HAIS (Hartley-Anglo-Iranian-Siemens) cable – an insulated lead pipe, reinforced by steel wire, and coated in tar and yarn. Though not strictly a cable, secrecy dictated that it was referred to as such in order that an inadvertent slip would not reveal that an undersea pipe project was being hatched. Within a year, tests proved that the system worked with the pipe successfully being deployed from a large drum mounted on a ship. Manufacturing began and 710 nautical miles of HAIS cable was produced for Operation Pluto. Seventeen pipelines were laid from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg, and from Dungeness to Boulogne, which eventually delivered 1,350,000 gallons of fuel per day.

The ‘Latimer’ and ‘Sancroft’ were converted for HAIS cable laying by R & H Green & Silley Weir Ltd, at the Royal Albert Dock, in London, and the ships were used in Operation Pluto from January 1944 to 1945. They both returned to peacetime duties in 1947, being renamed ‘Ached’ and ‘Clintonia’. Both ships were scrapped in Japan in 1964.