Scale: 1:480. A miniature waterline model set in a realistic stormy sea and displayed in a table-top case with a painted background. Too small to be of any research value it is nevertheless rather quaint. It was made by A. G. L. Hardy in 1942, while serving as a sub-lieutenant RNVR on board the depicted ship. The case has been signed by him on the underside.

A ‘Hills-class’ Admiralty armed trawler, ‘Bredon’, T-223, was built by the well-known trawler builders, Cook, Welton & Gemmell Ltd, of Kingston-upon-Hull, and launched on the 20 November 1941. With the outbreak of the Second World War hundreds of coal-burning trawlers joined the so-called “Harry Tate’s Navy”, the Royal Naval Patrol Service, employed on the perilous Northern Patrol, looking for U-boats and German raiders in the North Atlantic. Others escorted Atlantic and Arctic convoys. Hardy himself had a lucky escape. HMS ‘Bredon’ was sunk by ‘U-521’ in the North Atlantic on 8 February 1943, shortly after he left her to join the submarine service. On the reverse of the model case Hardy has attached a newspaper cutting: “Two trawlers lost. The naval trawlers Bredon temporary lieutenant John Reginald Fradgley, and Travern acting skipper Lieutenant Frederick George Blockwell, have been lost.”