Maritime Innovation in Miniature
Behind the Scenes in Barrow-in-Furness
The founding of Barrow-in-Furness is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of maritime technology and shipbuilding. In just a handful of years at the end of the nineteenth century it transformed from a farm into a major global shipbuilding centre with a particular reputation for innovation. Today it maintains that reputation as well as its shipbuilding legacy as the home of British nuclear submarine manufacture.
The change was wrought by the discovery of iron ore deposits in nearby hills. A railway soon followed to get the ore to the coast, where Walney Island created a superb natural harbour, sheltered from the North Sea. A series of entrepreneurs and far-sighted businessmen put the pieces together and realised that Barrow itself could become a major centre of manufacture. Immense investment in people and material resulted in an unrivalled centre of design and manufacture that could boast clients from all over the world, at a time when maritime power was exploding globally.
The names of the shipbuilders at Barrow changed over time: the original Barrow Shipbuilding Company of 1871 acquired a subsidiary, the Maxim Guns and Ammunitions Company, and then both were acquired by Vickers Ltd. to become Vickers, Sons & Maxim in 1897. In 1927 they merged with Armstrong-Whitworth, an engineering company from Tyneside to become Vickers-Armstrongs, and was nationalised in the 1960s. Now Barrow is the location of BAE Systems Submarines, one of only a handful of dockyards in the world capable of constructing nuclear submarines.
As a means of advertising the design and manufacturing capabilities of the Barrow shipyard, a specialist model shop was created to make scale models of the finest ships that were created at Barrow. The Barrow Museum Service has been collecting ship models since it was established in 1900 but its most significant models are those made in the shipyard: twelve large models known as the Vickers Ship Models Collection, donated by BAE Systems in 1999.
Many of those models now survive in the Dock Museum, itself a design and construction marvel which straddles one of the oldest docks in Barrow, dating from 1872. The magnificent models help to illustrate the historical importance and impact of shipbuilding at Barrow within the broader British and global shipbuilding, engineering, armament and model-making industries.
The twelve models created at the model shop are masterpieces. It was cruel having to decide which two to film in a single day’s filming but we settled on two innovative and contrasting models: HMS Vengeance (1899) and RMS Orion (1934).
Both models are enormous, but at almost three metres long, Orion is slightly larger than Vengeance, though Vengeance as a naval ship from the 1890s with more details to show. The first challenge was to remove them from their beautiful wooden and glass display cases. The cases had not been opened for at least a quarter of a century and contained the most exquisite and fragile models. We worked with a specialist four-man team from GlassHaus in Leeds, a company that make bespoke conservation-grade display cases. They arrived at eight in the morning having woken up at four to travel to Barrow. After some head-scratching to ascertain how the cases had been constructed - essentially reverse-engineering them - they carefully set to work unscrewing the timber surrounds that held the enormous glass panels; three men holding the glass, one unscrewing the screws, four film crew and a museum manager watching. It was like, as one person said, ‘dismantling a bomb’.
With the panels removed, and everyone able to breathe again, the film crew set to work, setting up lights, putting in black backgrounds behind and below the models to give them the impression of floating in dark space. The removal of the glass had a dramatic and immediate effect on the models themselves. The lines were clearer, the minutiae more vibrant, the colours and shine more visceral: The models simply came to life. The filming project is partly inspired to create a visual work of art that honours that skill of the artisans that spent so long – easily measured in years – creating these models and now with the glass removed, the challenge was set.
Each model took around four hours to film and each posed a slightly different challenge: Vengeance has all the complexity of a Victorian warship, with rigging, a huge variety of guns and ships’ boats with little space anywhere on deck; Orion as a passenger liner from the 1930s has far more space but far more opportunities to be creative with camera and lights. The resulting films are spectacular and we are enormously grateful to the staff at the Dock Museum for their interest and enthusiasm from the very start of the project, but also on a long and testing day’s filming.