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The Model Builders:
Despite their remarkable skills, the craftsmen who built British dockyard models were so far down the social totem pole that very little was recorded about them. What we do know today has come about largely from the recent discovery of tantalizing notes and signatures hidden in the interiors of a handful of models, including several in Annapolis. George Stockwell and his son of the same name, for example, both placed notes in models they constructed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The private modeler Allen Hunt liked to put business cards in his models! And in the late 1720s, two young apprentice shipwrights from Portsmouth Dockyard secretly wrote their names inside the Naval Academy's Model No 22. Armed with this information, researchers have shed new light on the men who created England's dockyard models centuries ago. |