Modelling Admiral Popov's Battleship

Last November the Riverside Museum launched their publication celebrating their wonderful model collection. It’s a beautiful work of art and a great tribute to the museum staff such as Emily Malcolm, who spent years on it. We heard Professor John Hume speak of his childhood visits to the ship models in the old Kelvingrove Art Gallery. I was another of those Glasgow children taken there at weekends in the days when much of the ground floor was devoted to the city’s enormous collection of ship models, a tradition that continues nowadays in a rather restricted form at the Riverside.

Among the sleek racing yachts and the ocean liners some real oddities stood out, none more than the almost circular Russian Imperial yacht Livadia, her mystique enhanced by her constantly being referred to as Admiral Popov’s battleship. That isn’t exactly true. As we have seen, Vice-Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popov was attracted to the idea of circular battleships that John Elder had floated and in September 1879 appointed John Elder & Co to construct the Livadia as a prototype. We can see that it was convenient to test the design as a yacht; a battleship that didn’t perform would be embarrassing.

By 1879 John Elder had died and his widow Isabella had taken over the yard with its workforce of a couple of thousand men. The city of Glasgow owns her portrait and we see one strong, dynamic industrialist. She had head-hunted William Pearce from the Royal Dockyards as chief architect. Popov gave them an unlimited budget, the price being on a “cost plus” basis with a massive bonus if the ship exceeded fifteen knots on her trials. On 27 September Livadia on her third attempt beat the fifteen knots target and won Pearce a bonus of 414,000 Rubles on top of the base price of about 2.7 million.

Thanks to the new book we know that the model at the Riverside was built to the order of William Pearce. For many decades it sat in a case in the boardroom at Fairfields. A second, perhaps more elaborate, model was built and sent by Pearce as a present to the Tsar. It sits today in St Petersburg.

Looking at these models one can see the major features that were important to the Victorians. The model would enable the Tsar’s dream to be shared with an audience who would otherwise have had little opportunity to see the ship in real life. The model would ideally be a demonstration of the modelmaker’s skill and by implication that of the actual shipbuilders.

Victorian modellers sought total accuracy, a “good” ship model being expected to show every screw and rivet, even where it was impossible to produce this truly to scale. Sadly the effect of doing this could be distortion and a loss of the viewer’s ability to appreciate form. Elaborate gilding and paintwork further confuses the picture.

In 2014 I opened a fine art gallery in the city centre. We were on the ground floor of one of what John Hume describes as Glasgow’s Jolly Red Giants, the enormous red sandstone commercial towers that sprang up in late Nineteenth Century Glasgow and still dominate the cityscape.

Our building featured a Sixteenth Century French Renaissance exterior, with external statuary that includes a replica of the tomb of the Medicis, lots of mythical green men and other oddities. It was designed by the extraordinary Scottish architect William Leiper. To describe Leiper in one sentence, think the Scottish Branch of the Gothic Revival, throw in some Scots Baronial, season with Sir Walter Scott and you’ve got him. I decided to put on an exhibition dedicated to Leiper as part of the Festival of Architecture 2016.

So, what’s the connection to Livadia? In 1879 Leiper was having a gay time with his artist friends in Paris when the Tsar brought him back to Glasgow to create a Gothic interior in his new yacht. Being a bit mad about model ships, this was all the excuse I needed to get hold of a model.

I considered but quickly discarded asking the Riverside Museum for a loan of the Pearce model. There would be very obvious practical, insurance and security issues. A new model could show what could be done with modern technology.

I’m glad that we decided not to go with Virtual Reality. In theory we could have portrayed the spectacular interior, but it has to be done well and the cost would have been enormous. Doing it at a basic level, such as can be seen at the Museum in Irvine, does nothing for me. We also wanted something visual to draw people into the gallery, rather than something they would only access once already inside and perhaps have to queue to see.

Also, I simply like physical models. They are easy for the viewer to explore and can convey a sense of romance that technology doesn’t.

Of course this leads to adults and children alike wanting to examine not just visually but with the fingers, the sense of touch adding another perspective to understanding. As a result we lose some magic by protecting them behind glass. The Riverside Museum has solved this in a way that works at a superficial level, but has deficiencies. Livadia is immured at a high level, so you only see her from below, making it difficult to appreciate her remarkable design. We decided to put our model under a glass bubble.

To funding. We had put in for a grant towards the cost of the exhibition from the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, but of course had been awarded a tiny fraction of what we asked for. At meetings of the steering group for the Festival of Architecture I had met the representative from the National Lottery. There was encouragement to go ahead and we needed a legacy destination. I spoke to Fairfield Heritage to find out if there might be a home for the model in the longer term and they was supportive, but had no funding to buy it.

At this point James Pierce heard about the project. He had just returned from Russia with a wife. I was still investigating sources of funding when I discovered not only that James was keen to go ahead, he’d already made a start, perhaps partly with encouragement from his new in-laws. We allocated part of our grant to reimburse the cost of the materials, but warned him that he was proceeding at his own risk.

Starting work ruled out any prospect of Lottery funding, but looking back it’s obvious that James had to make a start, to meet the exhibition date. Going through a tender process and waiting for an answer would have left no time for actually building the model.

In the event James built the model in his evenings, after a day spent building the spectacular model of the racing hydrofoil Britannia that today sits in the foyer of the British America’s Cup Challenge headquarters in Portsmouth.

We wanted to ensure accuracy and had a problem finding the original drawings. A set on deposit at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow had mysteriously disappeared, as had all the best of the photographs taken by Queen Victoria’s photographers when Livadia stopped in Southampton during her maiden voyage. There was huge disappointment when we untied the ribbons on the lovely leather bound album and found it almost empty. This problem was resolved when James found that a fellow in the States who sold model kits of various historic ships had somehow got copies of the originals and was willing to send him images of them.

Regarding the style of the new model we opted for simplicity with no colour and no attempt to replicate all the features of rigging etcetera. We also decided on a waterline model that could be displayed easily in the gallery window and internal lighting, given our location on a busy street with a lot of evening traffic.

Our exhibition was a great success in terms of numbers, with lots of people attracted purely because of the model in the window. Among the visitors were the organisers of the James Watt Dinner, a major annual event in the shipbuilder’s calendar, and Richard Pierce and I were invited to show it there. Sadly none of the industrialists present offered to buy it.

The Imperial Yacht Livadia

There’s an old saying that the last things anyone wants on a yacht are an umbrella or a naval officer, but a fairy fountain decorated by electric lights in changing colours and sitting in a circular basin surrounded by floral displays must come close. The fountain, built from statuary marble by Messrs Galbraith & Winton, who were later to create the interior of Glasgow City Chambers, was only one extraordinary feature of Tsar Alexander’s fantastic floating palace Livadia II, built by John Elder & Co at Fairfield in 1880. 

She was probably the biggest and certainly the most expensive ship launched into the upper reach of the Clyde at that time. For the Glasgow architect William Leiper the commission to design the interior of this extraordinary floating palace was sufficiently attractive to bring him back from his spell at the Ecole Julian in Paris, where he'd spent two years having a gay time with his artist friends.  One can only guess at the excitement he must have felt on being given an unlimited budget to indulge his imagination. 

The Architect (23 October 1880) described there being on the awning deck the great State Saloon, 70 feet by 40 feet, “in the plan of an elongated octagon of twelve wide-span elliptic arches” with at one end a highly architectural sideboard with Ionic columns, the Imperial arms supported by carved figures and “foliage festoons” with elaborate candelabras. The ceiling was richly moulded and carved in white ivory relieved in gold, the seating in the finest French silk tapestry against a backdrop of heavy crimson plush curtains, the whole in the style of Louis Seize. 

Leiper commissioned the stained glass artist Andrew Wells to design the ceiling of a suite in “Crimean Tartar” style and William de Morgan made a minor but significant contribution with tiles of a special artichoke pattern. 

Courtesy the De Morgan Foundation

That the commission to create the flagship of the Imperial Romanovs, one of the wealthiest families in the World, came to Glasgow was a great tribute to the skills and versatility not only of Glasgow’s shipwrights but also her craftsmen and women. There was also a serious purpose, because for some years naval strategists had been discussing what form the battleships of the future should take, given the new technologies that were developing. 

In 1868 the Scottish engineering genius John Elder had read a paper at the Royal United Services Institute entitled “Circular Ships of War, with immersed motive power”, arguing that increasing the beam of a warship could enable it to carry heavier armaments. This was probably based on thinking about some of the vessels involved in the American civil war, in which Elder had played a significant role by providing the Confederate navy with many of its fast blockade runners. He would have become aware of the circular monitors that the Americans had developed. 

My native city is currently coming to terms with a dishonourable part of her history, her involvement with the slave trade. Elders were just one of several shipyards that grew very rich building fast, paddle-driven blockade runners for the South.

Vice-Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popov was attracted to Elder’s concept and in September 1879 appointed John Elder & Co to construct the Livadia as a prototype. 

By this time the yard was owned by the formidable Isabella Elder, John’s widow, who had head-hunted William Pearce from the Royal Dockyard at Chatham to run it. Popov gave the yard at Fairfield an unlimited budget, the price being on a “cost plus” basis with a massive bonus if the ship exceeded fifteen knots on her trials. Pearce, assisted by the Dutch engineer Bruno Tideman, produced a modified version of Popov’s design, reputedly  towing a one-tenth sized scale model about Loch Lomond. 

The result was a turbot-shaped hull, 259 feet (79m) long with a maximum beam of 153 feet (47m), that was launched before about 10,000 spectators on 7 July 1880, when she was named by the Duchess of Hamilton and blessed by a Russian Orthodox priest. 

Her machinery included three main engines for propulsion and about twenty smaller ones to drive equipment and generate electricity, powering inter alia the fountain. On 27 September Livadia on her third attempt achieved a speed of 15.725 knots, her engines running in excess of an estimated 12,000HP, earning Pearce a bonus of 414,000 Rubles on top of the base price of about 2.7 million Rubles. 

At the end of September Livadia left the Clyde on her maiden voyage. At Plymouth the Grand Duke Constantine joined the ship. On October 19 she left Brest despite warnings of foul weather further south, the Grand Duke insisting that there was no better opportunity to put the yacht through her paces than to have her ride out a storm. The following three days and nights were a nightmare for the imperial passengers, with the Livadia meeting 27 foot waves. 

With her shallow draught and blunt entrance she was unable to part the seas, as a narrower ship would have done, instead slamming onto them from above. On the third day the crew found that at least one of the bottom compartments was no longer watertight and it was decided to put into Ferrol in North West Spain, where divers reported that the hull had suffered quite extensive damage. Through the winter, while repairs went on below, the public spaces were used to host numerous balls and high society events. 

Tsar Alexander never got a chance to enjoy his eccentric yacht. By the time she arrived in the Black Sea in the Spring of 1881 he had been assassinated. 

Oddly, Livadia had indirectly saved his life a year earlier, when a bomb placed by one Stefan Khalturin in the basement of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, directly under the dining hall, went off at exactly half past six, but the Tsar, a man of very punctual habits, wasn’t there. He had taken a detour to show his mistress Princess Catherine Dolgoruki the model of the Livadia, a present from her builders, which had arrived that day. 

Of course the yard had their builder, James Cameron, make another model, which for many decades it sat in a case in the boardroom at Fairfields. In the early years of last Century the yard was persuaded to deposit it with the city.

Today this model sits as part of the main wall display at the Riverside Museum, among a whole array of models of all sizes. There's no doubt of the impact on the casual viewer, but I think it's a great shame that much of the individual detail is lost in the crowd. Also, for the viewer with a technical interest the radical hull shape, which was the whole point and mystery of Livadia, is lost.

Such a builder's model would ideally be a demonstration of the modelmaker’s skill and by implication that of the actual shipbuilders. Victorian modellers sought total accuracy, a “good” ship model being expected to show every screw and rivet, even where it was impossible to produce this truly to scale. Sadly the effect of doing this could be  distortion and a loss of the viewer’s ability to appreciate form. Elaborate gilding and paintwork further confuses the picture. 

In 2014 I opened a fine art gallery in the city centre. We were on the ground floor of what John Hume describes as Glasgow’s Jolly Red Giants, the enormous red sandstone commercial towers that sprang up in late Nineteenth Century Glasgow and still dominate the cityscape. Our building featured a Sixteenth Century French Renaissance exterior, with external statuary that includes a replica of the tomb of the Medicis, lots of mythical green men and other oddities. 

It was designed by the extraordinary Scottish architect William Leiper. I started to research him. To describe Leiper in one sentence, think the Scottish Branch of the Gothic Revival, throw in some Scots Baronial, season with Sir Walter Scott and you’ve got him. I decided to put on an exhibition dedicated to Leiper as part of the Festival of Architecture 2016.

The connection with Livadia meant that we had to have a model. We decided to commission a new, Twentyfirst Century one, rather than try to borrow an existing one. 

As anyone with experience of the various grant awarding bodies will know, there's no point in any private individual, however well-intentioned, even thinking about applying. After wasting a lot of time and effort we at the gallery and our chosen builder, the talented James Pierce, accepted that we were on our own.

The result was delivered on time and attracted lots of visitors to what turned out to be one of the very few truly informative exhibitions taking place during the Festival.

 

A Twenty first Century Model of Livadia

The memory of childhood visits to the Kevingrove Art Gallery, from the era when much of the ground floor was devoted to the ship models, has stayed with me, in common I’m sure with many other Glaswegians of a certain age. Among the sleek racing yachts of George Lennox Watson and the great Clydebuilt liners some real oddities stood out, none more than the almost circular Russian Imperial yacht Livadia, her mystique enhanced by her association with the exotically named Admiral Popov.

In the old days you couldn’t touch the models in their glass cases, but at least you could see them from all sides and get a real sense of their form and beauty. As the years went by they seem to have diminished in importance, first moving to the old Transport Museum at Kelvin Hall, where only a fraction of the total complement was on show, then on to the Riverside Museum, where it seems even fewer can be seen. Much worse, the survivors are now largely built into wall displays. Livadia in particular is currently immured at a height that makes it impossible to appreciate her remarkable design.

The Riverside model was built to the order of Sir William Pearce, the owner of John Elder & Co, and for many decades it sat in a case in the boardroom at Fairfield. A second, more elaborate, model was built at a reputed cost in 1880 of £500 (about £50,000 in today’s money) and sent by Pearce as a present to his client Tsar Alexander II. It sits today in a museum in St Petersburg.

Such models were an important part of the process of obtaining an order and creating goodwill for the builder. Pearce would have realised that the model would enable the Tsar’s dream to be shared with an audience who would otherwise have had little opportunity to see the ship in real life and put his shipyard into the limelight.  It gave the Tsar the opportunity to explain his designer’s radical ideas to those who may have had little or no experience or interest in reading technical drawings. No doubt he would also have pictured himself strolling the spacious decks or hosting a reception or ball in rooms of a size and proportion not usually found on a ship.

Viewing that model, it would be easy for the layman to appreciate just how radical a departure from the conventional Livadia was to be.  It would have been obvious that thanks to the ship’s enormous beam it would be stable in the water (and incidentally make a steady gun platform), for this was the thinking behind the project.

At the Leiper Gallery we decided that our contribution to the Festival of Architecture would be an exhibition dedicated to the life and work of William Leiper and we wanted to include Livadia, which played a significant part in his story, the commission to design the interior being a sufficiently attractive project to lure him back from Paris to resume his architectural practice.

This raised the question, should we try to borrow an existing model or commission a new one? Faced with a choice between which of the two great cities would be more easily persuaded to lend its model we decided not to try.

Model making as a craft has been around for centuries and has greatly moved on recently. Victorian modellers sought total accuracy, a “good” ship model being expected to show every screw and rivet, even where it was impossible to produce this truly to scale. Sadly the effect of doing this could be  distortion and a loss of the viewer’s ability to appreciate form.

Recently a young pretender emerged in the form of Virtual Reality.  But this has some major shortcomings. Interfacing with the world via a screen or visor though impressive, even useful in some applications, has distinct limitations.

A physical model is passive until the viewer approaches it, then without any need for intervening technology he starts to explore the subject, to engage with it on his own terms. Every child will start to examine some new object not just visually but with the fingers, the sense of touch adding another perspective to understanding. Adults do not lose the urge to reach out and feel even the most delicate detail, so sadly many models have to be protected behind glass.

We felt that we had to have a physical, rather than a virtual, model and wanted something that would demonstrate the best that can be achieved with current technologies.

The search for a modeller who would deliver on time to the finest quality was simplified by the discovery that James Pierce of Ambleside had recently acquired Russian in-laws and was likely to be favourably disposed towards the idea.

James studied at Lancaster College of Art and graduated with First Class Honours in Modelmaking for Design & Media from the Bournemouth Arts Institute.  After brief periods with Dyson and the architectural model maker Threadgill  in London he headed back north bringing with him hands-on experience of the latest materials and computer aided machining techniques.  But, perhaps most importantly a fresh approach to model making, a sense of theatre.

Ten years ago he became a partner in a Cumbrian company. Initially the firm built full-sized yachts, moving later to become established as  a world-leading manufacturer of ship and yacht research models. In 1995 & 2000 they contributed to the success of New Zealand’s America’s Cup victory and numerous super-yachts, after which building ‘real’ yachts fell by the wayside to concentrate on research and concept modelmaking. 

With towing tank models the emphasis has to be on accuracy, but concept models primarily require inspiration to make a project come to life. Such models are the client’s first tangible, physical link with a new ship or super yacht design. The excitement of everyone involved is at quite a different level, way above viewing a set of drawings or a computer animation. The project is coming to life. Model making is no longer a technical skill, it is elevated to an art form.

   

It is interesting to compare the 1880 Livadia model at the Riverside Museum with James’s 2016 interpretation. Having engaged the onlooker without blinding him with an excess of detail a thousand questions are posed, the perfect way to start a new conversation.

All images courtesy of James and Richard Pierce  http://jamesfranklinpierce.weebly.com/

The Romanov yacht Livadia - Imperial vanity or prototype weapon of war?

There’s an old saying that the last things anyone wants on a yacht are an umbrella or a naval officer, but a fairy fountain decorated by electric lights in changing colours and sitting in a circular basin surrounded by floral displays must come close.

The fountain, built from statuary marble by Messrs Galbraith & Winton, who were later to create the interior of Glasgow City Chambers, was only one extraordinary feature of Tsar Alexander’s fantastic floating palace Livadia II, built by John Elder & Co at Fairfield in 1880.

Shaped like a giant turbot, the ship measured 259 feet in length with a beam of 153 feet. She was probably the biggest and certainly the most expensive ship launched into the upper reach of the Clyde at that time.

For the Glasgow architect William Leiper the commission to design the interior of this extraordinary floating palace was sufficiently attractive to bring him back from his spell as an art student at the Ecole Julian in Paris.  One can only guess at the excitement he must have felt on being given an unlimited budget to indulge his imagination.

The Architect (23 October 1880) described there being on the awning deck the great State Saloon, 70 feet by 40 feet, “in the plan of an elongated octagon of twelve wide-span elliptic arches” with at one end a highly architectural sideboard with Ionic columns, the Imperial arms supported by carved figures and “foliage festoons” with elaborate candelabras The ceiling was richly moulded and carved in white ivory relieved in gold, the seating in the finest French silk tapestry against a backdrop of heavy crimson plush curtains, the whole in the style of Louis Seize. 

Leiper commissioned the stained glass artist Andrew Wells to design the ceiling of a suite in “Crimean Tartar” style and William de Morgan made a minor but significant contribution with tiles of a special artichoke pattern.

image courtesy of the de Morgan Foundation

That the commission to create the flagship of the Imperial Romanovs, one of the wealthiest families in the World, came to Glasgow was a great tribute to the skills and versatility not only of Glasgow’s shipwrights but also her craftsmen and women. There was also a serious purpose, because for some years naval strategists had been discussing what form the battleships of the future should take, given the new technologies that were developing.

In 1868 the Scottish engineering genius John Elder had read a paper at the Royal United Services Institute entitled “Circular Ships of War, with immersed motive power”, arguing that increasing the beam of a warship could enable it to carry heavier armaments. This was probably based on thinking about some of the vessels involved in the American civil war, in which Elder had played a significant role by providing the Confederate navy with many of its fast blockade runners. He would have become aware of the circular monitors that the Americans had developed.

Vice-Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popov was attracted to Elder’s concept and in September 1879 appointed John Elder & Co to construct the Livadia as a prototype. By this time the yard was owned by the formidable Isabella Elder, John’s widow, who had head-hunted William Pearce to run it. It seems that Popov gave the yard at Fairfield an unlimited budget, the price being on a “cost plus” basis with a massive bonus if the ship exceeded fifteen knots on her trials.

William Pearce, assisted by the Dutch engineer Bruno Tideman, produced a modified version of Popov’s design, reputedly  towing a one-tenth sized scale model about Loch Lomond. The result was a turbot-shaped hull, 259 feet (79m) long with a maximum beam of 153 feet (47m), that was launched before about 10,000 spectators on 7 July 1880, when she was named by the Duchess of Hamilton and blessed by a Russian Orthodox priest. Her machinery included three main engines for propulsion and about twenty smaller ones to drive equipment and generate electricity, powering inter alia the fountain.

On 27 September Livadia on her third attempt achieved a speed of 15.725 knots, her engines running in excess of an estimated 12,000HP, earning Pearce a bonus of 414,000 Rubles on top of the base price of about 2.7 million Rubles.

At the end of September Livadia left the Clyde on her maiden voyage. At Plymouth the Grand Duke Constantine joined the ship. On October 19 she left Brest despite warnings of foul weather further south, the Grand Duke insisting that there was no better opportunity to put the yacht through her paces than to have her ride out a storm.

The following three days and nights were a nightmare for the imperial passengers, with the Livadia meeting 27 foot waves. With her shallow draught and blunt entrance she was unable to part the seas, as a narrower ship would have done, instead slamming onto them from above. On the third day the crew found that at least one of the bottom compartments was no longer watertight and it was decided to put into Ferrol in North West Spain, where divers reported that the hull had suffered quite extensive damage. Through the winter, while repairs went on below, the public spaces were used to host numerous balls and high society events.

Tsar Alexander never got a chance to enjoy his eccentric yacht. By the time she arrived in the Black Sea in the Spring of 1881 he had been assassinated. Oddly, Livadia had indirectly saved his life a year earlier, when a bomb placed by one Stefan Khalturin in the basement of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, directly under the dining hall, went off at exactly half past six, but the Tsar, a man of very punctual habits, wasn’t there. He had taken a detour to show his mistress Princess Catherine Dolgoruki the model of the Livadia, a present from her builders, which had arrived that day.

A future post will discuss the building of the model illustrated in the opening image