If you’re doing a major restoration of a treasured building – or even a treasured ship – you need to find out what the right colours to bring it truthfully back to life. So the team on the huge, £40 million Victory restoration project called in Ian and Michael Crick-Smith to get to the truth about the paint used on Victory in her most famous era. That’s Michael Crick-Smith in the picture. And what he’s looking at – gigantically magnified – is a tiny sliver of paint from Victory, that he knows is from the right date – showing him one of the internal colours of the ship at the Battle of Trafalgar. The white bit is the right bit here… and eerily, as you can see if you look carefully, with black soot and cinders from the battle still clinging to it…
The paint detectives
01 September 2015
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About Rob
Rob is a TV producer, reporter and camera operator with 30 years’ experience at the BBC, Channel 4 and ITN, in news, factual and documentary production. He is a four times award winner, whose awards include a coveted Royal Television Society award for his work on Channel 4 News. His association with The Maritime Foundation goes back to 1995, when he won the first Desmond Wettern Maritime Media Award for a series of reports that led to a major documentary on the loss of the bulk carrier Derbyshire.