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That’s NHS-UK – which doesn’t stand for our much-loved but perennially beleaguered health service, but National Historic Ships UK, who are among our latest clients. NHS-UK maintain a national register of historic vessels around the country, some still sailing and operational, some not. They’ve put together a far-sighted training scheme called the ‘Shipshape Heritage Training Partnership’ – SHTP for short – how to sail veteran ships in the way they were sailed and are meant to be sailed. Because skills needed to handle these fine old vessels, and especially ones under sail – Thames barges, pilot cutters, trawlers – are dying out as the last generation that knew and worked them have, sadly, mostly “crossed the bar”. And keeping such ships sailing is the very best way of bringing them to life – taking them out on the open waters that are their true home.

Well, no conservation company is complete without a guard dog (this is Alfie, of the Crick-Smith team) to keep an eye on what’s happening and make sure everything is above board, and all visitors behave properly. (Especially to make sure that no treats are going begging… miserable failure by the Maritime Films UK team there.) On behalf of Camera Assistant Steve Crouch and myself, Alfie, I can only offer the feeble excuse that we didn’t know you were part of the team. But Steve had his (very nice and smart ) trousers carefully checked out by the UK’s top canine conservator, because Steve lives in Neville the cocker spaniel’s house, and it’s only good form to show an interest, after all. We dogs do have manners, you know. Even if there aren’t any treats. Don’t forget next time, is all!!

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…

Like this, that’s what! Look and you’ll see a lighter colour coming forward from Victory’s stern. To the dismay of model-makers everywhere (one of whom called for the conservators who worked out the right colour to be made to walk the plank!) – this is how she really looked at the Battle of Trafalgar, when Admiral Lord Nelson beat a combined French and Spanish fleet to establish ‘Rule, Britannia!’ on the waves for a 100 years. And finally did for that prototype Fascist Napoleon and his bid for world domination, too. Outstanding! Sadly though, as the irate – and humorous – comment about walking the plank pointed out, that means hundreds of models of Victory having to be repainted. But conservation experts Michael and Ian Crick-Smith really have got their research right – next blog will tell you how they did it…

Latest project for Maritime Films UK: HMS Victory – seen from our old friend HMS M33. Nelson’s flagship, veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, is undergoing what can only be described as the mother and father of all makeovers. Everything is up for renewal – from the supports that hold her up in her dock in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard… to her planking where needed… all her masts and ropes (cordage is the correct term, sorry RN) and – her paint. Check it out. It’s changing, big time! Because that ochre colour, between the black bands across the gun ports, is all wrong. That’s been irrefutably established by paint detectives and specialist conservators Ian and Michael Crick-Smith, based on microscopic examination of the scores of paint layers applied to the ship. So what will she look like in her new clothes…?

It took much more than the “lick of paint” that so annoyed Sybil Fawlty in the famous episode featuring the unwisely jovial Irish builder – but here M33 is, fully open to the public. Go on board, and you get the sights and sounds of a ship alive. You see the crew’s quarters, just as if they’d just left them. The tiny officer’s wardroom, with a wind-up gramophone playing a hit of the day. Food stores, with a selection of WWI tinned food. The shells in racks. Machine guns in position on deck. Then go down to the former engine room for a stunning audio-visual presentation about the Gallipoli campaign – they call it immersive, and it really is: as the shells burst and the guns roar, M33 shudders as if in sympathy with her fallen comrades from the disaster of Gallipoli.