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K63 HMS Picotee 1941
1/48 scale early short forecastle
Flower Class Corvette
1/48 scale early short forecastle
Flower Class Corvette
Despite all their many faults Flower class corvettes where the back-bone of the allied convoy system during the Second World War. In various guises two hundred and ninety four where built and saw action between 1940 and 1945. They contributed to the sinking of over fifty U-Boats, thirty three where lost, twenty two of them to submarines. One of those lost to torpedo attack was HMS Picotee.
Which flower to pick? I live less than ten miles from Harland and Wolff’s Belfast ship yard and my family have long had connections with the ‘yard’ some dating back to and before the Titanic. In WW2 my great uncle Jackie drove the crane used to help build HMS Black Prince, a Dido class light cruiser, my uncle Jim was an electrical artificers on board her. H&W built thirty five Flowers including HMS Bryony who was ‘sunk’ by German bombers before launched! She was later re-floated and finished the war, before being sold and ending up as a Norwegian weather ship.
Scanning through the histories of the H&W boats my eye fell on the name of the commanding officer of HMS Picotee, Lt R.A. Harrison, RNR and the name Harrison sparked a memory of a bit of family lore. My recollection is a bit sketchy but as I remember it great grandmother was married twice, the first to a civil engineer from a Dublin family called Harrison. They decided to make a new life for themselves in South Africa, Harrison left first to take an arranged job and set up home near Port Elizabeth, his pregnant wife to follow two months later. By the time my great grandmother arrived her husband was dead, (don’t remember the cause), and she was alone and wanted to go back to Ireland. The good people of a PE church gathered up the cost of her fare and the company her husband was to work for gave her a not inconsiderable one hundred pounds and she set of home, my grandmother was born during the voyage back.
Back to Picotee; Harrison had two younger brothers, both career seamen and RNR’s, both were killed during the second world war, one in submarines in the far east the other, as I remembered it, was lost with his destroyer that was supporting an Artic convoy. HMS Picotee was not part of an Artic convoy, but was in convoy with ships bound for Iceland. I do not know for sure if this is the same man and all of my relations that might have known have passed on but I suspect it is and that is enough for me to choose HMS Picotee as my subject. Picotee was sunk by U-568 and all hands were lost. U-568 was later sunk in the Mediterranean.
Now for my model, to build her I am using a mixture of various plans and photographs that I have gathered together over the last couple of months. The hull is made from GRP and was produced by Fleetscale and it is a real beauty. The majority of the build will be from scratch using mostly ply-wood and styrene sheet, parts like boats guns and rails may end up being bought in and modified.
To date I have made a working stand and started to prepare the hull. I will add more along with some photographs very soon.
Regards JJ..
