Many years ago, when I was a member of the Transvaal Branch of the World Ship Society, I was involved in a project which sadly came to nothing. Looking back at my old slides I recalled with sadness the demise of the display model of the RMS Windsor Castle which had been donated to the society. How we came by the model I do not recall, but the first time I saw it was at the Santarama Miniland. The model was in dire need of restoration and it was at the Miniland because it was virtually the only place with enough space to store it.

At some point somebody had made a half hearted attempt at restoration, the lavender hull was pink, the lifeboats had been removed and some of the white upperworks had been painted as well. But the paint was cracked and the stanchions were bent, and the internal lighting was a mess. The paint job had infringed in areas of the deck and many of the portholes were painted over, the doors were broken and many of the fittings had been lost or damaged over the years. We had some grand schemes to restore the ship, but as a modeller myself I knew that it was a huge task, and one which would need lots of dedication and money. The sad thing is that nobody seemed to want the model, there was no maritime museum in Johannesburg and the funds for restoration would not be forthcoming from anybody but our own pockets. A decision was made to tackle the project, but like most things the spirits were willing, but nobody wanted to give up their time to do it. The internal politics at the Miniland also made things extremely complicated and it was evident that the ship would have to be moved as soon as possible. This was no small task either, given that she was nearly 10 foot long!

We stripped the superstructure down to its seperate decks, leaving only the hull loose on its base. The superstructure sections were taken to the home of one of our members to store and a truck was arranged to move the ship when the position became too awkward with the Miniland's management. Then the ship was moved and stored on trestles at the home of the one member. It was covered in fibreglass to protect it and then left to decay even further. I would gladly have taken the model to my own home, but I lived on the 5th story of a block of flats and the ship was too big to get into the lift.

It was inevitable that the ship would eventually need to be moved again when the member wanted to renovate the house, and one of our other members volunteered to take it home. He stayed on a plot near Pretoria and was the last person in the world who would ever have the energy or knowledge to take on this project. The ship was uplifted once again and the bits and pieces of its superstructure were given to him to take home with him.

About a year later we went to see this member as he was moving house and I enquired about the whereabouts of the ship, and to my extreme disgust I discovered that it had been dumped as I had feared. Yet another precious piece of maritime history thrown away like so much rubbish. The irony is that as a child I had stood at the bus stop outside the Union-Castle Line offices on the corner of Loveday and Commissioner Streets in town and stared for hours at the huge display models that they had in their windows. And I always longed to have one for my bedroom. I still have one of the lifeboats amongst my odds and ends and I think I must have the only real photographs of the model as it was, and finding these slides after all these years was a sad occasion, especially at a time when the real ship has sailed to the breakers.