VICTORY IS NIGH
After 51 years, sailor finishes work on scale model (nearly)
THE original HMS Victory took six years to build before going on to glory as Nelson’s famous flagship.
Michael Byard’s version has been under construction for 51 years – and has yet to be completed.
But then he has been working singlehanded since starting in 1969. And his ship is only 5ft long, meaning many of the 3,000 hand-cut pieces had to be fitted together using tweezers.
There was also the small matter of the four-decade break he took two years after starting, to raise his family and earn a living as a sailor and shipping company worker.
Now, however, six years after picking up his tools once again at the age of 74, Mr Byard has completed the painstaking feat – but for one intricate part that needs to be shipped from New York.
He has had to order a 3D print of the ship’s figurehead after realising it was too technical for him to make from scratch himself. It is due to arrive in a month.
HMS Victory, launched in 1765, was 186ft long and achieved lasting fame as Nelson’s flagship in Britain’s greatest naval triumph in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The model by Mr Byard, who visited the original in Portsmouth in 1960, has gun ports, lifeboats and cannon, and is 4ft 11in long, 14in wide and 16in tall. More than 300 wooden planks, measuring an eighth to a quarter of an inch and all hand-carved to size, make up the floor and body of the ship.
Father-of-two Mr Byard, who lives in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, with his wife Anne, 65, reckons he has spent many, many hundreds of hours on the model, peering at his work through his reading glasses and sometimes even a visor with magnifying lenses.
Arthritis in his thumbs prevented him from working on the project in the cold winter months.
The ship has 104 brass cannon on the upper deck, which he bought from a specialist before hand-making wooden carriages to hold them.
He also made intricate ladders by hand out of one millimetre plywood, spending hours cutting and fixing the wood.
He said: ‘It was very fiddly. I was learning as I was going along. There were times when it was frustrating but I enjoyed what I was doing and I had an end goal in sight – it was just a question of working on it.
‘It’s been a labour of love. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.’