Scale: 1:72. Full hull model of the cargo clipper 'Titania' (1866). The model is rigged and fully equipped. It has been built in the ‘bread and butter’ style, the hull is sawn and carved from three horizontal layers of yellow pine. ‘Titania’ is written on the port and starboard bows, together with ‘Titania London’ on the stern. It flies the house flag of Shaw, Lowther and Maxton on the main, signal letters on the mizzen and a Red Ensign at the peak of the Mizen gaff. The model portrays the ‘Titania’ as refitted rather than as first built. It was 200 feet in length, with a breadth of 36 feet and a gross tonnage of 943.

The maker, Clifford Oldham, took the lines from which he built this model from the original half model (SLR0989) in December 1937, when it hung in the Science Museum. Meticulous in his reconstruction, he worked on it intermittently over the next 50 years, before finally completing it in around 1987.

The ‘Titania’ was a composite-built clipper and was highly competitive and profitable in the tea trade to the Far East. In 1871, under Captain J. Dowdy, the ‘Titania’ made the fastest passage of the year – 93 days from Foochow against the South West monsoon. Bought by the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1880s, ‘Titania’ ended her days working in the Mediterranean and was finally broken up in Marseilles in 1910.