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HMHS Isle of Thanet at Dunkirk Gare Maritime
by Mike McCabe

HMHS Isle of Thanet at Dunkirk Gare Maritime

The model shows an incident days before the start of Operation Dynamo when the converted Channel steamer Isle of Thanet, being used as a hospital ship, picked up wounded soldiers of the BEF at the Dunkirk Maritime station.  This station at the centre of the docks at Dunkirk soon became unusable as the German army approached due to the danger of getting in and out of the docks.

For Isle of Thanet I used our Fine Waterline kit, research turned up quite a few photos of Isle of Thanet in her civilian days but she was not greatly altered externally whilst serving as a hospital ship.  Most of the work involved adding details around the bridge area, vents from Battlefleet models, boats were copies of Combrig items I made for my own use, the various other details that can be seen are from wire and photoetch including boat derricks taken from a Lion Roar set.

Building the dockside seen required almost entirely a scratchbuilding exercise, the base of this is Battlefleet dock sections cut to fit and extended with plastic card, the base for the platforms and station building is the same.  I found a couple of photos of Gare Maritime which showed just how close it was to the dockside, often with dock scenes I think there has to be some creative licence as otherwise they would be very large, certainly too big for my limited shelf space, but in this case this was not needed.  I estimated the size of the building from photos using passengers as comparison, and built up the station building from plastic card and strip, completed with doors printed onto paper.  Later photos of the station showed that an extension over the platforms had been built, this turned into a fiddly exercise to replicate but after a few tries I managed to do so with acetate attached to plastic strip with white glue.  These were quite fragile when complete but I built up a framework for the roof with plastic rod and attached the roof to this once everything underneath had been completed.  The station building was finished off using lengths of square plastic section cut to size with the trusty Chopper.  Clocks and station nameplates were printed onto paper and attached.

The opportunity to show a ship and a train together was obviously too good to miss so I set about building a locomotive and finding some drawings of British hospital train carriages, some of those as well.  These were built with plastic rod and strip again, the windows were inset which was a fiddly job which is not visible on the final model, decal would have been easier!  I made some station furniture, seats, cigarette machines and travel boards, some adverts would have been nice but I missed that trick.  To fit out the station I used the Flyhawk aircraft carrier deck vehicles set, this has some handy if incredibly fiddly little vehicles, fork lift trucks, trailers and a small tractor, which have use wider than the intended one. Completing the station before roofing were a number of figures, I use Eduard pre-painted sets mostly, they are the cheapest I think.  So often on ship modelling forums I see people saying that the figures look too flat, to improve on the look I add a blob of thin white glue front and back to thicken them up before painting, also whilst still on the fret I cut them off from the head attachment, add some of the uniform colour to white glue and paint a blob on the top of the head to give the impression of a helmet.  Once off the fret and ready to position, I give the legs or arms a little bend to make them less two dimensional, etch parts are not meant to be used flat!

Completing the dock furniture was the mobile crane which I built from drawings, cobbling together the boom from etched ship crane parts.

The small buildings in the corner are Battlefleet again, these had some clutter added to them to show a dockside workshop.

Finally completing the scene are some White Ensign Bedford trucks, the master for the Austin ambulances was made by my good friend Don McKeand and he kindly lent me a mould so I could kit out my little convoy of ambulances bringing wounded to the dockside. 

I had wanted to build a hospital ship for some time and after reading about the evacuation of Dunkirk this was too good a scene to miss, hopefully it captures something of the last days of the BEF in France and the chaos which was to come.

Mike McCabe