On 6th December last year the Toy Solder Collection of the late John Ruddle was sold by C&T Auctions and I am told that the sale raised £100,000. Here is a link to the online catalogue, compiled by James Opie, which in itself is a valuable resource for collectors of old toy soldiers: The Toy Soldier Collection of the Late John Ruddle Auction (candtauctions.co.uk)
But not everything went to auction; the wargame buildings, accessories, homecast figures and ships from his garden were considered unsuitable for inclusion in the sale, largely due to their condition, and were sold privately as a job lot. After cleaning up and some repair most of the ships were sold through a collectors shop in Gosport, a Naval town just outside Portsmouth, where they were mostly snapped up by retired Naval officers as garden ornaments.
John had told me, some years previously, that he'd sold all of his model ships to a collector in Germany and I assumed he meant his garden battleships, naturally I was disappointed that I'd never see them again. I realise now that he meant his collection of 1:1200 scale waterline ships, for which there is a much larger following in Germany, that made a lot more sense to me. The last two garden battleships found their way to the London Toy Soldier Show last year so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to acquire one as a piece of iconic wargaming history.
John's ships have been shown before in various books and magazines but the photographs are mostly monochrome and set in larger views of his garden so I thought people might like to see a closer view.
I don't know much about battleships so I'm hoping someone can tell me the class of this one. John seems to have named his ships after actual vessels (although I recall a freighter named after the fictional "African Queen"), this one is HMS Rutlish, which I have been unable to trace any record of.
John was a maintenance engineer in the print industry and, while the ships are impressive from a distance, close up you can see that he bolted on all sorts of bits and pieces to build them.
The superstructure lifts off and inside I found it had been fitted with an electric motor, so it might have been floated on a boating pond at one time, but there is no sign that a propeller shaft or screw were ever installed. John had told me that he built his ships from aluminium sheet and that does appear to be the case with the deck, guns and bridge but the hull is made from fibreglass, a common enough material used by ship modellers and for DIY car repairs in the 1960's, but rarely used domestically since then.
This final shot of me holding HMS Rutlish is to give a sense of the size. The paintwork is flaking badly, testament to years spent out in the garden and several repaints, I am currently struggling with the decision to burn off the worst sections and repaint or leave as is?
Among the other items that never made the grade for the auction were a large quantity of silicon moulds that John used for casting his own figures and spare parts to repair and convert old Britains hollowcasts. There was also a large collection of the actual figures he'd made and used in his garden wargames, being in the print industry he had access to ample supplies of lead, and created units which had never been covered by the toy manufacturers, including several units of what appear to be various Constabulary to police the far flung regions of his garden Empire.
