SWA Model Display - D-Day Museum - 5th July 2009.

The display was put on at the request of Portsmouth City Council Museums and coincided with other events at Southsea. We are the only Group to be asked to put on a display inside the Museum, and the Museum ensured that we had a share of their advance publicity which appeared both in the local paper and in the weekend supplement. The display was held in the Café as usual, this provided us with a somewhat different layout opportunity which again worked very well. We had excellent support from the Museum staff when sorting out the best way to arrange the tables.

I had the usual excellent support from our members with ten, Charles Davis, John Edwards, Chris Hooper, Ken Winter, David McNair-Taylor, David Reith, Peter Williams, Geoff Young, Alan Gamblin and myself ( see photo) turning up with a total of 28 models, plus, as we were in the D-Day Museum special dispensation was given to display 5 tanks which we used at the front entrance, unfortunately we could not sail the landing craft that went with them! Plenty of grass, no usable water ! As last year, I had been asked by the Museum to include modern Warships as well as covering the WWII period. This fitted in well as we had to split the display to accommodate the Café entrances, Fire Exit and Servery.

There was a good spread of models ranging from an HDML and LCM3 at the smaller end to Vanguard at the larger ship end, the photographs show the general lay out.

It was an extremely busy and absorbing day with many of the people visiting our display being ex-servicemen, the questions that we faced were challenging and searching. We all agreed that it was one of the best local shows that we had attended to date. The Museum regarded the day as a success, their normal visitor numbers are around 300 for a Sunday, by lunch time over 1000 people had visited the Museum.

John Hawley.