The matchstick armada: Modeller spends 62 years building a unique fleet of 430 ships that's a tribute to the Royal Navy




For more than 60 years master modeller Philip Warren has been painstakingly creating an armada of every Royal Navy warship afloat, in service or setting sail since the Second World War ... out of matchsticks and wooden matchboxes.

And without even knowing it he was building a unique history of ships - a modern day tribute to the vessels that have been serving his country since 1945.

His collection of 432 naval vessels - which also includes 60 American ships - has been drawing huge and admiring crowds at exhibitions across the country since 1953. And museum directors are agreed that there is no other collection like it in the world.



Philip Warren surrounded by his fleet of warships made entirely out of matchsticks and matchbox wood

But the 79-year-old retired company director from Blandford, Dorset, will soon have to give up doing what has kept him literally glued to his task since he was just 17 years old.

Not because he is too old or losing interest ... but because they no longer make the wooden matchboxes essential to the task, and defence cuts mean we no longer build as many warships.

The patient hobbyist began assembling his collection in 1948, using simple tools of a razor blade, tweezers and sandpaper to carve the matches and boxes and pieces them together using PVA and balsa wood glue.

More than 650,000 matches have been used to create every class of ship in the Royal Navy in incredible detail on a scale model of 1:300. And he has even crafted 1,200 model aircraft out of matches to make his scale-model carrier ships look even more realistic.



The post-war Royal Naval ships include HMS Ark Royal, HMS Belfast and HMS Sheffield, and among his matchstick armada are dozens of vessels from the US Navy, including the 40ins long aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, which is the biggest in his fleet.

Philip Warren on his latest painstaking construction of a ship superstructure and, below, pictured in 1956 building USS Forrestal

The average ship takes around 1,500 matches and up to three months to build - totalling a whopping 650,000 matches over the years. But he uses more than 5,000 matches and 200 boxes on his largest creations, each of which can take up to a year to build.



The vessels in Mr Warren's navy, which also includes16 submarines, are flat-bottomed so that when placed on a blue tablecloth they give the impression of floating on water.



His most recent model is HMS Daring, the Royal Navy's newest destroyer having been formally commissioned in July.

Mr Warren is currently exhibiting 251 of his ships at the Nothe Fort Museum in Weymouth, having carefully carefully transported them in boxes in his Ford Focus estate car. But when they are not on show, the ships are kept on shelves in his garage.



He said: 'I started building ships when I was 17, like every other boy back then, and I used what was around me. Matches were much more common then - they were used all day, every day, and every man would carry a matchbox with him.



Aircraft, also created from matchsticks, on the flight deck of USS Nimitz, Philip Warren's largest creation to date

'I looked back to ships from 1945 onwards, from the end of the Second World War, and built the ships which were afloat, in service or have come in since then. My whole collection is about 330 ships at the moment. I have built more than 400 but I've given away perhaps 50 or 60 as gifts and others weren't very good so were destroyed.



'The vast majority are Royal Navy, but I have also made around 60 American ships. In total, my collection spans about 20 nations.'



The models are base on plans, drawings and photographs of the real ships and they are accurate scale models.

Mr Warren, who was married to wife Anita for 47 years until she died eight years ago, continued: 'I have built examples of almost every class of ship in the Royal Navy. I say "almost" as a precaution, because there is always one old seadog who will say "you haven't got mine".



'When I started it was all big battleships with guns, but ships have changed to use more complex missiles and radar over the years.

'I seem to have unwittingly built the history of ships.Various museum directors have told me the collection is worth a lot of money, but it's priceless to me and I would never sell it.



'It's not insured because the purpose of insurance is to replace things when you lose them. These can never be replaced.

The real thing: American battleship USS Nimitz, one of the largest warships in the world and the biggest of Philip Warren's models, and the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Sheffield, above right, which was sunk in the Falklands conflict

'I'm an optimistic person but even I don't think I'll have another 62 years to rebuild them. Now, sadly I only have a finite number of ships left to build, because the wooden match boxes I need aren't produced anywhere any more. They were replaced by cardboard ones in the Eighties and unfortunately the stockpile is running out.

'I only have enough left for a few ships and certainly won't be able to make another large aircraft carrier.



'It always was and still very much a hobby. I consider myself a very lucky man that my hobby interests so many kind people.'

In 1989 Mr Warren presented the ships HMS Bronington and the frigate Minerva to Princess Diana as they were the ships Prince Charles served on during his navy career.

