May not be all that unusual, but copper sails and silver-plated hulls make those constructed by Mr Ronald Grose of Appledore something special.

Mr Grose is a perfectionist, his models not only being made almost exactly to scale but in every part, all of which he makes himself, he employs the original boat building construction method. If the hull of an original vessel was planked and riveted, for instance, then so is the hull of Mr Grose’s replica. One of his recent silver/copper models is a magnificent one of the Cutty Sark under full sail. Another is a wooden model of the liner Edinburgh Castle afloat on a blue sea with the moon and stars behind it – and just to make this model different, it lights up. Mr Grose estimates that each model takes him between 600 and 800 hours to complete and waiting to have the finishing touches added to it this winter is a wooden model of Scott’s Endeavour.

It is 12 years now since Mr Grose, a Bideford man, retired to Appledore and although he has been making models – cars, planes and steam engines as well as boats – ever since he was a boy, it is now very much his retirement hobby. The RNLI are among those who have commissioned work from him, including several replicas of lifeboats. He does not recall his first model, but he does remember that the now derelict folly at the bottom of Torridge Hill, Bideford, was his first workshop. It stands in what was the garden of the surgery of his father, the late Dr J S Grose.

Although he has never had an exhibition, word of Mr Grose’s skill has travelled. ‘People from all over the country and even abroad come knocking on the door looking for the boat man’ he said.

Gazette article dated 6 October 1978