Formidable was an eighty-gun ship of the line built for the French Navy in 1751. On 20 November 1759, she took part in the Battle of Quiberon Bay off the coast of Brittany. In this battle, the most important naval encounter of the Seven Years War, Formidable was captured by the British ship Resolution. Some of the crew of Formidable were taken prisoner and brought back to England. They were incarcerated in Winchester in the so-called King’s House, a former royal palace on the site of Winchester Castle.

A Latin inscription on the hull records that this model was ‘made by French prisoners of war in the nearby King’s House in 1760’, and given to the College by John Burton, Headmaster from 1724 to 1766. Burton probably acquired the model directly from the prisoners.

This is the earliest surviving ship model made by prisoners of war. The decks are constructed in oak, and the upper deck housing is made from pine and other soft woods. Only twenty of the guns are original, the rest are modern replacements. The guns retract inside the hull on a ratchet and pawl mechanism. The masts and spars are almost completely original, but the rigging was extensively repaired on the instructions of the College Bursar, T.F. Kirby, who rescued the model from being used as Christmas decoration in Hall in the 1870s.

In 2019 the model was restored with a grant from the Friends of Winchester College.

Literature: G. Callender, ‘Le Formidable’, The Mariner’s Mirror, Vol 2, no. 1 (January 1912), pp. 10-13; R. Foster, Winchester College Treasury: a guide to the collections (Winchester, 2016), p. 22; R. Foster (ed.), 50 Treasures from Winchester College (Winchester, 2019), pp. 106-7; R. Foster & S. Stephens, Formidable: an Eighteenth-Century Ship Model at Winchester College (Winchester, 2019)

Provenance: Given by John Burton (1690-1774)

Location: New Hall