by Phil Reeder
1/350 HMS Ashanti (White Ensign)
By comparsion with the other WEM destroyer kits, their latest Tribal class kit is very expensive at £140. Whilst up to the standards of the earlier kits, it offers no great improvement over them. Having said that, it is still a good kit, and in my opinion it is geared towards the pre-war ships although some (not all) of the wartime mods have been included.
I replaced all the kit 4.7" barrels with homemade ones from brass rod, and used stretched tube plastic for the recoil sleeves. Likewise the 4" barrels were from left overs out of the Trumpy Hood accessory pack. Splinter screens were added to deck edges round the gun mountings. The pom-pom has been partly scratchbuilt, using WEM`s mount as a basis, and the 20mm were leftovers from the Dragon Buchanan kit.
The model is painted in the first Admiralty disruptive scheme,of MS4A, B5, B6, MS1,and MS2. I used a well-known photo of her, taken with an Icelandic mountain background, as guide for the camouflage pattern. I also found a portside view of her in the book "Afridi to Nizam" which helped a great deal. I even included a voodoo doll, called JU-JU, which was presented to the ship in 1939 when she visited the homeland of the Ashanti people on the Gold Coast (now Ghana). This was mounted on a plaque on the forward end of the searchlight platform and was supposed to bring good luck; must have worked as she was one of only four RN Tribals to survive the war!
