This painted wooden sign promoting the Second World War savings scheme bears the wording 'Local subscriptions to date' lower left, with a total that has been updated at least once or twice to £168,789. The ship shown may be loosely based on a photograph of the battle-cruiser HMS Hood, known as 'the mighty Hood' and widely popular as an emblem of British naval might in the inter-war years. It is shown leaving a shipyard, with an as yet unpainted repair on the bow and the inscription 'A giant refreshed'. This suggests a date for the source image of early 1941, when Hood underwent a brief refit before becoming involved in the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck. On 24 May 1941, in action with the latter in the Denmark Strait, it exploded and sank with only three survivors, of whom the last (Ted Briggs) died in Portsmouth in 2008.