The London Cup

This cup was presented to the ship builder Jonas Shish to commemorate the launching of the warship HMS London on 26 June 1670. The ship, previously known as the Loyal London, had been burnt by the Dutch on the River Medway in 1667. It had been paid for by a loan of £100,000 from the City of London. Shish rebuilt the original ship at Deptford Dockyard where he was Master Shipwright. When the City of London refused to provide further funding for the repairs, Charles II removed the word 'Loyal' from the ship's name in response. The diarist John Evelyn was a pall bearer at Jonas Shish's funeral in 1680. He described him as 'an honest and remarkable man...and his death a public losse, for his excellent successe in building ships.'

The cup is decorated with the arms of James, Duke of York and Lord High Admiral. It also features an inscription recording the number of men and guns aboard the ship as being 750 and 94 respectively. In reality the ship's capacity was 730 men and it had a compliment of 96 guns. The lid of the cup bears the arms of the Croft family, a member of which sold the cup to the London Museum in 1947.