Captain W R C Steele RN

Ms. diary (71pp) and 9mss. Letters covering his service as an Assistant Clerk in the Home Fleet battleship Conqueror, August 1913-May 1914, with useful comments on the Accountant Branch and gunroom life; 12mss. letters covering his service as a Clerk in the battle cruiser Invincible, August 1914-April 1915, including outstanding descriptions of the Battles of the Heligoland Bight and the Falkland Islands; together with a few other mss. and tss. letters written from the battle cruiser Renown, 1916-1920, one of which describes the start of the Prince of Wales' second Empire Tour in 1920, from the battleship Malaya recounting the evacuation of the Sultan of Turkey during the Near East crisis in 1922, and from the aircraft carrier Ark Royal in 1941, including a reference to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in May.

Unrestricted

(William) Richard Campbell Steele, who was brought up and educated in Brighton, entered the Accountant Branch of the Royal Navy in 1913 and joined his first ship, the Home Fleet battleship Conqueror, as an Assistant Clerk that August. On the outbreak of war a year later he was promoted to Clerk and appointed to the battle cruiser Invincible, in which he was present at the Battles of the Heligoland Bight and the Falkland Islands. Shortly after joining the new battle cruiser Renown in 1916 he became an Assistant Paymaster and by the time he left the ship in 1920 this rank had been converted into that of Paymaster Lieutenant. He also served in this rank in the battleship Malaya in 1922 and during the Second World War he was the Paymaster Commander in the aircraft carrier Ark Royal from July 1940 until she was sunk in November 1941.

The collection is comprised of the diary which he kept for a few months after joining Conqueror in 1913 and of the majority of the surviving letters that he wrote to his father during his service in the Royal Navy. His letters home from Conqueror and Invincible are particularly interesting and well-written and his first-hand accounts of the Heligoland and Falklands actions are models of their kind.