NAVAL STATIONS - PORTSMOUTH

Correspondence from the Flag Officer commanding at Portsmouth. the Portsmouth command was the most important of the home commands from the 18th century, though its geographical responsibilities did not extend beyond the central Channel. For reasons explained below, a good deal of correspondence from seagoing squadrons in the 18th century is included, and ADM 1/897-898 also include the other home commands.

In principle this sub-sub-series consists of the reports of the commanders-in-chief or port admirals at Portsmouth. In practice that position was not clearly established until near the end of the eighteenth century. Before the 1790s there was sometimes no commander-in-chief appointed, even to a major dockyard port in wartime, so that the command passed through a succession of temporary senior officers.

The respective responsibilities of port admirals and commanders-in-chief at sea were not clearly delineated, so that if a squadron came in to port whose flag officer outranked the port admiral, the command of the port might be transferred or shared. Conversely it was not unknown for port admirals to take squadrons to sea. For these reasons there is considerable overlap between the correspondence of port admirals and seagoing squadrons, and especially between commanders-in-chief of the Channel or Western Squadron and those at Portsmouth and Plymouth.

When using the ADM 12 indexes to search for papers in ADM 1, documents in this sub-sub-series have the reference: 'A'