ORIGINAL SERIES (1st group): 1660-1839

The sub-series is almost all in-letters received by the Secretary of the Admiralty concerning the official or semi-official business of the Admiralty Office and the Navy

From the time of John Clevland, Secretary 1751-1763, it was the custom of the Secretary, when he had read each letter at the Board, to turn over the bottom right-hand corner of the letter and write on it a brief minute of the Board's decision.

These 'turn-over notes' formed the foundation both of the resultant minutes (found in ADM 3 and later ADM 167) and of the out-letters (ADM 2), but their terse phraseology is much closer than either to the actual discussion at the Board, during which they were written.

Related to these notes is a collection of Board 'rough minutes' in ADM 3. These are rough notes on scraps of paper of the Board's decisions on matters not arising from in-letters. Many of them simply record the names of officers to be promoted or transferred.

The papers in this sub-series of ADM 1 apparently owe both their origin and their arrangement to the organisation of the Admiralty Office by William Bridgeman, Secretary 1694-1698.

Bridgeman's method was to put away the incoming letters in bundles according to the office or (less often) the name of the writer. Thus in principle all letters from, for example, Commanders-in-Chief at Portsmouth, the Navy Board, or the Secretaries of State, would be kept together in chronological order regardless of the subjects of the letters or the names of those who had signed them.

Bridgeman's arrangement of this series was followed with little change from 1698 to 1839, in which period many alterations took place in the organisation and responsibilities of the Admiralty. For this reason the collections of letters purporting to be from a single source are not in fact always homogenous within themselves, nor are their titles very explanatory.

No index to the contents of these letters was maintained until the development, in 1806-1808, of the Admiralty Index and Digest. These volumes provide subject and nominal indexes to the letters in ADM 1 (and the Board minutes in ADM 3), together with a summary of their contents. The method of using them is explained by a Reference Guide available in the Research Enquiries Room. These volumes are in ADM 12. ADM 12 (pieces 1 to 4) also contains indices to ships mentioned in ADM 1/1 to 576

Cases/files extracted from ADM 1/116, 137, 167 see ADM 156