Hello, my name is Dr Will Butler and I am the Head of Military Records at The National Archives. Today, we’re going to look at a document from our ADM document collection.
The documents in this collection all relate to the Admiralty and before this the Navy Board and the Board of the Admiralty, the department responsible for the administration of the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Coast Guard. They mainly cover the period from the middle of the 17th century pretty much up to the present day. The Navy Board had been established in 1546 and was made responsible under the Board of the Admiralty for the administration of the Navy. The Board was abolished In 1832 and administration was placed under the direct control of the Board of the Admiralty until its duties were taken over by the Ministry of Defence when it was formed in 1964.
So what kind of material can we find in this collection? You can find a range of material including records on the planning and conduct of any operation you might think of which involved the Royal Navy or the Royal Marines, and records which cover the ways in which these organisations changed over time. This includes letters, reports, photographs, and minutes of official meetings. The collection also holds records which relate to individuals who served in the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines, or Coast Guard up until the middle of the 20th century. This includes things like enlistment books and service and pension records, which provide an insight into the individuals who served in these forces. And as we can see from this record, these kinds of records can provide researchers with a range of additional information about individual people and what they did during their service. And The National Archives holds this material as the official archive of the UK government and these records are transferred to us from the Ministry of Defence.
Before we look at our example from this collection, notice that our document has a unique reference so we can use our catalogue to find it – in this case ADM 202/930, and in this case it comes in three parts slash 1, slash 2 and slash 3. Now let’s take a close look at our document and work out what it is about.
This document is essentially a diary of the day-to-day events of a Royal Marines Unit, 40 Commando, in the runup and during its involvement during the Falklands conflict, known officially as Operation Corporate, in the middle of 1982. Each military unit was required to fill out one of these diaries whilst it was on active operations, and you’ll see that it sets out what the unit was doing at any particular day and often includes additional documents such as orders, more detailed reports, maps, and some photographs. One of the officers of the unit was responsible for filling in the diary each day in order to recount the day’s events. This was kept as a method of tracking what was happening at the time as well as in order to learn for future operations. As these war diaries have been kept in some form since the First World War, they also allow historians to piece together what is happening as well as to allow those interested in family history to understand what individuals were doing on any given day. This diary provides us with an on-the-ground perspective of the conflict allowing us to understand it from this perspective rather than just from politicians back in the UK. We can see from the diary how the unit prepared for its deployment, what activities it carried out during its journey, and more generally we can get a sense about how the conflict was conducted. The unit itself was responsible for securing one of the beach heads, landing at San Carlos, and was tasked with attacking Port Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands when Argentine forces surrendered in June 1982.
So what we have with a war diary is a number of different things. It’s not just the day-to-day activities; it provides us lots of other information as well. We have first and quite often what’s known as the diary narrative. So it does give us that day-to-day, where the unit is moving to and from, which individuals are becoming part of that unit or leaving the unit for various reasons, and the location in which they currently are. We see here for example that it says on the 22nd of May 1982 that the 40 Commando were ordered to be responsible for a particular area on a hill, and that gives us a bit of an idea of the kind of information that it includes. But if we move through the diary it also gives us lots of other interesting pieces of paper, interesting elements. So we have here a map for example, of one of the areas on the Falkland Islands. We have various other maps that more generally look at the Atlantic as well.
And then what we have here, believe it or not, is almost a minute by minute account of all of the correspondence and all of the communications going to and from the unit involved, and it gives us that real insight into what the unit is doing at a much lower level and as I say an almost minute minute account, and so much so that both of these volumes actually include that information and provide us that level of detail. For a lot of situations that might be too much information for what you might be looking at this record for, but there might be lots of situations where you are wanting to understand in a lot more detail how the unit is moving, how is it doing, and what kind of communications and actions it’s having to take.
And in the third part of the document we have have some other incredibly interesting information. We have handwritten notes that were actually created at the time that the unit was for example in San Carlos and actually on the Falkland Islands. And as I say these are handwritten notes, some of them are copies, some of them are originals, and as we go through here we also have some photographic evidence of the unit as it prepared to leave the UK. We’ve got lots of imagery of the unit packing up all of its material, getting their equipment ready to cross the Atlantic. We then have images of the unit actually on board the SS Canberra, the ship which took it to the Atlantic. In this particular one the unit is carrying out physical training. They’re lifting logs and large guns. In this one they’re carrying out some weapons training on board the ship. And we even have photographs such as this one, which is the regimental sports day, which was carried out on the ship. And this particular photograph is showing those carrying out the 10,000 metre run around the ship. And then finally we have images of the unit as it landed and arrived on the Falkland Islands. So we have San Carlos Beach head here and we’ve get an idea of the units moving inland, the helicopter transportation that is carrying its supplies, as well as the smaller ships which carried the unit to the islands themselves. And then finally we also have some images of individual soldiers on patrol once they had landed on the Falkland Islands.
And really what this does is demonstrate I think the range of material you can get from this kind of diary. It’s not just a bland day-to-day account of what a unit is doing; you get lots of real insight into a military unit and how it’s going about what it’s being ordered to do and really what it’s up to, and it gives you a real flavour and brings that historical record to life. Don’t forget we’ve only looked at one document on this period of history, and remember our records are not really going to offer an Argentine perspective on the Falklands conflict. These are considerations we must bear in mind when we’re trying to evaluate its significance.
So this is just one of the many documents to be found in our Admiralty collection, which can be used to find out more about the Falklands conflict or other naval operations throughout many hundreds of years of history.