Catalogue description NAVAL STATIONS - NORE

Correspondence from the Flag Officer commanding the Nore.the Nore, which is the anchorage at the mouth of the Medway, became an important place of assembly during the Dutch wars. the command which became established there was responsible for the river Medway, the dockyards at Sheerness and (except 1812-14) Chatham, during most of its history for the entire North Sea. the subordinate commands of Yarmouth, Ramsgate (alias North Sea) and Leith were established during the Napoleonic Wars and subsequently became independent. ADM 1/709 contains letters from several home commands, 1709-21. ADM 1/519-520 contains further reports from C-in-Cs at the Nore, 1745-82, including periods in which they were commanding their squadrons at sea.

In principle this sub-sub-series consists of the reports of the commanders-in-chief or port admirals at the Nore. 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: 'C'