| Stephen Wentworth Roskill | |
| Birth Date: | 1 August 1903 |
| Death Date: | 4 November 1982 (aged 79) |
| Birth Place: | London, England |
| Death Place: | Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England |
| Allegiance: |  United Kingdom |
| Serviceyears: | 1917–1949 |
| Rank: | Captain |
| Battles: | Second World War |
| Awards: | Commander of the Order of the British Empire Distinguished Service Cross |
| Relations: | Eustace Roskill, Baron Roskill |
| Laterwork: | Royal Navy Official Historian of the Second World War Senior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University |
Captain Stephen Wentworth Roskill, (1 August 1903 – 4 November 1982) was a senior career officer of the Royal Navy, serving during the Second World War and, after his enforced medical retirement, served as the official historian of the Royal Navy from 1949 to 1960. He is now chiefly remembered as a prodigious author of books on British maritime history.
The son of John Henry Roskill, K.C. a barrister, and Sybil Dilke, Stephen Roskill was born in London, England and joined the Royal Navy in 1917, attending the Royal Naval College at Osborne House and then the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, Devon. As a midshipman Roskill served on the light cruiser on the China Station before returning to practise gunnery at Greenwich and Portsmouth.
On 22 October, 1926, when he was a Sub-Lieutenant of HMS Wistaria (since 29 June, 1925), based at the Royal Naval Dockyard in the Imperial fortress colony of Bermuda on the America and West Indies Station, Roskill assisted in rescuing HMS Calcutta from almost certain destruction during the 1926 Havana–Bermuda hurricane. The dockface (or the wall) in the South Yard and old North Yard of the Bermudian dockyard are on the eastern (Great Sound) shore of the island of Ireland (with the western shore on the open North Atlantic). Calcutta was tied (bow to the North) to the wall at the oiling wharf (at the northern end of the South Yard), where, during an unusually high tide, she was more exposed to the wind blowing eastward over the island, than she would have been in the more sheltered North Yard (where HMS Capetown tore up two bollards but otherwise rode out the storm safely), so forty hawsers were used to lash her to the shore, but all snapped when the windspeed reached 138 mph (the highest speed recorded before the storm destroyed the dockyard's anemometer). Fortunately, the bow anchor had been dropped, and held as the stern was swung around to the westward, into the channel (the entrance to the dockyard from the Great Sound) between the two breakwaters that protected the two sections of the dockyard, and the starboard beam of the ship contacted the end of the northern breakwater. Calcutta used her propulsion system to fight the wind that would have driven her backwards into the sound, and Executive Officer Commander HM Maltby and fifty other crew members jumped onto the breakwater and lashed the ship to the end of the breakwater, while Roskill, and Sub-Lieutenant Conrad Byron Alers-Hankey (a cousin of Alexander Maurice Alers Hankey, and brothers Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey, 1st Baron Hankey (the creator of the modern UK Cabinet Office) and Donald William Alers Hankey, and descendant of the Reverend William Alers Hankey (1771–1859), an ex-banker and the secretary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) for whom the town of Hankey, South Africa was named) of Capetown, swam to attach two more lines to the oil wharf.[1] The hurricane also sank the sister-ship of Wistaria, the sloop, which was trapped outside of Bermuda's reefline when the storm arrived.[2] [3] [4] [5]
In 1930, he married Elizabeth Van den Bergh, with whom he had seven children. Roskill served at sea as gunnery officer of the carrier on the China Station from 1933 to 1935. Afterwards he instructed at the gunnery school, and in 1936 he was given the prize gunnery appointment in the navy, that of the newly reconstructed dreadnought till 1939, was a member of the Naval Staff, 1939–1941, then served as executive officer of in 1941–1944.[6]
On 13 July 1943 Leander was part of a task group of predominantly American warships off the Solomon Islands, when they engaged a force of Imperial Japanese Navy ships. During the action, Leander was torpedoed and severely damaged. For his actions in helping keep the ship afloat, Roskill was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. In March, 1944 he was promoted acting captain and sent to join the British Admiralty delegation in Washington, D.C. as chief staff officer for administration and weapons. He was the senior British observer at the Bikini Atomic tests in 1946, and served as Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, 1946–48 before retiring as a captain, due to increasing deafness caused by exposure to gun detonations.
On retiring from active service in 1948, Roskill was appointed by the Cabinet Office Historical Section to write the official naval history of the Second World War. His three-volume work The War at Sea was published between 1954 and 1961.
In 1961, Roskill was elected a senior research fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, where he was instrumental in the foundation of the Churchill Archives Centre. The centre holds 300 boxes of Roskill's personal and research papers.[7] After retirement, he was a visiting lecturer at several universities, including being Lees Knowles Lecturer in 1961, the distinguished visiting lecturer at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1965, and Richmond Lecturer at Cambridge University in 1967. He was elected a vice president of the Navy Records Society in 1964 and an honorary vice president in 1974.
Roskill was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross on 21 March 1944 as commander in HMNZS Leander when she was torpedoed in the Pacific. In 1946 he was awarded the American Legion of Merit. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1971 New Year Honours and received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Cambridge University in 1970, from the University of Leeds in 1971, and from Oxford University in 1980. He was elected a Fellow of The British Academy.
. Barry M. Gough . Historical Dreadnoughts: Arthur Marder, Stephen Roskill and Battles for Naval History . 2010 . Seaforth (Pen and Sword) . Barnsley . 978-1-84832-077-2.