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. Naval career 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. 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. 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. Career as a naval historian 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 180 boxes of Roskill's