This is the first of a series of letters written by the young Francis Martin Leake to his mother. They form part of the Martin Leake family collection which has been the subject of previous posts: The Destruction of HMS Natal, 30 December 1915, Letters from the Lower Deck, 1906 and HMS Achilles and SMS Leopard, 16 March 1917.
Francis Martin Leake (1869-1928) was one of eight children of Stephen Martin Leake, a barrister from Ware in Hertfordshire. Francis entered the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1884 and retired as a Vice-Admiral in 1926. His younger brother Arthur, a surgeon, was one of the very rare winners of a double Victoria Cross, serving as a military doctor in the Boer War and in the First World War. The extensive set of 46 letters in the collection sent home by Francis from various ships or ports are mostly dated without the year. Some letters appear to have had the year added later, sometimes incorrectly. All bar three letters are addressed to ‘My dear Mama’; two seem to be to a sister and one to Francis’s father. The letters have now been databased in sequence having identified the year by means of current events referenced in them and from Francis’s Royal Naval service record.
The earliest letter from Francis is dated 10 August on HMS Agincourt notepaper, evidently written fairly soon after his arrival in Devonport as a 14-year-old cadet: ‘About 90 boys from the training ships about came to join today …we do school every day … I know very little of my way around the ship at present’. That letter is the first of several to reveal Francis’ sometimes-acute concerns about cash and expenses, and it is clear that he relied on parental funding at least in his early years in the RN.
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