Typed letter signed Sir Walter Nicholson Admiralty Royal Navy Submarines 1905

[FISHER, Sir John]; NICHOLSON, Sir Walter Frederic (1877–1946). Typed letter signed (“W. F. Nicholson”), on Admiralty stationery, concerning submarine fittings.
 
Admiralty, S.W., 15 July 1905.
 
Single sheet 230 × 203 mm, typed, with Admiralty blind-embossed seal at head; signed in ink at foot. Horizontal folds from original dispatch; light creasing and faint toning, otherwise clean and legible. Very good.
 
An official Admiralty letter written on behalf of Sir John Fisher, then First Sea Lord, acknowledging correspondence and offering comments on the fitting of appliances for pumping air into British submarines while submerged. The letter confirms that such systems had been fitted “since their first inception”. This is an early letter about submarine technology, with A class subs being launched in 1902 and B class only a year earlier in 1904. 
 
Signed by Walter Frederic Nicholson, at this date a junior Admiralty official, who would later rise to become Permanent Secretary of the Air Ministry and appointed KCB in 1922.  The letter sits firmly within Fisher’s programme of naval modernisation, during a period when submarines were controversial, strategically uncertain, and still regarded by many senior officers as auxiliary or even ungentlemanly weapons. An administrative letter in the formative phase of British submarine policy.