abstract:HMS Royal Oak was a 76-gun second rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched in 1664 at Portsmouth Dockyard. Royal Oak was built by John Tippets, Master-Shipwright at Portsmouth 1660-8, who later became Navy Commissioner and subsequently Surveyor of the Navy (Knighted 1672).
The minister was told about the HMSRoyalOak which was torpedoed by a German U-boat with the loss of 833 lives at Scapa Flow, off the Orkney coast, on 14 October 1939.
The letters to his mother about life in the Royal Navy came to an abrupt halt with a telegram of his death on the HMSRoyalOak, torpedoed in Scapa Flow by the German submarine U-47 in October 1939.