ABSTRACT
The roots of the organisation which was to produce the Official Histories began in September 1906. Lord Esher proposed the establishment of an Historical Section, as a subcommittee to the Committee of Imperial Defence, in the aftermath of the South African and Russo-Japanese Wars. His aim was to provide a single department to control the nation’s collection of military and naval archives and to ensure that the lessons of these conflicts were made available to military strategists. At that time histories were being prepared of three different campaigns in three different departments of the War Office and a further work was being compiled by the Admiralty. The lessons of the South African conflict, Esher believed,
could not be adequately appreciated unless the naval and military operations were treated as a whole together with the political considerations…[N]either the Admiralty nor the War Office were specially qualified to deal with history from this aspect.1
