ABSTRACT
During the war years 1939–1945, Edward Lynam, Superintendent of the British Museum Map Room and Honorary Secretary of the Hakluyt Society since 1931, contrived, in spite of many of other commitments, to keep the Society’s publications appearing regularly. In 1945 he was fortunate in having assigned to him, as his number two, Raleigh Ashlin Skelton (who, despite his baptismal forename, was always known to family and friends as ‘Peter’, his registered forename). 1 Skelton had served in the Royal Artillery and latterly in the Archives Branch of the Allied High Commission in Austria. As an Assistant Keeper in the Printed Books section of the British Museum before 1939 he had had the task of re-cataloguing the Museum’s collection of post-Purchas travel collections and had come to know their texts and maps very well. It is therefore not surprising that he was promptly brought into the work of the Society. Indeed, when Lynam became President in 1945, Skelton soon succeeded him as Honorary Secretary - as he was to succeeed him as Superintendent of the Map Room a few years later - a position in the Society he was to occupy for twenty years. 2
