Catalogue description War Office and predecessors: Secretary-at-War, Secretary of State for War, and Commander-in-Chief, In-letters and Miscellaneous Papers

Papers of the Secretary-at-War and the Secretary of State for War are arranged under the various military stations or public departments from which they were sent, or under the subjects with which they deal, or alphabetically by the name of the writer.

The papers are also grouped into two larger and two smaller subseries:

I: Records of the old War Office (Secretary-at-War), arranged into three groups:

• 1. The books of original dispatches from various commanders,
• 2. Correspondence received from other government departments,
• 3. Correspondence from others, arranged roughly by the alphabetical order of the surnames of the senders, and including certain correspondence which might be expected to be found in the volumes of the first two groups. This has been divided into two sequences: the first consisting of foolscap volumes, the second of smaller volumes.

II: Records of the War Department (Secretary of State for War), arranged into four groups:

• 1. Despatches, correspondence and papers from the French Wars period (1794-1816). Some of these books start earlier than July 1794, before the separate War Department was created,
• 2. A few volumes covering the period 1817-1831, when the major part of the work of the Colonial and War Department was colonial,
• 3. Military in-letters from the 1830s to the 1850s, arranged by colonies,
• 4. Crimean War correspondence and despatches.

III: Loose bundles of despatches addressed to the Commander-in-Chief.

IV: Miscellaneous volumes.