The record office was established in the Admiralty in 1809 to only manage the collections and to devise a central system of digesting and indexing.

[2] It existed until 1964 when the Admiralty Department was abolished and merged within a new Ministry of Defence.

Before the First World War the Admiralty was usually divided up for administrative reasons into branches, departments, divisions and sections, they were all individually responsible for the managing and maintaining their own records, each function were supposed to send all their finished documents to the record office for filing and preservation, this however did not happen due to constant organisational changes that were common place at the Admiralty.

Those branches that were outside the remit of the Admiralty Secretariat did not always adhere correctly to internal procedures resulting in a loss of crucial documents.

The Record Office within the Admiralty consisted of very limited space, and as a result of those decisions, 98% of all routine, original and official papers were destroyed.