David Watkin Waters, known to many as Willie, enjoyed an interesting if truncated naval career, but is best known for his scholarship and publication of valuable historical literature. It is difficult to produce a measured ranking of his work because it took in so many disparate fields. His probable masterwork was researched and written in collaboration with the late Commander Freddie Barley. It is generally believed that Barley provided much of the massive statistical underpinning, and Waters the intellectual structure and much of the writing.
This work The Defeat of the Enemy Attack on Shipping (1957) described and analysed the Second World War conflict more generally known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Further it was not openly published initially but as a ‘Naval Staff History’, an internally distributed confidential book in the Royal Navy before becoming more widely available at the National Archive at Kew and later published more widely by the Navy Records Society in 1997. The work demonstrated Waters's talents and abilities in several important ways. First, he was able to give a clear and concise presentation of that war's longest, most complex and widest-ranging conflict, by no means an easy feat. Second, he was able to extract and reinforce the lesson of the abiding merit of the convoy system, a historical example often neglected over the centuries. Last, the second volume represented a pioneering innovation: the use of large-format colour graphics to display huge volumes of otherwise hard to understand data simply and strikingly. In this it was years, if not decades, ahead of its time not just for staff histories but certainly for historical works and, possibly even more widely.
David Waters was born on 2 August 1911, the younger son of Engineer Lieutenant William Waters, Royal Navy who perished when HMS Formidable was sunk in 1915. He himself joined the navy in 1925 as a cadet and served in a number of ships on the Home, Mediterranean and China stations before training as a pilot in 1935. It was in this capacity on 13 August 1940 that he was involved on a night raid on Augusta, Sicily, when after losing a full awareness of the sea's proximity when flares went out, he put his aircraft into the sea. Surviving with his crew he was taken prisoner by the Italians. Thereafter followed a varied series of adventures.
Initially he found himself in the charge of some very congenial Italians who very much appreciated Waters's culture and wit, although they had to find a mutual language of discourse which was French. At the same time, when imprisoned near Venice he was involved in incidents connected with crew of the British submarine Oswald which had been surrendered to the Italians. Her captain and first lieutenant had gained no respect from their ship's company for this incident and relations worsened in the prison camp. An eventual severe disturbance was brought under control in conjunction with one of the submarine's other officers, Michael Kyrle Pope. Waters also attempted escape but failed. Eventually he was moved to a German camp where he saw out the rest of the war. In captivity Waters displayed significant autodidactism by wide reading and writing essays of high quality. Meanwhile his brother William, also a naval aviator, died in 1943.
After the war and his release from captivity it was clear that his lengthy period in prison had made his future naval career more problematic. The next year an event occurred that was to have a profound effect on his future. He was interviewed for a post in the Naval History Section, later the Naval Historical Branch of the Admiralty where he was to work, initially as a naval officer, then as a civil servant until 1960. This, it could be argued was Waters's most productive period. As well as The Defeat of the Enemy Attack on Shipping, he contributed other papers on the theory and practice of the convoy system as well as other naval strategic and tactical matters. Although he could be overemphatic in stressing the virtues of convoy, especially its offensive aspect, his conclusions remained sound even in the nuclear and post-nuclear age.
But Waters had expertise, research skills and achievements well outside his daily work in London. He also wrote extensively on navigation in Elizabethan and Stuart periods amongst other subjects. Perhaps his greatest expertise and singular contribution to scholarship lay in his studies of the construction and operation of Chinese junks and sampans, a subject of much greater complexity and sophistication than had previously been realised. This had started during his naval service pre-war on the China station. A mark of his scholarship is his having no fewer than 18 citations in Joseph Needham's magisterial Civilisation in China covering Waters's published work between 1936 and 1967. But these were not his only historical and literary claims to fame. He also wrote or edited, either alone or in conjunction with others: The True and Perfect Newes of Syr Francis Drake (1955), The Art of Navigation in England Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (1958 and 1978), The Sea – or Mariner's Astrolabe (1966), The Rutter of the Sea (1967), The Saluki in History, Art and Sport (1969 and 1984), The Elizabethan Navy and the Armada of Spain (1975), Science and the Techniques of Navigation in the Renaissance (1976), English Maritime Books relating to ships and their and operation at sea printed before 1801 (1995), as well as numerous learned journal articles in the UK and elsewhere.
Returning to his career, Waters had hoped to head up the Naval Historical Branch but when it became evident that this would not happen he joined the National Maritime Museum advancing from a head of department to become its Secretary, then Deputy Director. He left in 1978 and pursued a very active so-called retirement holding various fellowships and visiting professorships, generally in North America.
Waters had married his elder brother's widow, Hope, after the Second World War, thus inheriting a family. He had no children of his own although his stepson's daughter always considered Waters her grandfather. Latterly he and Hope parted and Waters spent his last years in New Zealand with his cousin, Marilyn Reynolds.
Waters to some extent concealed his encyclopaedic knowledge behind a genial, sometimes twinkling, personality. There is, however, little doubt that this largely self-taught man made considerable contributions to nautical history and science covering not just a very diverse range of subjects but also a span of centuries, which is unusual in the academic world.
David, or Willie Waters as he was known to different communities of his many friends, was little seen in the northern hemisphere after his ninetieth birthday. However those who knew him will always cherish the memory of this vastly talented and social man. Those recollections may fade with the passage of time but the quality and extent of his work is likely to outlast such ephemeral recollection.