Hi RF,RF wrote: "The letter cannot be located - that may be because it was destroyed, it may have been lost, it may still be held under the Official Secrets Act, it may have never existed in the first place!"
you are right, the SEVERAL letters from Tovey (as per Roskill) cannot be located YET.... The Churchill Archives do hold the letters exchanged between Roskill and Tovey, but they are unfortunately (or luckily for someone....) kept "secret" until 2058.....
However, you cannot say they don't exist if you don't want to accuse a serious historian like S.Roskill of inventing things.
I don't see how anyone can still doubt about this story (the intention of Pound and Churchill to Court-Martial Leach and Wake-Walker): we have Churchill sentence on May 25/26 "the worst thing since Troubridge turned away from the Goeben in 1914", referred by Colville; Pound Cabinet comments on May 26 "...whether or not she (PoW) had been right in doing so could not be judged on the information so far available"; Adm. Tovey letters to Roskill that were considered credible by Roskill himself; plus Tovey account to McMullen, referred by McMullen in the IWM interview.
We have also the very evident "contradictions", "modifications", "justifications" and "embellishments" entered in the official reports after the Court-Martial had been menaced and discussed at length in this forum.
Every historian after (I don't count Kennedy between them as he wrote a very well written fantasy novel with happy ending, but he had a very limited naval competence and no historical skill), like Tarrant and Roskill (as per his comments posted here) clearly believed it. Even Sir H.Leach was convinced it was true when reviewing "page by page" Wills book (and being an officier in the RN he could not be of any other opinion, looking at the facts happened on May 24 and at the traditions and high standards of the RN....).
What do we need more ?
Bye, Alberto