This is the latest in a series of occasional articles on the shared histories of Bermuda and the United States, which celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence this year. The articles, by Heritage Matters author Edward Harris, will run throughout the year.

Begun in 1809, the Bermuda dockyard for the fleets of the British Admiralty in the western Atlantic performed its military value into the mid-1990s, when the end of the “Cold War” knocked it out frigid. The atmosphere had however heated up considerably early in the twentieth century as a hot war was in the offing in the summer of 1914.

In his recent commanding account, Bermuda Sentinel, eminent Royal Dockyards historian, Jonathan Coad, related a changing of the guard at the facility at Ireland Island at that time.

“In late July 1914 Commander Duncan Tatton-Brown arrived as the new Captain-in-Charge of the dockyard, moving into The Cottage, his official residence a few days before the outbreak of the First World War.

“A letter to his wife, shortly to join him from England with their young family, captures something of the flavour and changing pace on this isolated Station as conflict loomed. Advising her ‘to bring gold out with you as there may be difficulty cashing cheques’, he writes somewhat regretfully: ‘Never mind about the croquet set, I have no one to get the lawn in order now’.”

The Commander likely had little time for play in the coming years (although a friend had sent him some balls for tennis) and he left the Bermuda dockyard in December 1917, about the time of the arrival of the USS Alert and other US destroyers, one with its passel of “pigs” (submarines).

Photography at the dockyard was likely verboten in wartime, but as you-all know, our cousins to the west are famous for breaking the rules, starting with chucking good tea into a murky Boston sea!

Thus it was that the former manager (and Bermudaphile) of the Bookmart, Martin Buckley, found an amazing collection of photographs of British and American vessels in the dockyard in the first months of 1918. He persuaded descendants of Petty Officer James Anderson, USN, to donate copies of the collection to the National Museum. We present a few here, as illustrative of US military activity in Bermuda in the last year of the Great, or First World War.

James was an electrician first class on the submarine support ship, USS Alert, and his collection comprises 56 images that capture something of the busy atmosphere of the dockyard.

The two basins of the naval arena bristled with British and American warships, some of which still ran on coal, seen in perhaps the only known pictures of the bituminous material under covered sheds next to where the Bone Fish restaurant stands today. The crew of USS Alert included Americans from as far away as Hawaii, as the ship had been stationed there for a few years and thus recruited some of the local men.

Selfies abound, as do images of pets and sporting activities. British destroyers, such as HMS Cumberland in dazzle-paint camouflage (stateside: “razzle dazzle”) jostle for wharf space with the likes of USS Calhoun and American submarines languish at moorings with the sleek subchaser boats.

Anderson ventured into Hamilton and captured the ancient British warship HMS Charybdis, which kept Bermuda in contact with New York in the absence of normal shipping during the war. The US Navy also had a station for submarines on White’s Island in Hamilton Harbour and nearby likely kept munitions at Agar’s Island in the massive British magazine there.

Petty Officer Anderson’s photographs give us a glimpse into the past when, far from being an isolated outpost of the Empire, Bermuda was in fact at the very centre of the allied effort to keep the vital trans-Atlantic sea lanes open.

They also show how navies worked hand in hand against a common enemy and how Americans who had for so long been treated warily as potential enemies were welcomed into Britain’s “Gibraltar of the West”. It is wonderful that PO Anderson’s family have donated copies of these important images to the National Museum of Bermuda. The collection will inform future generations of the important role played by these Islands during the first of the twentieth century’s terrible world wars in concert with the British and American allies.

• Dr Edward Harris is the founding executive director emeritus of the National Museum of Bermuda