Former Pembrokeshire journalist Lawrie Phillips has had a lifelong passion for the old Royal Dockyard in his home town of Pembroke Dock. His history of the Dockyard, its ships and men has just been published to coincide with the bicentenary of Pembroke Dock. It is a work of unusual authority and beauty.

Lawrie spent 35 years with the Ministry of Defence at home and abroad and down the years has assembled a remarkable archive of stories and pictures, some of which he has now published. This heavy 350-page work includes 170 monochrome images and 48 pages of colour shots of ships, the dockyard, charts and views, figureheads, relics, portraits, ship models, rolls of honour and more - most of it unfamiliar and all of it fascinating.

The first ships built were the frigates HMS Valorous and HMS Ariadne, launched in 1816. The last was the Royal Fleet Auxiliary oil tanker in 1922. The story of the 250-odd ships built in the intervening century, which is the bulk of the book, makes engrossing reading. The story of the five royal yachts built at Pembroke Dock is the first authoritative account which has ever been published. That of the accident to the Victoria and Albert in 1900 is the result of deep research.

The Dockyard workforce is given well-judged and kindly coverage. There are accounts of splendid service performed by the wokers in emergencies down the years, all well-praised by Captain Superintendents of the day. There are also accounts of skulking and how workers saw off the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. The workmen often lived at long distances from the Yard and this was a unique problem at Pembroke Dock. From the early years the Dockyard surgeon was provided with a horse to allow him to visit sick men at their homes.

Fleet Surgeon Jeans, in post at the turn of the century, recalls some lighter moments: 'As I rode up a lane towards a cottage, [I would] see, over the hedge, the poor 'sick' man busy hoeing his ground. He would hear the horse's hoof, look up, catch sight of me and dash for his cottage and his bed, where after listening to a long-winded account of his ailments from his wife and hearing the thumps of his boots on the floor overhead, I would find him probably fully-dressed, but minus those boots'.

Jeans writes that 'The long tramp to work and home, day after day, winter and summer, a tragedy in itself, was absolutely incompatible with a satisfactory day's work in between'. The Doctor tempers this compassionate concern by relating that 'a parson's wife living in one of these remoter villages sympathised one day with the wife of a workman who had so far to go to his work, and received the unexpected and illuminating reply 'Well, Mum, he do rest all day'. All this and much more in Lawrie Phillips' remarkable book.

The author laments the long-standing neglect of Pembroke Dockyard in Welsh history, notwithstanding the fact that it largely fed South Pembrokeshire for more than a century. 'Never once in this writer's schooldays in Pembroke and Pembroke Dock was any aspect of Pembroke dockyard ever introduced into a history or geography lesson. How strange this was - as strange as if teachers in Grimsby never, ever, spoke of fish, or schools in the Rhondda shunned any reference to coal. Or, as Professor Nicholas Rodger has observed in a different context, a history of Switzerland that did not mention mountains ... what splendid opportunities were missed'.

Many acknowledgements are made. These include Tenby Museum and Art Gallery, which the author says is 'a gem to be treasured'.

The author was for many years a senior Fleet staff officer and later Head of Publicity at the Ministry of Defence. In retirement, he has devoted himself to naval history and his major work, The Royal Navy Day by Day, is dedicated to Her Majesty The Queen and it is officially issued to every ship and establishment in the Fleet.

Lawrie Phillips 'is a leading naval historian with a great admiration for the Royal Navy and a profound understanding of its business', writes Admiral Baron West of Spithead in the foreword to the new book; 'There could be no better man to tell the story of Pembroke Dockyard'. The Admiral, a former Commander-in-Chief Fleet and First Sea Lord, will launch the book in the old Dockyard Chapel next Monday [March 10].

• Pembroke Dockyard and the Old Navy. A Bicentennial History. by Lt-Cdr Lawrie Phillips. The History Press £19.99.