Ralph Richard Armstrong was born in Walbottle, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland on the 18th June, 1903. He was a blacksmith's son who left school at thirteen to work in a Tyneside steelworks. He spent three years there, starting as an errand boy and progressing to greaser, labourer and crane driver. His book Sabotage at the Forge, set in a steelworks, is highly regarded for its accurate and effective description of a boy's experience in such an environment. The Whinstone Drift is similarly convincingly set against a Northumberland coal-mining background.

After the First World War he went to sea in the Merchant Service and for seventeen years sailed in many types of vessel, gaining the experience which he later put to use in his books about seafaring. . In 1937 he left the Merchant Service and pursued various occupations, finally concentrating on his writing. He drew on his wide-ranging experiences at sea, writing about, for example, cargo steamers (Passage Home), oil tankers (No Time for Tankers), and whalers (The Secret Sea).

He had a son, John, to whom he dedicated his book Sailor's Luck. He died in 1986.

Adult novels

• The Northern Maid (1947)
• Passage Home (1952)
• Sailor's Luck (1959)

Children's novels

• The Mystery of Obadiah (1943)
• Sabotage at the Forge (1946)
• Sea Change (1948)
• The Whinstone Drift (1951)
• Danger Rock (1955)
• The Lost Ship (1956)
• No Time for Tankers (1959)
• Island Odyssey (1963)
• The Secret Sea (1966)
• The Mutineers (1968)
• The Albatross (1970)

Non-Fiction

• Grace Darling: Maid and Myth (1965)
• A History of Seafaring (1968-9)

Volume 1: The Early Mariners

Volume 2: The Discoverers

Volume 3: The Merchantmen

• Themselves Alone: the Story of Men in Empty Places (1972)