I'm doing some research into what role the battleship played in each major navy during this 45 year span. I have found plenty of historians telling me how each navy opted to deploy their battleships and understand how each navy did eventually use them. However I am struggling to find any contemporary resources such as reports, memoirs, telegrams etc from admirals or naval theorists during this period about the usage or how of Battleships or how they believe they should be used.
Apologies if this appears to be 'homeworky' but I assure you I understand what role they did play and how they were used differently by the major navies. It's just the actual primary accounts/reports to follow up that I am struggling to find. Any help is much appreciated.
Alfred Thayer Mahan influenced the strategy of the major naval powers at the start of your period. Google has plenty of his books available for the full viewing.
This one is by a Rear Admiral Bacon, read aloud in 1910(Starts on the bottom of page 638). The author is writing in the Dreadnought era, and gives a good overview of the various arguments surrounding the all big-gun battleship concept. What amuses me is how prescient the author appears to be when concluding his piece on page 643.. The traditional narrative is that it wasn't until the coming of the aircraft carrier that people felt battleships were vulnerable. The article helps explain the British fear of submarines sinking their battleships in WWI:
To sum up, all the considerations of offence and defence point to an increase in size of battleships as modern gun construction advances. But, since the modern battleship no longer holds the supreme position which, in the old days, made the battleship the sole ultimate arbiter of sea power, it is improbable that, as the torpedo improves, battleships, unable to defend themselves against any form of torpedo craft, will be built merely to fight battleships. The functions of the large cruiser will therefore be assumed by the battleship, high speed will become more and more necessary, and armor protection will be less accentuated than at present....
Line of battle, as we now know it, will be radically modified, and the fleet action of the future will, in course of time, develop into an aggregation of duels between opposing battle units. The tactics of such units open up a vista of most exhilarating speculation, and will afford to the naval officer of the future a scope for his tactical skill never dreamed of by us or our predecessors.
William Sowden Sims was a prolific writer on the topic of naval warfare in the early twentieth century. He wrote "Victory at Sea" and won the Pulitzer prize in history in 1920 for this book. He wrote two very important articles about long range naval gunnery and big guns on battleships that were published in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute in 1904 and 1906. He also wrote fourteen other articles that were published in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, but those later articles were not as important as his first two. Here is a pdf file that contains the complete bibliography of the writings of William Sowden Sims. http://www.denninginstitute.com/pjd/TT/Sims/SimsRegister.pdf
John Arbuthnot Fisher (a/k/a Jackie Fisher) was a British admiral that was also a prolific writer and naval theorist. "Records, by the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher" was published in 1919 and is the compilation of all of his earlier publications in British naval journals. He was a frequent contributor to "Jane's Fighting Ships" and Fisher's fertile mind developed the Dreadnought battleship and the battle cruiser.
Alfred von Tirpitz on the other hand was a distant third when it came to writing about battleships in the early twentieth century. His most important technical writing was about torpedoes, when he was a low ranking officer. His writings about battleships was more along the lines on how to get the massive expansion of the German High Seas Fleet funded by the German Reichstag, not on how these battleships would be used in an actual war at sea. Alfred Tirpitz did write "My Memoirs" in 1919 and a much larger five volume "Memories" in 1927, but these works are more like Robert Massie's book "Dreadnought". They look at the politics behind the Anglo German naval arms race and do not go into much detail about the actual battleships.
TL/DR Look for articles written by William S Sims and John Arburthnot Fisher published between 1904 and 1914. They both wrote several excellent primary sources about the development of all big gun battleships.