Beautiful drawings by a mystery artist of her fellow Wrens at work in the second world war, repairing equipment including torpedo tubes and depth charges, are to go on display for the first time more than 60 years after the artist presented them to the National Maritime Museum.

The museum hopes the display may bring more information about the artist, Gladys E Reed. They know nothing about her except for the clues in the drawings themselves, and the information she gave when in 1947 she presented the folder of her work: 14 sketches made during her rest periods, in pencil on small sheets of cheap paper. She could still be alive, since she was probably a young unmarried woman when she joined the Women's Royal Naval Service.

"She clearly had some art school training – the drawings are wonderfully accomplished," said Melanie Vandenbrouck, curator of the museum's vast art collection. "They are very rare in themselves: depictions of Wrens at work in the war are very uncommon, but they are drawn in a very sensitive, intimate way.

"It is obvious that she knew these women very well, that they were close colleagues who trusted her. They have a quality quite different from the work of official war artists who, however brilliant, would have come in from outside, done the job and left again."

The correspondence in the archive shows that in May 1947 Reed was living at Eastern Villas Road in Southsea, and she had served in the WRNS at HMS Eaglet in Liverpool as a wireless telegraph operator.

Reed first offered the drawings to the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, where she had trained along with the other second world war recruits to the WRNS. They sugested she contact the maritime museum, just across the road, and she wrote to the director Frank Carr, offering drawings made "in my off-watch time, a sketch record of the various interesting kinds of work being done by Wrens".

"The correspondence is unusual," Vandenbrouck said. "Most such letters are very formal, acknowledgement of receipt and such like. These are different, the letters are very warm, the director said that he was delighted to accept them, and exceptionally she was offered a 10 guinea honorarium – which in England in 1947, when everything was in such short supply, was quite a useful amount of money."

The drawings show Wrens hard at work on tasks including stripping and cleaning down depth charges and servicing torpedo tubes, wearily resting in a chair by a stove, or doing their laundry in a wash-hand basin.

Vandenbrouck believes similar drawings must also have been given to friends Reed served with, and are probably still in family collections. She has failed to unearth any information on Reed's later life and career, or find records of her work being exhibited, and the museum cannot access her service records because it cannot trace next of kin.

"There must be people out there who knew her, and we would really love to know more," Vandenbrouck said. The drawings will go on display from March, with other art from the first and second world wars, in the gallery at the Queen's House, part of Royal Museums Greenwich.