Here is a link to a short bio of Ken Stevens.

Here is the notes on the song from Fair Winds and a Following Sea by The Boarding Party (Folk-Legacy FLG00109)

In August of 1982 we spent a few weeks touring England and Wales, performing in folk clubs and festivals. It was raining when we drove into Portsmouth for a concert that night, and took a ride down by the harbor where the ships of the Royal Navy had returned only a few days earlier from participating in the Falkland Islands crisis. The battered vessels appeared to show signs of damage considerably more extensive than had been reported by newspapers in the United States.

When we arrived at the club, we found it was packed with people (including a team of Morris dancers who were attempting to drink all of the beer in the south of England), among them many fine singers who joined in every chorus. One singer in the audience was Ken Stevens, who had just finished writing this song and sang it before our third set. It was so new - an hour? - that he read it from a sheet of paper. As he sang, the club fell silent, with the images of those ships in the harbor surely in everyone's mind.

Survivor Leave has been a tradition in the Royal Navy since at least World War I, and granted 21 days extra leave to any sailor who survived the sinking of his ship. At the outset of the Falklands incident, however, with Britain's seamen actually on their way to the South Atlantic, the regulation was changed, reducing the amount of leave from three weeks to three days. (Ken says he once sang the song at an old sailors' home, and one of the residents asked whether it was written about the Battle of Jutland in 1916.)

(link)