Tom Pocock

Thomas Allcot Guy Pocock, writing under the name Tom Pocock, (18 August 1925, London – 7 May 2007, London) was an English biographer, war correspondent, journalist and naval historian.

Life
He was the son of the novelist and educationist Guy Pocock, who taught Lord Mountbatten at Dartmouth, and attended Westminster School and Cheltenham College. He joined the Royal Navy in 1943, being present at D-Day and then serving as naval "minder" to war correspondents covering the Battle of Normandy. Falling ill, by the end of 1944 he was demobbed [demobilized], and became a war correspondent at only 19 years old. He spent four years with the Hulton Press current affairs magazine group, being one of the first journalists to see Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and learning his trade from Alan Moorehead (later becoming his biographer). He then moved on to be a feature-writer and then Naval Correspondent on the Daily Mail, and then (in 1952) Naval Correspondent of The Times.

He was a foreign correspondent and special writer for the Daily Express from 1956 to 1959, then from 1959 was feature writer, Defence Correspondent, war correspondent and finally Travel Editor on the Evening Standard. He married Penny Casson in 1969 (they had two daughters). He won the Mountbatten Maritime Prize in 2004.

Famous Relatives
Tom Pocock's family included such luminaries as: Vice-Admiral Sir George Pocock, K.B. (who was the captor of Havana in the Seven Years War), the marine painter Nicholas Pocock as well as his aunt Doris Pocock who was an author of girls' school stories.

Works

 * Nelson and His World, 1967, his first book, written on his return from reporting the Aden Emergency
 * Chelsea Reach
 * Fighting General
 * Stopping Napoleon
 * The Terror Before Trafalgar
 * Captain Marryat
 * Nelson's Women
 * Battle for Empire: The Very First World War 1756-63 (1998)
 * A Thirst for Glory, The Life of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith
 * The Young Nelson in the Americas
 * Horatio Nelson, runner-up for the Whitbread Biography Award of 1987.
 * Remember Nelson - The Life of Captain Sir William Hoste (1977)
 * Rider Haggard and the Lost Empire
 * Sailor King: The Life of King William IV
 * East and West of Suez
 * Alan Moorehead
 * 1945: The Dawn Came Up Like Thunder
 * Norfolk
 * Travels of a London Schoolboy, 1826-1830 (editor)
 * London Walks
 * Essential Venice