Antony Preston

Antony Preston (26 February 1938 – 25 December 2004) was an English naval historian and editor, specialising in the area of 19th and 20th-century naval history and warship design.

Life
Antony Preston was born in 1938 in Salford, Lancashire, the son of the 16th Viscount Gormanston and Miss Julia O'Mahony. After becoming a wartime evacuee, he was educated in South Africa at King Edward VII School, Johannesburg, and the University of Witwatersrand. On his return to England he spent some years at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, before becoming Editor of the periodical "Defence". During the 1970s he was employed by a specialist publisher, Conway Maritime Press, as editor of their Warship annual. He also produced the specialised newsletter Navint. In the early nineties he took over as chief-editor of the magazine Naval Forces at the German editorial group Mönch. He left to resume as editor of Warships in 1996. Antony Preston lived in London until his death in 2004. His son Matt Preston (born 1961 and the eldest of Preston's three children) has gained celebrity as a TV judge on MasterChef Australia and as a restaurant critic-columnist for the Melbourne Age & Herald-Sun newspapers.

Work
Antony Preston was a prolific author both of books and articles, and published on subjects ranging from the American Revolution to modern seapower; the bibliography given below illustrates the breadth of his expertise. He wrote on general military history, as well as most aspects of naval history and modern-day naval matters. He was a pugnacious writer and was usually willing to take up one side of a controversy, even in a work of reference (see brief collection of quotes below).

Memorable quotes

 * s - "ton for ton, the least satisfactory ships built for the RN in modern times"
 * French - "unfit for combat with any existing cruiser"
 * Fast attack craft - "a fresh coat of paint and a display of flags can hide a multitude of shortcomings"
 * German Panzerschiffe - "more of a political gesture than a significant contribution to the history of capital-ship design"
 * s - "the most grotesque craft ever seen".

World's Worst Warships
The World's Worst Warships is a book about warship design. While nobody sets out to design a bad warship, some ships turn out unsuitable for the tasks which they are asked to perform. Antony Preston regarded the following designs as particularly poor:


 * US Civil war era Monitors
 * Turret ship HMS Captain (1869)
 * Russian coast defence ships RUSSIAN MONITOR Novgorod and her sister, RUSSIAN MONITOR Vice-Admiral Popov
 * Armoured rams HMS Polyphemus (1881) and USS Katahdin (1893)
 * Russian armoured cruiser RUSSIAN CRUISER Rurik
 * Dynamite cruiser USS Vesuvius (1888)
 * British protected cruisers
 * Russian s
 * Destroyer HMS Swift (1907)
 * Austro-Hungarian Viribus Unitis-class battleships
 * French s
 * American s
 * US flush-decker destroyers (, &  )
 * British K-class submarines
 * British light battlecruisers, HMS Glorious, HMS Furious (47), HMS Courageous (50)
 * Battlecruiser HMS Hood (51)
 * US
 * Swedish cruiser HMS Gotland (cruiser)
 * French heavy cruisers
 * German pocket battleships
 * Italian light cruisers
 * JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Ryūjō
 * Japanese s
 * Japanese s
 * German s
 * British s
 * Hydrogen peroxide-fuelled submarines
 * Soviet s
 * British Type 21 frigates