Resting place Mortlake, London Name Antony Preston Nationality British Role Historian | Genre Naval History Children Matt Preston Spouse Jennifer Preston | |
Occupation Naval historian, editor, journalist and author Died December 25, 2004, Battersea, London, United Kingdom Education University of the Witwatersrand, King Edward VII School Books The world's worst warships, Send a Gunboat, Submarine Warfare, The World's Great Airc, The Royal Navy submarin Similar People Matt Preston, Charles Messenger, John Batchelor | ||
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.
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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 four 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
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. Notwithstanding his lack of engineering knowledge, Antony Preston regarded the following designs as particularly poor: