SIR JULIAN CORBETT (1854–1922)

A former barrister who became a distinguished writer on aspects of British naval history and from 1902 a lecturer at the new Royal Naval War College at Greenwich, was one of the NRS’s foremost early members, and edited several of the Society’s publications. The son of a London architect, he attended Marlborough College and graduated with a first-class degree in law from Trinity College, Cambridge.  He abandoned the Bar after a few years, to travel and write both fiction and non-fiction.  His biography of Sir Francis Drake (about whom he wrote two novels) appeared in the ‘English Men of Action’ series during 1890.    His well-received Drake and the Tudor Navy, based on extensive archival sources and informed by his appreciation of the nexus between state policy and the deployment of naval power, appeared in 1898. That same year he edited, at Laughton’s urging, Papers Relating to the Spanish War, 1585-87, volume 11 in the NRS series of publications.  A few years later he edited Sir William Slyngsbie’s ‘Relation of the Voyage to Cadiz 1596’, which appeared in the The Naval Miscellany, vol. I edited by Laughton (Volume 20 in the NRS series).  Other volumes edited by Corbett were Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 (series vol. 29), Views of the Battles of the Third Dutch War, Signals and Instructions, 1776-1794 (series vol. 34), and the first two volumes of The Private Papers of George, 2nd Earl Spencer (series vols. 46 and  48). In 1914, following publication of the second Spencer volume, he was awarded the Chesney gold medal by the Royal United Service Institution.  Books he authored included The Successors of Drake (1900), England in the Mediterranean, 1603–1714 (1904), England in the Seven Years’ War (1907), and The Campaign of Trafalgar (1910; reprinted 2005), andMaritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–06 (2 vols., 1915). He also wrote influential pamphlets. Admiral Sir John Fisher, as First Sea Lord (1904-10), solicited Corbett’s endorsement of a number of innovations, including the Dreadnought and the battle cruiser. Corbett advised on naval policy during the First World War, was knighted in 1917, and became the historian of the war’s maritime conduct in his Naval Operations (3 vols., 1920-23), a controversial and difficult task.

      More information about Sir Julian’s life and career, and a list of further reading, can be found in Sir Geoffrey Callender’s entry on Corbett (revised by James Goldrick) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography(ODNB).