MICHAEL A. LEWIS (1890-1970)

Michael Lewis was a councillor and a vice-president of the NRS.  He edited, with insight and humour, Sir William Henry Dillon’s enjoyable and lengthy A Narrative of My Personal Adventures (1790-1839) that comprise Volumes 93 and 97 (1953-56) of the Society’s publications. Like Sir John Knox Laughton, Sir Julian Corbett, and Sir Geoffrey Callender, Lewis was a member of ‘the Greenwich School’ of naval historians  - to employ C. Northcote Parkinson’s phrase.  This ‘Greenwich School’ – members of the Admiralty’s own teaching staff - dominated the writing and interpretation of naval history at a time when academic historians at the universities concerned themselves rather more with ‘turnips, spinning-jennies and constitutional progress’ than with considerations of Britain’s maritime past (see English Historical Review, Vol. 64, 1949, pp. 374-375). Educated at Uppingham and at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lewis was in 1913 appointed an assistant master at the old Royal Naval College at Osborne, and served throughout the First World War in the Royal Marine Artillery.  In 1922 he became assistant head of the history and English department at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and in 1934 the Admiralty appointed him professor of history and English at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, in succession to Sir Geoffrey Callender.  He held that post until his retirement in 1955.  Initially a writer of fiction and light verse who contributed to Punch, Lewis from 1939 was a prolific and in many ways groundbreaking writer on naval history.  His works, often highly original investigations of facets of the navy’s story, include England’s Sea Officers (1939), British Ships and British Seamen (1942), The Navy of Britain (1948), The History of the British Navy (1959), A Social History of the Navy, 1793-1815 (1960), The Spanish Armada (1960), Armada Guns (1961), Napoleon and his British Captives (1962), and The Navy in Transition, 1814-64 (1965). Professor Michael Arthur Lewis was a Fellow of the Society of Arts (FSA), a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS), and a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).  An obituary, with photograph, appeared in The Times (2 March 1970, p. 12).