Antony Preston

Antony Martin Douglas Leslie William Calhoun 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.

Antony Preston was born in 1938 in Salford, Lancashire, 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.

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.

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:

Only the four most recent Warship annuals are listed; other titles are listed in reverse order of publication.

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.