Spenser Wilkinson

Spenser Wilkinson (born May 1, 1853 in Hulme , † January 31, 1937 in Oxford ) was a British lawyer , military historian and journalist. He was the first Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford University .

Live and act

He grew up near Manchester and attended Owen College there. From 1873 to 1878 he studied at Oxford University ( Merton College ). He then became a lawyer (admitted in 1880). Even in Oxford he began to be interested in military history and was in the voluntary associations (Oxford Volunteers). After returning to Manchester in 1880, he founded the Manchester Tactical Society. In the same year he married. From 1882 to 1892 he was with the Manchester Guardian . He occasionally reported on military matters, such as Wolseley's campaign in Egypt in 1883. Since he was not liberal enough for him, the editor CP Scott separated from Wilkinson in 1892. He then wrote for the Morning Post from 1895 to 1914, including theater reviews.

At the same time he continued to study military strategy, especially Carl von Clausewitz and the German General Staff. He made his opinion public that England was lagging behind militarily and was thus very influential in public. In the Foreign Ministry, his brother-in-law Eyre Crowe (1864-1925) represented similar views in his Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany from 1907, which he circulated in the Foreign Ministry and in the British government and which a hegemonic striving of the German Reich in Europe, which must be opposed. Wilkinson, who was one of the founders of the Navy League of Great Britain in 1894 and who cemented his reputation through correct predictions at the beginning of the Boer War of 1899/1900, was also an influential military expert in Great Britain until the 1930s and also respected in politics and military circles. who also criticized the British military leadership in World War I. In 1909 he became the first Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College .

In 1880 he married Victoria Crowe, the niece of the painter Eyre Crowe and sister of the diplomat Eyre Crowe .

Fonts

• Essays toward the Improvement of the Volunteer Forces , 1886
• Volunteers and the National Defense , London, Constable 1896
• The Brain of an Army , Westminster: Constable 1890 (via the German General Staff)
• with Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911): Imperial Defense , London, New York: Macmillan 1892
• The Command of the Sea , London: Constable 1894
• The Nation's Awakening: Essays towards a british policy , Westminster: Constable 1897
• British Policy in South Africa , London: S. Low, Marston and Company, 1899
• From Cromwell to Wellington , London 1899
• War and Policy , New York 1900 (essays)
• Britain at Bay , 1909, Project Gutenberg
• Hannibal's March through the Alps , Oxford, Clarendon Press 1911
• Lessons of the War. Being the comments from day to day to the relief of Ladysmith , London: Constable 1900, Project Gutenberg
• August 1914. The coming of the war , Oxford UP 1914
• Great Britain and Germany , Oxford UP 1914
• First Lessons in War , London: Methuen 1915
• The French Army before Napoleon , Clarendon Press 1915 (Lectures Oxford 1914)
• The rise of General Bonaparte , Clarendon Press 1930
• The Nation's Servants: Three Essays on the Education of Officers , London, Constable 1916
• The defense of Piedmont, 1742-1748; a prelude to the study of Napoleon , Clarendon Press 1927
• Thirty-five years, 1874-1909 , London: Constable 1933
• Early Life of Moltke , Clarendon Press 1913
  • He also published an English translation of Moltke's military correspondence from 1870/71 (Reprint, Ashgate 1991)
• Strategy in the Navy , Morning Post 1909 (criticism of Julian Corbett )

literature

• John Hattendorf "The Study of War History at Oxford" in Hattendorf, Malcolm H. Murfett (Ed.), The Limitations of Military Power, 1990
• Jay Luvaas : The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815-1940, University of Chicago Press 1964
• Christopher Bassford: Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945, Oxford University Press, 1994
• AJA Morris, article in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004