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.

Life
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. 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.

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:


 * US Civil war era Monitors
 * Turret ship HMS Captain (1869)
 * Russian coast defence ships RUSSIAN MONITOR Novgorod and her sister, RUSSIAN MONITOR Vitse-admiral Popov
 * Armoured rams HMS Polyphemus (1881) and USS Katahdin (1893)
 * Russian armoured cruiser RUSSIAN CRUISER Rurik
 * Dynamite cruiser USS Vesuvius (1888)
 * British Powerful-class cruiser protected cruisers
 * Russian Borodino-class battleships
 * Destroyer HMS Swift (1907)
 * Austro-Hungarian Viribus Unitis-class battleships
 * French Normandie-class battleships
 * American AA-1-class submarines
 * US flush-decker destroyers (Caldwell-class destroyer, Wickes-class destroyer & Clemson-class destroyer)
 * British K-class submarines
 * British light battlecruisers, HMS Glorious, HMS Furious (47), HMS Courageous (50)
 * Battlecruiser HMS Hood (51)
 * US Omaha-class cruiser
 * Swedish cruiser HSWMS Gotland (1933)
 * French Duquesne-class cruiser heavy cruisers
 * German pocket battleships
 * Italian Condottieri-class cruiser light cruisers (Giussano and Cadorna classes)
 * JAPANESE AIRCRAFT CARRIER Ryūjō
 * Japanese Mogami-class cruisers
 * Japanese Yamato-class battleships
 * German Bismarck-class battleships
 * British Implacable-class aircraft carriers
 * Hydrogen peroxide-fuelled submarines
 * Soviet Alfa-class submarines
 * British Type 21 frigates
 * La Combattante-class fast attack craft