Spenser Wilkinson

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Spenser Wilkinson
In The Sketch, 2 December 1896
Born
Henry Spenser Wilkinson

(1853-05-01)1 May 1853
Hulme, England
Died31 January 1937(1937-01-31) (aged 83)
Oxford, England
Education
Occupation(s)Academic, writer, critic
Spouse
Victoria Crowe
​
(m. 1888)​
Children6

Henry Spenser Wilkinson (1 May 1853 – 31 January 1937) was the first

Morning Post
.

Early life and education

The second son of Thomas Read Wilkinson, a banker, and his wife Emma Wolfenden, he was born in

Oxford Volunteers. After Oxford, he read law at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1880.[2] On returning to Manchester in 1880, he took a commission in the volunteers and also founded the Manchester Tactical Society
.

In 1888, Wilkinson married Victoria Crowe (1868–1929), daughter of Sir Joseph Archer Crowe and niece of the artist Eyre Crowe. Together, he and his wife had two sons and four daughters.[1]

Career as a journalist

From 1882 to 1892 he was on the staff of the

Morning Post from 1895 to 1914.[1]

Convinced as early as 1874 that Great Britain was inadequately armed, he increasingly devoted his attention to the subject of the national defence. He became a key figure in the founding of the

Foreign Office, Wilkinson's wife's brother, Sir Eyre Crowe, summarised much of Wilkinson's argument from his 1896 book The National Awakening in his famous 1 January 1907 memorandum on British relations with France and Germany.[1]

Academic career

Wilkinson was very well connected to key figures in politics and in the armed forces as he journalist and had long hoped for an academic appointment, as his interests increasingly turned toward historical study. He was elected the first

Chichele Professor of Military History in the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College in 1909. During World War I he became—like Clausewitz's foremost German proponent at the time, Hans Delbrück—an energetic critic of his nation's counterproductive strategy and policy. He remained an influential voice in Britain until his death in Oxford on 31 January 1937.[1]

Bibliography

For on-line examples of Wilkinson's writings, see:

  • Strategy in the Navy, The Morning Post, 3 August 1909. This essay is essentially an attack on the influential British naval theorist
    Julian Stafford Corbett
    's interpretation of Clausewitz and on Corbett's influence on the Royal Navy.
  • Killing No Murder: An Examination of Some New Theories of War, Army Quarterly 14 (October 1927). This is a bitingly critical response to
    B.H. Liddell Hart
    's book, The Remaking of Modern Armies (London: J. Murray, 1927).

Sources

  • Scammell, J. M. "Spenser Wilkinson and the Defense of Britain." Journal of Military History 4 (1940): 129–142 online
  • William Archer, Real Conversations (London, 1904)
  • John B. Hattendorf, "The Study of War History at Oxford" in Hattendorf and Malcolm H. Murfett, eds., The Limitations of Military Power (1990).
  • Jay Luvaas, The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815–1940 (1965.
  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
    . (2004)

Wilkinson's Papers are located at the

Basil Liddell Hart is at King's College London

For an extended discussion of Wilkinson, see

  • Chapter 9, "Major British Military Writers," and Chapter 15, section "Wilkinson on Liddell Hart and Clausewitz," in Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

References

  1. ^
    doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36904. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  2. ^ "Wilkinson, Henry Spenser". Who's Who. Vol. 59. 1907. p. 1893.
  3. ^ "Review of The Nation's Need: Chapters on Education edited by Spenser Wilkinson". The Athenaeum (3941): 586. 9 May 1903.
  • This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
    New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help
    )

External links
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