Peter G Hore FRHistS (born 1944) naval officer, historian and obituarist, served a full career in the Royal Navy (1962-2000), spent ten years working in the cinema and television industry (2000-2009) and is a successful biographer and obituarist. One of his books, Habit of Victory, was the Daily Telegraph reader's choice and another book, Sydney, Cipher and Search was praised for its literary quality and depth of research and shortlisted for the Mountbatten Media Awards. His reasons for becoming an historian are published at British Naval History.[1]
Captain Peter Hore served worldwide as a logistics specialist in the British Royal Navy, including exchange service in the United States Navy (1964), and two tours of duty in NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic (1972-3). During his Navy service he qualified as an interpreter in Spanish in 1968, interpreter in Swedish in 1970 and linguist in Cantonese in 1986. During the 1982 Falklands War he was the Joint Logistics Commander on Ascension Island, and he has since had the unusual distinction of both having helped to direct the Royal Navy's applied research programme (1992-4) and having headed its non-technical research programme (1997-2000). From 1997-2000 he was Head of Defence Studies during the British government's Strategic Defence Review.
He is a former Vice President of the Royal Navy Museum and was chairman of its Curatorial Working Party (now the National Museum of the Royal Navy). He has been a trustee of The Naval Review, a member of the council of the Navy Records Society, a member of the board of the Society for Nautical Research and chairman of its Research, Technical and Programmes Committee.
In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society,[2] and was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Swedish Society of Naval Sciences.
He is also a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.
In 2000-09 he was Chief Executive of the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund, a multi-million £ casework charity open to everyone behind the camera in British film and television industries. The charity raises funds principally through the Royal Film Performance. He retired as CEO in November 2009.[3]
Peter Hore is the editor or author of many reviews, articles and books including three biographies, numerous obituaries and several books on naval history and strategy. He is recognized at Historic Naval Fiction [4] as an established author. In 2009 his book Sydney, Cipher and Search,[5] an account of his ten-year search through the archives, interviews with survivors, and the breaking of a German wartime code, solved the mystery of the disappearance in 1941 of the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney (D48).[6] Sydney, Cipher and Search was awarded the Sir Robert Craven Trophy.[7] a certificate for literary merit from the Maritime Foundation at the Mountbatten Maritime Prize awards, and was nominated for the Anderson Medal award of the Society for Nautical Research. He is associate editor and book review editor of the influential monthly magazine Warships International Fleet Review,[8] was an op-ed writer on defence and international affairs for Newsday in New York, and has written over half a million words in some 600 obituaries for the London Daily Telegraph.
He is a consultant and contributor to the authoritative Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.and some examples of his contributions can be referenced here:
Recent books include Dreadnought to Daring: 100 Years of Comment, Controversy and Debate; Nelson’s Band of Brothers: Their Lives and Memorials, containing a selection of rare illustrations and the biographies of all the officers who commanded under Horatio Nelson at his three great battles; and HMS Pickle: The Swiftest Ship in Nelson’s Trafalgar Fleet, a history of HMS Pickle (1800) and her captain at the Battle of Trafalgar, John Richards Lapenotière.
His latest book is Lindell’s List, the life and times of a group of American and British agents who were imprisoned by the Germans in the Second World War and rescued by the Swedish Red Cross from the ‘women’s hell’, a concentration camp at Ravensbrück, concentration camp, north of Berlin.
Peter Hore has contributed more than 1000 obituaries to the Daily Telegraph on Special Forces and members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, and maritime subjects including British and overseas naval officers, men and women, Royal Marines, Merchant Navy officers, yachtsmen, life-boatmen, naval architects and shipping magnates. Each obituary is on average about 1,000 words long, highly factual and based on interviews and archival research. See examples here:[12]
A partial bibliography is on Amazon.[13]
Numerous newspaper and magazine articles, including regular features and op-ed articles for Warships International Fleet Review, the Kedge Anchor and Trafalgar Chronicle. Since 2015 he has been the editor of the Trafalgar Chronicle [14] Peter has also contributed a large number of book reviews for The Naval Review, The Linguist, Mariner's Mirror, and is Series editor for The British Navy at War and Peace.