John Knox Laughton

John Knox Laughton

Sir John Knox Laughton was a British naval historian and arguably the first to delineate the importance of the subject of naval history as an independent field of study. Beginning his working life as a mathematically trained civilian instructor for the Royal Navy, he later became professor of modern history at King's College London and a co-founder of the Navy Records Society. A prolific writer of lives, he penned the biographies of more than 900 naval personalities for the Dictionary of National Biography.