Full version of the obituary which was published in the Daily Telegraph on 27^th March 2019

Peter Terence Warwick was born on 20 December 1949 in Kenilworth where his father was a pioneer aero-engineer who worked with Frank Whittle and on jets from the Gloster Meteor Mk 1 to Concorde.   

Educated at Pattinson College and Woodlands Comprehensive (now West Coventry Academy), Coventry, he read economics at Hull 1968-71 and, part-time, for a masters at Birkbeck 1972-75 on the impact of transport rationalisation on land values.   His history was self-taught.  

Warwick was diverted from his intention of joining the Royal Navy for a short service commission by the offer of a job as personal assistant to the left-wing politician and entrepreneur T. Dan Smith.    Smith gave Warwick great responsibility, while Warwick learned to network through dealing with Smith’s contacts who were as varied as the union-leader Vic Feather, the musician Yehudi Menuhin, and the then Foreign Secretary George Brown.   His specific responsibilities included finding greenfield sites for motorway service stations and the planning application for Sullom Voe oil terminal.  Though he believed he knew Smith’s business intimately, he was surprised not to be interviewed by the police after Smith’s arrest on corruption charges and remained convinced that Smith had been made a scapegoat by the establishment.      

In 1974-85 Warwick joined Legal & General’s investment planning team, ending as head of property research:  projects included Landsdowne House and Leadenhall Market.   His interests were never numbers, however, but people and while lent to a charity, Action Resource Centre 1985-88, he gained new qualifications in public relations, returning to L&G as business development manager 1988-91 and marketing director 1991-96.   Warwick enjoyed champagne and fast cars, but the business world was changing around him and becoming less fun, and in 1995 he set up as a freelance consultant in marketing and communications, initially enjoying some success with Middle Eastern clients.   This also enabled him to give more attention to his teenage son, Tom, and gradually, with a variable income, his life-style became more abstemious.

He had already been known to put clients and junior colleagues at ease by descriptions, often using the cutlery, of Nelson’s battles, and now with downtime between commissions he was able to give full reign to his enthusiasm for his hero, Nelson.  Warwick dated his obsession to 15 March 1957 when, aged 7, he read the last episode of ‘The Life of the Great Sailor’ in The Eagle, and experienced “a quasi-spiritual moment, like a hot knife going through butter”.   Over the next 40 years he built a library about Nelson and collected artefacts related to him, but it was not until the 1990s, while showing friends round the Nelson exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, that he learned about The 1805 Club and realised that he could share his interests with others.  He immediately joined and, by his infectious enthusiasm and natural leadership, quickly rose to be the club’s chairman, a position he was elected to annually for the last fourteen years.

Warwick helped turn The 1805 Club from a group of antiquarians into a vibrant, international sponsor of events, conferences and scholarly publications.    These ranged from the restaging of Emma Hamilton’s semi-naked attitudes, an audience with HM the Queen of Denmark during the bicentenary of the Battle of Copenhagen, and conservation of more than a score of monuments to naval heroes of Nelson’s time.   Warwick also became one of only a handful of people to enjoy a three-course meal at the top of Nelson’s column, while there was scaffolding up for its maintenance, and there he hid his own marker for future generations to find.

For 15 years “the great joy of my life” was being one of the volunteer crew HMS Victory’s replica cutter, who, dressed in their 18^th century uniforms were not, he felt, re-enactors but representatives of the highest traditions of the Royal Navy.

In 2005 he co-founded Thames Alive, an umbrella group to emphasise the importance of traditional rowing to the River Thames.     The first of several spectacular riverborne pageants was a fulfilment of a boyhood dream, the Thames Nelson Flotilla, part-sponsored by the Daily Telegraph, which on 16 September 2005 recreated Lord Nelson’s 1806 funeral procession from Greenwich to Westminster.     

Subsequently, encouraged by Lord Jeffrey Sterling, he proposed to the Palace a procession along the Thames to mark HM the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which in 2012 resulted in 300 rowed craft being led along the Thames by the newly-built Queen’s Row Barge Gloriana.   For Warwick it was a bitter-sweet occasion.   He felt strongly that proper credit for the event was not given to Thames Alive, though not one to bear malice but always quick with a Nelson quotation, he would say of this, “Never let there be petty jealousies between us”:  nevertheless, he could not bear to watch the BBC’s “pathetic” coverage of the event.   He was also saddened that the zealous application of health and safety rules ended HMS Victory cutter’s appearances at this and other public events at home and abroad. 

Thames Alive also campaigned successfully for the London 2012 Olympic Torch Relay to feature the river and on 27 July 2012 the torch embarked at Hampton Court Palace and carried downriver to the Tower.  The last event in which Warwick participated was a river parade to mark the centenary of the November 1918 armistice.    

In 2008 Warwick started another career as a speaker on Noble Caledonia’s sea cruises, rapidly establishing himself, his magic grin and grasp of detail, as one of its leading personalities.   He was happiest spending many weeks each year at sea, particularly in the Caribbean where he made his name synonymous with naval history cruises in the three-masted barque Sea Cloud II.  Whether there or in the Baltic, the Antarctic or the Pacific, Warwick brought naval and polar history to life through spell-binding, note-free talks given to the background of rapid-fire, colourful slides;  he assisted the expedition leaders in boats and on land;  and, always kind and interested in people, he expertly hosted his own ‘captain’s table’ in the dining room.   He took perverse pleasure in that, like the sailors of old, he could not swim.

His organising ability and his refusal to accept a rebuff were recognised by an invitation to join the Waterloo Dispatch when, inevitably, he soon took the lead in staging the bicentenary of the arrival in 2015 in St James’s Square of Wellington’s dispatch from the Battle of Waterloo.

Warwick’s gift was his ability to light up a room, to engage each person as though he or she were the only person in that room, his phenomenal memory for names and places, and his numerous lifelong friendships.   Warwick also had a powerful sense of duty and in the last phase of his cancer, after he had been advised not to drive, he rose early one morning in Lewes to make an unaccompanied, complex, cross-country rail journey to the West Country to honour a commitment to speak at a NADFAS (now Arts Society) function.

He wrote Voices from the Battle of Trafalgar (2005) and two booklets Trafalgar: Tales from the Front Line (2011) and, in the pocket giant series, Horatio Nelson (2015).

He regarded his last four and half years’ treatment for cancer and several major operations not as a battle but, like another of his heroes, Captain James Cook, as a voyage of discovery.    Even in the closing days of his life he pursued new projects and was researching and fund-raising for a television series on the life of Emma Hamilton.

Warwick married Paulette Beauchamp-Lait in 1976: they separated in 1982 and he is survived by his son who cared lovingly for him in the last months.   Peter Warwick died on 20 March 2019.    

Peter Warwick recorded an interview for his obituary on 2 January 2019.   For additional information the writer thanks, among others,  Lord Sterling, Dr Keith Chittenden, Jerome Monahan, Malcolm Knight (Thames Alive), Barbara Altounyan (The Hospice Biographers), Mike Deegan and Chantal Cookson (Noble Caledonia), Rob Powell (Thames Pictures) and members of The 1805 Club.