In 1919 Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere endowed a "Professorship of Naval History" at Cambridge with a donation of £20,000, in memory of his son Vere who was killed at the Battle of Ancre in November 1916.[1] In 1932 the Royal Empire Society successfully campaigned for Cambridge to accept the renaming of the chair to "The Professorship of Imperial and Naval History", under which rubric a new professor was appointed in 1934.[2] Among the holders of this prestigious chair, only Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond has specialized in naval history, while the others have tended to be scholars of imperial history.