Colin White was one of the country’s leading experts on the life and achievements of Britain’s greatest admiral, Horatio Nelson.

The field of Nelson hagiographies is crowded. There are more than 100 biographies, the first appearing in 1801, but it is only comparatively recently that historians have incorporated proper references and footnotes, cataloguing their primary sources and carefully selecting secondary sources for their accuracy. Of White’s several publications, two major works stand out, both based on original research. They are Nelson — The Admiral and Nelson — The New Letters.

He led the Nelson Letters Project, set up in 1999 by the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth, which found, to the surprise of many, more than 1,400 unpublished letters from 33 locations around the world. Some emerged from the archives of Nelson’s contemporaries. One fifth of the “pressed letters” from 1803-05 and held in books by the British Library had never been published, even in the magisterial seven-volume collection by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas of 1846. Pressed letters are copies made using an early method in which moistened tissue paper was pressed by a special machine to the ink of the original and read from the back. White also drew on personal, intimate and detailed orders to his captains, found in three scruffy working books and covering most of his campaigns, that were previously ignored by editors.

Much is private, was secret or fills inexplicable gaps. White was the first to admit that the new material did not challenge the existing view of Nelson’s style of leadership, but, he said, it “does enable us, as it were, to watch over Nelson’s shoulder at critical moments in his career in a sustained and detailed manner not possible before. Suddenly the ‘Nelson touch’ springs to life and we can get a sense of what it was like to be present at one of

Nelson’s briefings and share his thoughts. And to admire afresh Nelson’s urgency, humanity, wisdom and skill.”

Colin Saunders White was born in 1951. He was educated at Southampton University and obtained an MA in war studies at King’s College London. He worked at the Royal Naval Museum from 1975, becoming in 1995 deputy director and head of museum services. His The Nelson Companion (1995) is a bestseller in its third edition.

For the bicentenary of the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, White was appointed chairman of the Official Nelson Celebrations Committee charged with co-ordinating the Trafalgar Festival, and for this he was presented in 2006 the Longmans History Today Trustees Award. In 2001 he was seconded to the National Maritime Museum as director of its 2005 initiatives including an exhibition, Nelson and Napoleon, publications and special events.

The Desmond Wettern Media Award “for being the most visible spokesman of Britain’s maritime interests” followed his remarkable tally of some 300 public lectures that he gave during 2005. In 2006 White was awarded the Distinguished Book Prize by the Society for Military History for Nelson — the New Letters.

A man of deep Christian faith, great personal warmth and humour, his brilliant public speaking, aided by his penchant for amateur theatricals, created a memorable tour de force before royalty and the assembled grandees of the maritime world at the 2005 Trafalgar Night dinner in the Painted Hall at Greenwich.

He is probably the only person with the distinction of having been promoted from ordinary seaman RNR to hon. captain RNR, in one step. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Society of Antiquaries and was vice-president of the Navy Records Society. He was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Portsmouth and was its visiting professor in maritime history.

He was appointed director of the Royal Naval Museum in June 2006.

Colin White, historian and director of the Royal Naval Museum 2006-08 was born on August 28, 1951. He died of cancer on December 25, 2008, aged 57