Sir Edward Townley Peel, KBE, DSO, MC (31 May 1884 – 6 September 1961) was a British army officer, businessman and amateur sportsman.
"Alexandria's British community, owing to its political dominance in Egypt but also to the considerable commercial success of many of its members, enjoyed a position of social prominence out of proportion to its numbers.
[8] By the time Miles Lampson, 1st Baron Killearn was High Commissioner for Egypt, Peel & Co was "one of the biggest cotton firms of Alexandria".
[2][4][note 1] In World War I Peel served with the Wiltshire Regiment on the Western Front in France, in the Gallipoli Campaign, and with the Middle East force in Egypt, Palestine and Syria.
[4][note 2][12] In 1952 Peel wrote to London warning of the impossibility of maintaining a secure base on the Suez Canal; historian Philip Mansel characterises his intervention as "tr[ying] to instil sense in the British government".
Killearn states that Peel was 'foremost in pressing the claims of the "small man" in priority to the larger claimants of who he was, of course, one of the biggest in the class of private firms'.
[note 3][4] Peel became a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1933, proposed by Field-Marshal Lord Allenby, and was vice-president of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom.
[2][4] Peel was keenly interested in marine biology and he provided his yacht and gave assistance to Frederick Russell in investigating the movements of tunny off the east coast of Britain.
Although local fishermen considered there had been no tunny before World War I, the studies suggested that migration into the North Sea had not been recent.
[20][21][22] In the season, which was August and September, Peel sailed with his "huge steam yacht" St George with an "exotic Sudanese crew" and in 1932 he landed a world-record tunny of 798 pounds (362.0 kg), capturing the record by over 40 pounds (18 kg) from a tuna caught off Nova Scotia by American champion Zane Grey.
Killearn describes Peel as 'an outstanding character excelling at work as at play, a first class shot, a fine cricketer and golfer, a good tennis played who navigated his own yacht the S.S. St. George of 500 tons' and says that the distressing miscarriage of the Suez crisis resulting in the expulsion and ruin of the British community in 1956 broke Peel's heart and hastened his death.