His view was based in part on the successful defence of Plevna in 1877 by Turkish forces using magazine-fed rifles and earthwork fortifications.

Returning from the Mediterranean, Clarke was appointed to a group of officers tasked with the planning of British coast defences overseas.

[citation needed] Sydenham (4 October 1916) and Admiral Reginald Custance (9 October 1916) complained in letters to The Times that Winston Churchill’s recent statements (Churchill was out of office at the time) that the German High Seas Fleet was effectively blockaded and that surplus forces should be used in offensive operations (similar to the views of naval theorist Julian Corbett) ignored the importance of seeking a decisive victory over the German Fleet.

Admiral Doveton Sturdee also complained in a private memorandum (24 Nov 1916) that Churchill’s policy was “the exact reverse of what he advocated when in office and expressed in public speeches”.

Historian Christopher Bell thinks this not quite fair – Churchill had advocated risking old, near-obsolete ships in the attack on the Dardanelles but had never suggested weakening Britain’s superiority over Germany in the North Sea.

[11] Lord Sydenham was one of several military writers who criticized some of the opinions and statistics in Volume III of Churchill's The World Crisis.

[14] Clarke's writings were published by The Britons,[15] an antisemitic British Fascist organisation founded in 1919 by Henry Hamilton Beamish.

According to historian Sharman Kadish, The Britons was "the most extreme group disseminating anti-Semitic propaganda in the early 1920s - indeed the first organisation set up in Britain for this express purpose.

"[16] On 1 June 1871, Clarke married Caroline Emily, eldest daughter of General Peregrine Henry Fellowes, RM.

[1] Lord Sydenham of Combe died at his home in Onslow Square, London, in February 1933, aged 84, when the barony became extinct.