Philip Payton

Philip John Payton is a British historian and Emeritus Professor of Cornish and Australian Studies at the University of Exeter and formerly Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies based at Tremough, just outside Penryn, Cornwall.

He was born in 1953 in Sussex. His mother was Cornish, from the Helston area. His father was a merchant seaman, then businessman and academic. Payton spent much of his childhood in Sussex and attended Haywards Heath Grammar School. Active in Mebyon Kernow (the Party for Cornwall) as a teenager, he began his writing career in articles on Cornish history and politics in journals such as New Cornwall and Cornish Nation. He obtained his first degree from the University of Bristol in 1975 and returned to Australia (where he had lived as a child) to read for a doctorate at the University of Adelaide, choosing as his theme the Cornish in Australia, completing this in 1978.

In 1979 he joined the Royal Navy as an officer in the Instructor Branch, training at the Britannia Royal Naval College (Dartmouth) and at sea in HMS Intrepid before being appointed to HMS Fisgard at Torpoint in Cornwall. Subsequently, he served at HMS Cochrane, HMS Collingwood and at the Royal Naval Engineering College at Manadon.

In 1989 was appointed Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Affairs at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich.

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