Thomas George Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook has generally been regarded as one of the least effectual First Lords of the Admiralty of the Victorian era. Appointed to the post in 1880 by William Gladstone, he was, according to John Henry Briggs, of the same economical and ideological stripes as Gladstone himself:

Briggs's credentials to pass judgment on the First Lord appear impeccable. Both he and his father were career Admiralty civil servants, their combined tenures spanning much of the nineteenth century. Briggs himself served almost forty-five years at Whitehall, of which more than thirty-five were spent assisting the Board itself. Thus, his boast that he ‘had the honour of serving with fifteen First Lords and upwards of fifty Admirals’ lends apparent credence to his subsequent claim that he ‘was cognisant of all that was taking place throughout the department’.

Having retired in 1870, Briggs was, unless clairvoyant, no longer ‘cognisant of all that was taking place throughout the department’ by the time that Northbrook assumed office, and historians have long been aware that his account of the Admiralty's doings, even when he was present, is often profoundly unreliable: marred by blatant partisanship, factual errors, and near-libels of many distinguished and capable Navy officials. And yet his allegations continue to inform modern judgments of many of those administrators, none more so than Northbrook.

Oscar Parkes, long-time editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, appropriated not only Briggs's verdict but enough of his words to warrant accusations of plagiarism: ‘Northbrook was a politician and a very strong party one at that. Having from early days imbibed the extreme views of economy and retrenchment associated with Liberalism, he was always more solicitous to keep down the Estimates than to incur any expenses which he thought might be embarrassing to the Ministry.’