Ships
- HMS King George V (41) Captain from 7 June 1945
Brian Betham Schofield was born on 11 October 1895 at Alderley Edge, Cheshire, the son of Thomas Dodgshon Schofield, a wine merchant, and of Margaret Annie Schofield. He entered the Royal Navy on 15 September 1908 and trained at the Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth. He became a midshipman on 15 May 1913.
In the First World War he served for three years with the Harwich Force. As a midshipman he was present at the action off the Dogger Bank on 24 January 1915. He was made an acting sub-lieutenant on 15 September 1915, a sub-lieutenant on 15 March 1916, and a lieutenant on 15 June 1917.
After the war he specialised in navigation. He was promoted lieutenant-commander on 15 June 1925 and commander on 30 June 1931, and in the mid-1930s he held two appointments as squadron navigating officer of the Second Cruiser Squadron. Promotion to captain followed on 30 June 1938. In 1939 and the winter of 1939–40 he served with the naval attaché staff in Paris, at The Hague, and in Brussels.
On 27 February 1940 he took command of the light cruiser Galatea and remained in her until March 1941. He then became Director of the Trade Division at the Admiralty, the branch charged with convoy organisation and routing. The work set him in the middle of the Battle of the Atlantic, including the rescue ships that sailed with the merchant convoys, and it took him to the Atlantic Conference at Placentia Bay in August 1941, where Churchill and Roosevelt met. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire on 2 June 1943.
He returned to sea as captain of the battleship Duke of York from 6 August to 9 December 1943. After that short command he turned to senior staff duty connected with the maritime plans for the invasion of Normandy, and he served as Chief of Staff to the admiral heading the British Joint Services Mission in Washington.
On 7 June 1945 he assumed command of the battleship King George V. In the last weeks of the war against Japan she was flagship of the British Pacific Fleet under Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, and Schofield was her captain when she lay in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender on 2 September 1945. He remained in command after the ship came home, through her service as flagship of the Home Fleet, and left her in September 1946.
He was promoted rear-admiral in 1947 and appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 9 June 1949. On 1 December 1950 he was placed on the retired list as a vice-admiral, ending a career that had begun in 1908.
In retirement he wrote at length on naval history and policy. His books include The Royal Navy Today, The Russian Convoys, British Sea Power, The Rescue Ships, The Loss of the Bismarck, The Attack on Taranto, Operation Neptune, The Arctic Convoys, Stringbags in Action, and the memoir With the Royal Navy in War and Peace. He was a regular contributor to the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, to Brassey’s Armed Forces Annual, and to the Army Quarterly. Schofield died at Henley, Oxfordshire, on 8 November 1984.