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David Capewell

Royal Marines general

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ5232142 ↗
Source-derived summary

Lieutenant General Sir David Andrew Capewell, (born 21 August 1959) is a retired Royal Marines officer who served as Chief of Joint Operations from 2011 to 2015.

Early life and education

Capewell was born on 21 August 1959 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. He was educated at Holme Valley Grammar School, a grammar school in Holme Valley, Yorkshire.

Military career

Capewell was commissioned into the Royal Marines in 1979, holding a special short-service commission. He was confirmed in the rank of lieutenant on 1 September 1983 (seniority from 1 February), and was transferred to a full career commission on 29 October 1985 (seniority from 1 February 1983).

As a junior officer, Capewell served in Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe and South Africa. He was promoted to major on 31 December 1994. He became Chief of Staff of 3 Commando Brigade in 1998. He was promoted to colonel on 31 December 1999 and appointed Commanding Officer of 40 Commando in March 2000. In January 2002, he was appointed Chief of Staff, UK Joint Force Headquarters, in which role he served as Chief of Operations and Intelligence to the British Commander for the invasion of Iraq.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “David Capewell” is royal Marines general. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through David, Capewell and Royal, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1959, 2011, 2015, 1979—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1959-01-01. For this dossier, David, Capewell and Royal is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “royal Marines general” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5232142. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 2011, 2015 and 1979.

Critical limits

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “David Capewell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.