battleship. However, Dewar befriended the captain, Herbert Richmond, who acted both as a friend and a mentor to him in the following years. With Richmond's encouragement, Dewar began a thorough study of naval tactics and strategy which would later continue at the Royal Naval War College. Promotion to commander Dewar was reappointed to Dreadnought on 28 March 1911, was promoted Commander on 22 June and on 14 December he was appointed for duty at the Royal Naval War College, Portsmouth as an instructor. The next year, he was selected to join the newly formed War Staff at the Admiralty, created on First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill's orders in 1912. He was consequently reappointed for duty at the War College on 2 April 1912. On 4 March 1913, it was announced that Commander Dewar had been awarded the Gold Medal and Trench-Gascoigne Prize by the Royal United Service Institution for his winning essay on the question "What is the war value of oversea commerce? How did it affect our naval policy in the past and how does it in the present day?" The final chapter of the paper was suppressed from publication by the Admiralty; in it Dewar advocated a "distant" blockade in a war with Germany at a time (1912) when the Royal Navy was still contemplating a "close" blockade of the German coastline. In the event, a distant blockade was imposed. Dewar was then and remained unsympathetic to the removal of his concluding chapter; Dewar's reputation as an intellectual within the Navy was confirmed when in 1912, he became one of the founder members of The Naval Review, an independent journal of Royal Navy officers. That year Richmond had formed a "Naval Society" with a dozen friends, Dewar among them. After Richmond went abroad on active service, Dewar decided that instead of being a society of purely discussion, it ought publish a journal, to which end he "raised subscriptions for the first issue from some forty or fifty officers of all ranks". In 1914, Dewar was appointed commander (second-in-command) of the battleship Prince of Wales, then flagship of the 5th Battle Squadron in the 2nd Fleet (Home Fleets). On 28 July, Dewar married Gertrude Margaret Stapleton-Bretherton, the sister of Evelyn, Princess Blücher, in a service at St. Bartholomew's Church in Rainhill on Merseyside. The service was conducted by the Archbishop of Liverpool and the Bishop of Portsmouth.