Martin Alabaster Martin Alabaster Rear Admiral Martin Brian Alabaster CBE (born 10 August 1958) is a retired senior officer in the British Royal Navy. Alabaster spent his early years in Devon, Pembrokeshire and Hampshire but for the majority of his upbringing lived in south London. There, he attended Dulwich College. He later joined the Royal Navy and entered Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, at the rank of Midshipman in January 1977. Martin completed his Naval General Training, and then went up to Queens’ College, Cambridge to read Engineering. Alabaster took up his first sea appointment as the Weapons Section Officer in
Royal Naval College, Greenwich building. The Navy's Department of Nuclear Science and Technology opened on the college premises in 1959, and JASON, the department's research and training reactor, was commissioned in the King William building in 1962. In 1967 Queen Elizabeth II knighted Francis Chichester on the river steps of the College, honouring his achievement in circumnavigating the world as a solo yachtsman, using the old route of the clippers, becoming the first to do so. His was also the fastest such circumnavigation, taking nine months and one day. The Royal School of Naval Architecture, which had been part of the College since 1873,