This week our own Dr Matthew Heaslip was interviewed by multiple national and regional media outlets including ITV Meridian, BBC South Today and The Guardian to help contextualise Britain’s response via the Royal Navy to America’s war on Iran, specifically the practicalities of the deployment of the destroyer HMS Duncan. Along with being Senior Lecturer in Naval History teaching on Portsmouth’s MA in Naval, Maritime and Coastal History he is also a Visiting Fellow at the Royal Navy’s Strategic Studies Centre. Matt’s research centres on the 20th century Navy, the importance of naval power in Britain’s efforts to exert influence worldwide and its applicability to present-day global geopolitics. ‘When faced with […]
Tag Archives | destroyers
Tin Cans and Relics: The Royal Navy’s over-age destroyers in the Second World War
Although Winston Churchill argued for the importance of building new destroyers, at the outset of the Second World War in 1939, many destroyers in the fleet were aged, and of limited practical value. In a paper given on Wednesday 8 May, Dr Jayne Friend examined the careers of these destroyers in the context of propaganda, culture and imagination to suggest how these very different classes of vessel had wide-ranging but parallel importance and purpose. Dr Jayne Friend is a naval historian specialising in the relationship between the Royal Navy, culture and identity within Britain. She gained her PhD, titled “‘The Sentinels of Britain’: Royal Navy Destroyers, British Identity, Culture and […]