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 | Royal Navy
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 […]
The hidden heritage of a naval town: women’s community activism in Portsmouth since 1960
As a naval town, Portsmouth’s history has tended to have a masculine focus. But many Portsmouth women have actively campaigned for women’s rights and set up practical initiatives in the Portsmouth area to improve the lives of women. A Heritage Lottery Fund grant enabled the setting up of a project to interview these women and capture their stories. UoP history reader Sue Bruley was one of the project leaders. Project co-lead Laurel Forster, Reader in Cultural history in the UoP School of Film, Media & Communication explains more about the project and its outcomes. The main aim of this project was to document the activism of women in the Portsmouth […]
Volunteering with naval artefacts from World War I
Emily Burgess, a third year history student at Portsmouth, describes some of the things she has learned and some of the amazing artefacts she has got to work with on a daily basis in over a year spent working as a volunteer first for the National Museum of the Royal Navy and then for the Royal Marines Museum. She is now devising her own projects and events for the museum and has found the experience invaluable to her studies for her degree. During my first year at Portsmouth University I attended a history volunteer fair held in The Mary Rose Museum. It was there that I met my future supervisor […]
History Research Seminars 2019-20
Each year, the History team at Portsmouth organise a series of research seminars that take place across the autumn, winter and spring terms. Historians are invited from a range of institutions, both in Britain and abroad, to talk about their latest research projects. The subjects presented cover a broad historical timespan and offer insight into a diverse range of topics. In this year’s programme there will be talks on schooling in interwar London, naval wives in the nineteenth century, life cycle rituals in the early modern period, European shipbuilding in the eighteenth century, and anti-racism campaigns in twentieth century Britain, and lots more besides. All are welcome to attend. The […]
Forlorn remnant of a runaway King
In this blog, the first in a series of posts by the History team looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, David Andress, Professor in Modern History at Portsmouth, reveals the fascinating history of King James’s Gate, an almost-unique monument to a monarch who fled the country he ruled. Dave specialises in the history of the French Revolution, and of the social and cultural history of conflicts in Europe and the Atlantic world more generally in the period between the 1760s and 1840s. He teaches across the undergraduate degree, and currently delivers core teaching on methodologies, as well as contributing his specialist knowledge of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France to first- and third-year modules. […]