Destroyers Naval Culture and British Identity

Posted: Wednesday 25th February 2026

Event date: 25 March

Time: 16:00

Location: Hybrid / LJMU

Jayne Friend is speaking at Liverpool John Moores University on 25 March about her new book, Destroyers, Naval Culture and British Identity.

The hybrid event will be hosted in room 106, John Foster Building, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool

If you would like to join online please email Kay MacGregor - K.Macgregor@2025.ljmu.ac.uk to request a meeting link.  

The book provides an overview of what destroyers were and how their capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination.

Destroyers, first developed over the course of the late 1880s and 1890s, were fast, manoeuverable warships intended to escort larger vessels and defend them against a wide range of threats. In Britain their speed, nimbleness and capacity for heroic deeds captured the popular imagination, and they became symbolic vessels, encapsulating the fortitude and ingenuity which contemporaries felt characterised the British navy. Based on extensive original research, this book provides both an overview of destroyers’ operational roles and how these developed over time and also a detailed examination of destroyers’ place within British culture, society and identity. Considering a wide range of sources including news reporting, pageantry, literature, film, art and more, the book reveals how the destroyer as symbol was used as propaganda, fitted in to popular, civic and artistic cultures and affected naval policy, British people’s morale and outlook, and international views of Britain’s naval power. One striking example of the depth of British people’s attachment to destroyers was the scheme during the Second World War for individual towns to each adopt their own destroyer, a scheme which achieved astonishing success, with many small towns raising huge sums sufficient to fund entirely the building of their own destroyer.