Winston Churchill on Destroyers

Winston Churchill likened building slow destroyers to breeding slow racehorses. He had wanted to build 35-knot destroyers in the 1912-13 estimates, but ended up building the L-class ships which were designed to be 29-knot ships. The problem wasn't corrected until the M-class in 1913-14 estimates, which were nominally 34-knot ships. That was a huge improvement over what they had been building: small, conservative destroyers. They were handicapped by a school of thought that believe that destroyers were only to protect the fleet against enemy torpedo attacks, rather than for use in offensive action.