DID you know that Darwen not only had its own Spitfire during World War II – it also had its own minesweeper?

A memorial to the aircraft, paid for by townsfolk who raised thousands of pounds in the early days of the war, before it was shot down, today stands in the town centre.

But, as it attracts many admiring glances, another story has been revealed, that of HMT– that’s His Majesty’s Trawler – Darwen, a 227-ton, coal-fired steam trawler which fought her way through two world wars as a minesweeper.

The boat was in action in the Great War under her original name of Lanercost.

Launched early in 1915, she arrived at Fleetwood to be requisitioned by the Admiralty and become Minesweeper No 3254.

It wasn’t an easy war for the minesweepers, and many of them were blown out of the water by German mines, ships, and U-boats.

That fate befell HMT Burnley, which was requisitioned as another minesweeper, as soon as she was built in 1915.

But, a few months after being taken over by the Admiralty and attached to the Harwich patrol, she went down with all hands in 1916 after hitting a mine off Orford Ness, Suffolk, one of 12 laid the previous day by a German submarine.

Nineteen men were lost.

But Lanercost came through the carnage with flying colours and was returned to owners Palatine Steam Trawling Co. Ltd, at Fleetwood, as FD292 and became the trawler Darwen in 1921, sailing out of Fleetwood and fishing the North Atlantic.

The Royal Navy again commandeered the Darwen at the beginning of the Second World War when she was based in various Irish Sea ports, and in the thick of the Battle of the Atlantic.

In April 1940, after the first winter of the longest battle of the war, skipper Alexander Craig, of HMT Darwen, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for ‘unfailing courage, endurance, resource and devotion to duty in HM trawlers, and drifters, in their hard and perilous tasks of sweeping the seas clear of mines, combating submarines and keeping a look-out for the enemy’.

His Third Hand Jim Bailey was mentioned in dispatches.

HMT Chorley, requisitioned as a boom defence vessel, foundered off Start Point, South Devon, in 1942.

Darwen was a lucky ship.

In 1950, her crew were filmed fishing out of Grimsby, in the North Sea, and after spells at Tynemouth and Milford Haven, where she was renamed Westleigh, she finally served as Perverus.

Owned by Percy Turner, she was the last steam trawler ever to work out of Plymouth. She left for the breakers' yard in 1955.

There was also an HMS Colne, a River-class destroyer of the Royal Navy, which was launched in 1905.

She served in the Gallipoli Campaign during the First World War.