At a time when we see this story has now made it to the national press.....
"Maimed veteran’s fishing lifeline sunk by marine agency blunders"
England used trawlers to maintain control of seaward approaches to major harbors. No one knew these waters as well as local fishermen, and the trawler was the ship type these fishermen understood and could operate effectively without further instruction. The Royal Navy maintained a small inventory of trawlers in peacetime, but requisitioned much larger numbers of civilian trawlers in wartime. The larger and newer trawlers and whalers were converted for anti-submarine use and the older and smaller trawlers were converted to minesweepers.
Some of these formed the backbone of the Newlyn fishing fleet untill the 1990s.
