An artist is exhibiting drawings in Peel Cathedral that depict Manxmen who served in the Royal Naval Patrol Service and crewed mine-sweeping trawlers during the two world wars.

Ian Coulson’s large drawings combine the naval theme with that of seabirds.

Mr Coulson, a sailor and former art and design teacher at the Isle of Man College, said: ’I was given a copy of my grandfather’s naval records from the Great War and started to range deep and wide on the internet investigating his war from the opaque entries made on two sides of an official form. I had known that he was a trawlerman from Hull.

’Like a significant number of families in Peel, mine was a fishing family with both my parents arriving here whilst following the fishing around the British coast.

’At the outbreak of the First World War the Admiralty requisitioned trawlers in their hundreds to be re-purposed as minesweepers and, of course, as you would expect their crews volunteered en masse and instead of trawling for cod they began trawling for mines!’

He added: ’I’m still astonished by the potential for visual research that the internet presents us with, and as more and more people research their "ancestry" so the number of what previously were private, family photographs in albums or biscuit tins at the backs of cupboards are now digitalised and available to all.

’We can look into the eyes of men who are sitting for their portraits in their newly issued uniforms across a century of history that we know - and they would hardly have guessed at.

’The more you read, the more you begin to realise that our view of history is generalised, as we lose contact with first-hand experiences, history becomes mythologised .

’These minesweepers stood apart as a sort of an alternative navy, which did not take kindly to the traditions, the uniforms and the discipline of the Royal Navy.

’They were fishermen with a crew ethic in which everyone knew that they could rely on each other implicitly to keep working no matter how horrendous the conditions, they were ultimately self reliant and reliable.’

He continued: ’I’m getting really quite excited with the work by now, as I research further I find the same set of circumstances prevailing at the outbreak of the Second World War where the now anti-submarine trawlers and their predominantly fishermen crews were referred to as "Harry Tate’s Navy", as a sort of disparaging reference to their amateurish nature, of course they adopt the name themselves as a sort of self deprecating declaration of their "otherness".

’What becomes the Royal Naval Patrol Service in the second war was as determined to be distinctive as its predecessors had.

’I began to find reference to Manxmen in my reading and go to look at the war memorials and things become more serious as I begin to research stories that although happening around the globe are literally very close to home.

’Growing up in Peel I remember men who had devoted their youths and had their lives shaped by that war.

’Now I was making drawings about lives of boys from my town whose existence had ended in drowning or in calamitous explosions.

’There are important questions of taste when the frivolous activity of drawing is describing the deaths of young men and I felt that the solemn memorialising of men and ships should be my way forward.

’The families of these men will still be on the island and I humbly ask that they view these drawings in this spirit.’

Mr Coulson and Peel Cathedral’s administrator are currently discussing plans to tour the drawings through the cathedrals and churches of the coastal towns in the UK where the trawlers were based.

He recently showed the drawings to current art students at the college, who made a ’real connection’ when they realised that ’although the subject matter was historical and that I was obviously old, the people at the heart of each of these heroic circumstances were of their own age, and many of them would never get old’.

The drawings are currently on display as part of Remembrance commemorations in Peel Cathedral until November 20.