DARWEN? Where’s that? Well, you’ve heard of Blackburn? Yes. And you’ve heard of Bolton? A nod. Well they are both suburbs of Darwen.

George Willie Snape always had an answer ready for anyone who professed ignorance of where exactly his home town was.

He spent a lifetime in politics, many of them as Liberal agent for Darwen between the wars and he made his name in the 1924 General Election when he helped to rustle up a poll of 92.7 per cent, a record for an English constituency.

Five years later when Liberal Sir Herbert Samuel won the seat the turn-out was 92.3 per cent.

And not a postal vote in sight in those days.

After the Second World War he retired and became a long-standing councillor on Darwen Town Council.

George Willie’s amusing reply to anyone puzzled about Darwen gets a mention in the new book on Darwen and its Characters by local journalist Harold Heys.

But he didn’t know where it was first coined until enlightened by local history researcher Tony Foster, who was one of George’s grandsons.

It came about when Wilfred Pickles brought his popular radio show Have a Go! to the Tudor Cinema in Darwen in October, 1947, and George Willie was one of the guests.

He told the story of how, during the Great War, he had been badly injured in Salonika while serving with the East Lancs and had been moved to a hospital in Malta, in 1917, where a nurse told him she’d “never heard of Darwen”.

George explained to her how important it was compared to neighbouring Blackburn and Bolton and must have thought it rather a neat explanation, as he happily trotted it out many times as his political travels took him all over the country until his death in 1967, at the age of 78.

George Willie, then assistant food officer, won £1 18s 9d on the show and donated 19s 6d to the Darwen Nursing Association and 19s 3d to Blackburn Royal Infirmary.

Other local folk on the programme were Nancy Standing, Bill Catterall, the memory man, Florence Chapelhow, Bertha Coates, Audrey Townsend and J W Alston, a disabled ex-soldier.

The same chapter in “Characters” tells the story of how the intense rivalry between Darwen and Blackburn developed in the mid 1800s.

The problem for Darreners was that Blackburn had been granted civic status in 1851, while they had to wait till August, 1878, for their Charter of Incorporation, signed by Queen Victoria, to be brought back to Darwen to a great fanfare, stirring oratory and the pealing of the Holy Trinity church bells.

Darwen News columnist Tatler wrote of the “jeers and pity” the town had had to bear from “outsiders”. He summed up the celebrations most elegantly: “Of course, we have had most to bear from our Blackburn neighbours, but all the world knows what they are, so we flourish our charter in their faces with unspeakable delight and tell them to go to their own place and make the best of it. We hug our charter to our breast and bid defiance to an insolent world.”

Darwen and its Characters is dotted with digs at “our Blackburn neighbours”.

One chapter mentions the arrival in town of a former Crimean War cannon in May 1910 together with a couple of fierce-looking shells.

Readers are assured that one local wag urged that the cannon be placed strategically at the top of Cravens Brow.

It was regarded as a splendid idea but, to the disappointment of many, ended up at the top of Whitehall Park.

The new book sold out over the launch weekend and a hastily arranged reprint has also sold out. The Friends are trying to rustle up a handful of copies for sale at their next coffee morning in the Library in November.