Mr Harold Shaw helped to organise transport on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, and now, after 25 years service, is a contracts manager for Mullen and Durkin.

From the fourteenth of an Express weekly industrial feature "We Can Make It" by Allan Halstead. The series outlines each firm's history and development and tells the story of ordinary people. It was linked with a competition "Unsung Hero '71" with a prize of a holiday in Ireland with a companion. To find all this series of articles search the website using the words - unsung hero.

Andrew Mullen and Daniel Durkin, both born in a little village, Tobercurry, in County Sligo, Eire, set up Mullen and Durkin in Burnley in 1890. Those were the days when all you needed to be a builder was a pick and a shovel, a wheelbarrow and a ladder. Daniel died when he was comparatively young, leaving a son, Dan, who continued in the business which became a limited company in 1918, until his death in 1939. Andrew, who remained a bachelor, worked on until he died in 1927 - he left a considerable sum to finance the building of Christ the King Church. By then the directors included Mr Percy Riley, who joined the firm as manager and secretary. His son Eric Riley is now managing director, and took the firm into the £14m combine, Norwest Holst Ltd, the 10th biggest group in the British "building league." He has now been with the firm for 25 years.

Examples of Mullen and Durkin's handiwork are all around Burnley. In the early days there were many houses in the Dugdale Road area, and hundreds since both in the North and as far South as Hendon, North London, where they did a lot of speculative building between the wars. They specialised on industrial and commercial (and church) building. One of the earliest locally was Heasandford Mill. Since then there have been steel works in Sheffield, engineering works in Newcastle, an ordnance factory in Enfield, and (by the second world war) conversions of old premises for British Thompson Houston (when they brought aircraft work from Coventry to Nelson and Colne) and Lucas, who came from Birmingham to Burnley. It was for Lucas that M and D built the handsome new factory at Heasandford. Other buildings include Sion Baptist Church, St John's Church, Colne, the Turf Moor super-grandstand, Marsden Building Society and Burnley Building Society offices. The firm is currently building the massive extension to the Regent Axle Company's Rossendale Road factory and has laid the foundations now being built upon for the Michelin extensions at Heasandford.