STONEMASON George Wood, married at Tockholes and buried in Darwen, played a small part in the famous Dambusters’ raid of the Second World War.

Not that he knew much about it. George died during the First World War.

His story was unearthed by his great granddaughter, Patricia Turner, of Bowling Green Close, Darwen, when she was researching her ancestors.

George must have been tough. He was born in Devon in 1850 and travelled widely as an experienced stonemason.

In his late 20s he pitched up in Tockholes, which was central to a lot of reservoir construction and maintenance on the Darwen moors.

He took digs at a beer house at the end of Hollinshead Terrace and took a shine to Susannah, daughter of landlord William Hacking.

One thing led to another and son George arrived a few months before mother and father married at St Stephen’s Church in the village.

A vast reservoir project was getting underway in the Elan Valley in mid-Wales and George Wood moved down with his growing family to work as a foreman there.

New workers spent a night in the dosshouse to be deloused and single men lived in groups of eight. There was a school for the under 11s and then they were expected to work.

There was a hospital for injuries and a bath house which men could use up to three times a week, but women only once! The pub was for men only.

The first dam to be built was a small masonry construction used to store water for the navvies’ camp at Garreg Ddu and to feed the steam power thundering away in the valleys below.

Sixty years later, in July 1942, inventor Barnes Wallis saw his prototype bouncing bomb tested on the dam before it was used in the famous Dambusters raid on German industrial sites on the Ruhr.

The central portion of the wall was destroyed and the experiment was a complete success.

George and Susannah had four sons who became stonemasons and later worked on the Stocks Reservoir at Dalehead in the Bowland hills. They also had a daughter Annie who was to become Mrs Turner’s grandma.

She and her husband Robert Bradshaw lived on St John’s Street, Darwen, for many years and George went to join them when he retired. He died there in 1915.

Said Patricia: “Great granddad must have had a hard life. Folk complain these days, but how many would have coped with the graft and long hours he had to put in?”

Susannah had died a few years earlier when she fell down the stairs at their home in Charles Street, Darwen, aged 49.