KEY POINTS:
My call-up papers arrived in an official buff envelope. I opened it with some excitement, thinking of Mosquitoes and Spitfires, but shock and disappointment followed - I had been selected, by ballot, to serve my country in the coal mines.
Wartime Labour Minister Ernest Bevin thought it a
great idea to replace the coal miners in the forces with thousands of very unhappy young men.
By the end of October 1944, out of 16,000 youths picked by ballot, 500 were prosecuted for refusing to obey the order. Some 143 were sent to jail.
I had to report to the Cresswell Training Centre in Nottinghamshire on 20 November 1944, just a few days after my 18th birthday. There we endured physical training under the iron hand of a Parachute Regiment instructor and learned what it was like underground.
For our first journey down the pit, we filed into the "cage", the signal bells rang, and away we went with a distinct impression that our stomachs had been left behind.
The ride stopped in the white painted pit bottom.
From there, a stroll in single file to the training face, a worked-out seam, about 1.8 metres high, with props and bars in position. We all sat down and switched off our cap lamps. No one spoke.
We listened to the continual clicks and cracks of the roof being compressed by the earth above. If anyone felt claustrophobic, that was the time.
I was sent to Ramcroft Colliery, near Chesterfield in Derbyshire, with lodgings in the nearby village of Holmwood. My landlord was a miner, a quiet man whose wife made up for it. I seemed to be the only Bevin Boy in the village and in the pit, which added to my feeling of loneliness.
After a few weeks I was directed for further underground training at another pit in the village. I was to work on haulage in the pit bottom. Some of the equipment for turning the empty tubs around was extremely crude. We had to give them a hefty twist over a steel plate, lubricated with water, then guide them back on the rails again. I had a local lad working with me and we shared the monotonous jobs to make the shift go faster. He told me he liked the job because it was safe. Later I heard he had been killed. Apparently he was bending down, coupling some tubs together when another train of tubs came down the incline behind him.
They say his head was crushed between two tubs.
In winter I started at 6am and finished at 2pm. I had my first shift on the coal face, the deputy took me to the location. I was to operate the conveyor belt in the centre of the face and to keep the nearby colliers supplied with props and bars to support the roof. The coal seam was just over a metre high. I followed the deputy, on hands and knees, past busily shovelling miners, seemingly annoyed at stopping to let us pass.
We arrived at my workplace, stopped the belt and climbed over it into a tiny recess. Almost immediately a voice shouted "Firing, firing". Suddenly, woomph, then another woomph and tiny bits of coal came flying across. After a dozen blasts the colliers got back to work. Then a man started drilling shot holes opposite me. I wished I was in the Air Force.
I had been unhappy with my lodgings. It didn't improve when I found a large custard tart sitting on a wooden box right next to the toilet. I rushed in to tell the landlady - "that's all right, it's just cooling off", she said.
I remember standing by the gear head motor one day. Everything seemed normal: the coal was flowing steadily along the conveyor belt when bits of rock dropped on my helmet. I looked up and bigger pieces began to fall, then with a rumble big rocks started to move.
In seconds, newly installed steel arches were being displaced one after the other and as I backed away the whole roof looked like collapsing. I stopped the conveyor, knowing that in a couple of minutes someone from the coal face would come to find the reason for the stoppage. I soon heard voices and the sound of tapping as they prodded the roof to check if it was safe.
Everything was cleared up and away went the belt, but when I arrived next morning the whole area was a great cavern. The afternoon shift, the day before, had found a fault above my position and tons of rock had fallen.
I was finally released in 1948 but with no demob perks. Our situation was not well known: many thought we had a choice and that going into the mines was a soft option. It was not.
Coal mining was a dangerous business with a high rate of injuries and deaths. Bevin Boys bore their full share of those terrible accidents.
Last year, former Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament that a special badge had been created to recognise the work of the young miners. That was 50 years after the event. It took another six months before the badges arrived. Sadly, a high proportion of the Bevin Boys had already passed on.
* From Max Pudney's A Life Less Ordinary (Heritage Press)
