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This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from ´óÏó´«Ã½ London on behalf of David Roland and has been added to the site with his permission.

From 1943-1945, one in ten of the young men called up had to work in Britain's mines, mostly against their will. They were given the nickname ‘Bevin Boys’ after the Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin whose idea it was. Much to their distress, many people often wrongly believed the Bevin Boys were avoiding serving in the armed forces.

"I'm 80 now, so I was 19 when I was called up in 1944. My elder brother was in the forces from the beginning of the war and my twin sisters both volunteered for the ATS which was 'the lady's army'. Instead of being called up, I was called down - that's to say I was being sent down a coal pit. Like a lot of Bevin Boys I objected strongly and refused to go. I remember going to North London Magistrates Court and being in front of a certain Mr Daniel Hopkins. One of my sisters was by then an officer, so I thought 'she'll have a lot of pulling power', so I got her to appear as a witness. After listening to her plea to allow me in the army, the magistrate said 'I'm sorry, I've got no power to change the law, you either go down the pit or you go to prison.'

So I left my home in Stoke Newington and went from training pit after training pit. I was billeted with an old school teacher and her family in the Maresfield Road area of north east London then I was sent down the pit in Derbyshire. My first job with about eight other young people, was loading the tubs up with coal. George my friend and I were in that team and the rest of them hated us. Why? Because we came from London and because of our accent. That never changed so far as the young people were concerned. But the older miners weren't like that, they were decent hard-working people. We certainly didn't tell anyone we were Jewish or it would be even worse. There was certainly some indication of anti-Semitism even in those days. The stories about concentration camps were coming out, but those young blokes weren't the types to read papers anyway.

I was aghast when I first went down the pit. First of all the cage which takes you down to the coal face dropped like a stone, a couple of hundred feet in a matter of seconds and you leave your heart at the top. That was the first indication that things weren't going to plan. Then, you see layers of dust down there and you think of running a finger along a ledge at home. But down there, the dust is two inches high. You trudge through years and years of it, breathing it in from people in front of you churning it up. Your eyes are stinging and your throat and chest are full of it.

The language, I'm not talking about the bad language, I mean the different language they spoke, and may still be spoken there for all I know, was impossible to understand. 'Eyup lad, where be thy snap?' Which means 'where's your lunch?' How was I to know that the word's taken from the tin box that snaps shut to keep the coal dust from the food?

We were down in those conditions for over eight hours a day. If you wanted to go to the toilet, there was very little space, so you found yourself a little cubby-hole somewhere and you have a shovel with you and you do what's necessary. Making sure you're away from the draft so you don't allow smells to come back through into the tunnel. On the coal face, you had a short handled and short headed pick and you find a decent seam and you put it between a rock and coal and prise it down and maybe you'll get a ton falling down right away.

It was pretty dangerous. One in five Bevin Boys were killed or injured. And when you get cut by coal, you're marked for life with a black scar. I've got one right on my forehead.

But you had your good times as well as bad. Directly I was moved from haulage to the coal face, the wages were absolutely marvellous. They were the same as anyone's working down there for 20 years. But I have to say, that as soon as they saw we were novices, those old miners turned round and helped us all they could to do a good job. It took two or three weeks before we could work as hard as they could, and we became tremendously fit. You weren't aware of the dust going into your lungs, you just spat it out. The miners used to chew tobacco to help. You couldn't smoke of course because there was gas and you could cause an explosion so you were searched before you went down.

I was down that pit for just over two years. I had to work there after the war was over. In the meantime, in 1945, my friend George got buried in a rock fall. We managed to get him to the surface and found he was covered in bruises but he didn't have a broken bone in his body, which was absolutely miraculous. After that he vowed he'd never to go down again. He said 'I'm going back to London'. I said 'All right George, I'll go with you.' So I could very much have been considered a deserter. Anyway when I came home, the police got in touch and told me that as I hadn't done my time, I had to go into the army which I was quite prepared to do. Strangely enough, if you thought I was a deserter, my first regiment was the Military Police. I did their training but I was RTU'd (returned to unit) because I didn't like the idea of being a policeman and I went into REME, the engineers, and served out in the Middle East, mainly up and down the Suez Canal and Jordan. I was finally demobbed in 1948.

What did I learn down the mines? That any job I did after that would be a piece of cake."

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