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I started at Deans as a welder in 1938, and when the war started in 1939 I was welding drum fittings, musical equipment and so on, but that finished as soon as the war started, and we went onto all kinds of war effort work, like welding bridges for the army, making pontoon bridges to go over streams, and all kinds of things for radar for the RAF.

We joined the Home Guard, the shipyard platoon and we used to do manoeuvres on Figham. There was like a bombard thing that they used to fire shells out of on Figham. That was in 1939-40, so I was about 16-17. Then there was all the bombing going on in Hull, and a few bombs dropped on Beverley, not a lot, and we used to watch it from Weel across the Hull, the fires and that.

When I was about 18, 1941 I think, I got called up to Hull to go to the enrolment centre in Chapel street, where the ´óÏó´«Ã½ offices are now, and I was down to go in the Royal Navy as a welder. A letter came a week or two later to go into the coal mines, and I thought that was funny and went back to see them, and they said well if you’ve got a letter from them (they were called the Bevin boys) then that supersedes anything else.

I came home and got demobbed and got a demob suit rigged up and home to Deans again and of course Deans had altered again, they’d gone on to bus doors and seats, passenger vehicle industry. They hadn’t built any buses for six years and all the old ones from before the war were still going. Everybody wanted new buses and equipment and Deans couldn’t make ‘em quick enough.

I had to go to Doncaster to Askham Colliery where all the trainees had to go to do their training. We lived in a hostel, it was specially built, there was about 10 Nissen huts with about 16 in each one. We had a bed and a wardrobe and it was all modern, with showers and dining areas that had been specially built, ‘cos in 1939 all the miners were called up and 2 years later they found out there was nobody to mine coal for the war effort.

Once we finished the training we were posted to Edlington, about 7 miles from Doncaster. It was quite a long journey, especially if you were getting up at 4 in the morning for the early shift at 6 o’clock. So I got lodgings in the village so I could walk to work instead of going on an expensive bus ride.

We were on haulage, where tubs from the coal face were clipped onto a moving rope which brings it through airtight doors down to the pit head and up the winding engine to the top. It was very hot down there so you only had shorts on and a vest. Everything was covered in dust, so to stop any explosions there were bags of fine sand to mix in with the coal dust in case anything sparked it. When you walked in it, it was that deep, about 6 inches, like walking through real deep snow. It must have been terrible breathing it in but I never thought about it at the time.

When you get to the coal face there are great big machines cutting, about 6 foot high or more, digging the seam of coal and as soon as they take the coal out the pressure all the way round wants to fill the hole up again. There were 2 or 3 thick steel plates on top of the conveyor about 2 inches thick and the rippers come and open the roof and sides out as its closing in. After a year or two it stops, it’s slipped as far as its going to go but at first it starts 6 foot and goes down like that in a matter of days, and you think, are we going to get out of here like, and you can only crawl out until the rippers come to open it out again.

When you came up there were pithead baths. The lockers had hot air blowing through, every one, and when you come up your trousers were sweating, and when you put ‘em on the next day with them being in the hot lockers they were that hard it was like walking in cardboard when you first put them on like. Maybe they were washed about once a week, a month or whatever it was, ‘cos they were just chucked in there, pretty dirty. You just had a vest on because it was that hot.

I used to cycle home from Doncaster on a weekend. I lived at Weel and it took me about 2 and a half hours with a west wind. I’d bike on my own, set off in the morning and be back at dinner time. When I got in lodgings I used to come home most weekends like. It was a lot cheaper — I can’t remember what the wages was now — I think it was about 19 shillings a week after we’d finished training but I can’t remember exactly what it got to at finish. It was never a big wage like.

You met all types of people, intellectuals like teachers were called up and they all did their stint there [in the mines]. It was a case of having to wasn’t it? During the war everybody was pulling the same way, you didn’t seem to get into any arguments about anything because you’re all working for the same aim. Nobody was any better than anyone else, you were all on a similar level. We were all resigned to it because you couldn’t do much about it.

My brother was in the Air Force. He was in Japan and was a prisoner there after he was captured in Sumatra just off Singapore. He spent 3 years in Japan and when he came home he was like a skeleton. He’d been recovering in New Zealand for 2 months to try and build him up but when he came home I hardly recognised him, he was that thin.

We knew he had been taken prisoner. You only got postcards, you didn’t get big letters and he didn’t say where he was except he was well. I don’t think we were worried because when they are a prisoner you think they’re being looked after, but the conventions didn’t apply to Japan like they did in Germany and European countries. They seemed to do what they liked. But he survived. He never talked about it — never said anything about it at all, where he’d been, he never once mentioned it in all the years I knew him.

In Beverley everybody had to join the Home Guard and I was in the shipyard platoon. I’ve forgotten the name of the chap who was in charge of it. George Odey at the Tannery had a platoon as well and we used to go to Hodgson’s, they had a rifle range there, a 2-2 rifle range, and we used to go shooting there at night. During our training we got all the uniforms and rifles and we used to on Figham with what we call a Blacker Bombard — it was like an artillery piece which fired what looked like what you call mortar shells now, and we used to take it on there and fired blanks for practice. You set it up on legs and of course there was nowt on Figham then during the war, there wasn’t any cows or anything on then and we used to go training there, crawling through the long grass and watter and mud!

We were trained by an army sergeant at first and then the chap who worked in the office at the shipyard who’d been in the Territorials but was exempt from the army during the war on account of being a shipyard worker. He’d been a sergeant in the TAs for a few years and he knew the ropes of course. We used to get a major from somewhere, maybe from the barracks who would teach us different things. He could do gun training, rifles and that. We used to go on Saturdays and during the week one night. Most people from the shipyard were in the platoon.

The Home Guard platoons were based at different areas, a chap who worked with me, called Harry Brooks who’d been in the army, was foreman at Deans, and John Milner, they were in the Home Guard at Bishop Burton. You kept the uniform but the rifle was kept in the stores at the shipyard. If we were invaded we would go and get it from the store. It wasn’t full time, you only went for training when they wanted you. You didn’t carry guns and ammunition about with you.

I was at Weel and I was walking on top of river bank next to the Ferry Boat Inn and there was a whistling, and bombs came down. I bloody shot behind this river bank! All of a sudden the explosion was in Figham and the incendiary bombs were like manganese, brilliant white. We found one or two and took them home and we were breaking the buggers open in the shed. We emptied all the stuff out. If they’d been booby-trapped God knows what would have happened to us. The manganese flakes, we lit and phoof it went up, real bright. The gunpowder was black. When we emptied it out it exploded. We thought it would just burn like we had seen in films of cowboys where they left a trail and when they light it it burns along. We did this and as soon as it touched it it exploded Bang! This was inside a shed at home! Good job we didn’t empty all of it out. We didn’t realise.

Some great landmines with green parachutes had dropped next to Julian’s farm at Weyland. We walked past them in the field but didn’t realise they could have gone off. They weighed a ton each. These Royal Naval landrovers come, bomb disposal and we watched them while they defused them. It was about 6 foot high and bigger than a barrel. It had stuck in ground and there was still about 6 foot stuck up. It had gone in about maybe a foot or two. Somebody told us it was there so we went to have a look. After they had done it we went and had a word with them and they had unscrewed this detonator out and made it safe and a big army lorry came with a crane and lifted it on. It shows you how daft you were then. If you thought about it it could have blown you to pieces. In fact it could have blown Julian’s farm up, it was only half a field away.

At work we used to do firewatching, playing cards all night. There would be 4 or 5 of us because there would be a card school if there were nowt going on like and we played pontoon. There were plenty of fires in Hull but not where we were. They just came down the Humber dropping the bombs and they were gone. There were plenty of shells dropping about because anti-aircraft guns were firing at them and shells were going all over the place.

There were a lot of men in uniform in Beverley. Gordon Armstrong of Armstrong Patents had a stall in the square which he provided himself for five years serving tea and refreshments for free for any member of the forces and that must have cost him a fortune. He was a great patriot was Gordon Armstrong and he bought two spitfires for the nation so he must have had plenty of brass. He did a lot of good for Beverley, but until recently Beverley forgot about him.

Everybody in Beverley was doing something for the war effort, like the shipyard was working on corvettes and minesweepers. They made aluminium ships covered in mahogany so they were non-magnetic towards the end of the war, because mines were exploding ordinary ships. The tannery was making leather for the boots, shoes and everything for the war. Melrose was still in production in leather. I can’t think of any other factories but they were all working for the war. This is what made Deans really because they had been doing musical instruments, and all of a sudden they got big contracts from the government to do war work and it made Bob Deans.

There were a lot of women working because all the men got called up and I was learning women to weld. There was one particular woman, one of the Elwell family, I think she was called Mary Elwell. I learned her to weld there and she used to pose for Fred when he used to draw hands. She told me she used to sit for ages with her hands in a certain place when Fred was painting. I don’t know what happened to her because I left Deans a year later when I got called up into the mines.

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