大象传媒

I got my call-up papers in 1945 with disastrous fortune. You went for your medical and you had a preference for which service you wanted to go in. I wanted to go in the Navy and passed my test for the Navy.

The man said you鈥檝e passed your test. Three weeks time you take your toilet stuff and go. The next week I had a letter saying I was going in the mines. Which annoyed me quite a lot.

I appealed because I had lost a brother, who was killed in the Air Force. I also had a brother in the Guards, a brother in the Gloucesters, a brother in the medics and I get sent down the b mines. I appealed against it again on medical grounds because someone told me to tell them my nose bled every morning so I had another medical and wasn鈥檛 graded but sent to the local infirmary and the doctor gave me a blood test. He pricked my thumb and said if your blood runs down this test tube you won鈥檛 be going down the mines but it never moved, did it, so next I had a registered letter to say I was A1.

The letter dated 22-2-45 from the Ministry of Labour and National Service office in Bristol read:
Dear Sir
I have to tell you that your appeal against allocation to coalmining was heard by the Local Appeal Board on 21-2-45 and that after considering the recommendation of the Board it has been decided that you should be directed to training for underground coalmining employment. You will in due course receive a formal direction under Defence (General) Regulation 58A (1) to employment as a trainee against which there will be no appeal.

So then I had to go from Stroud for training 鈥� otherwise I would have been sent to jail. If my mother had been dead then I would rather have gone to jail. I was sent to Oakdale in Monmouthmouthshire, it was a colliery that was nearly worked out then so it was a training pit.

You spent all day shovelling coal from one side to another and back again. It was awful, but training wasn鈥檛 as bad as the real thing because they let you down gently in the cages, but the last day you go to a live colliery and we went to the top of the Rhonda, got in the lift, it went beep-beep-beep and it dropped like a stone, it was terrifying.

After that I was sent to a live colliery in Pontypridd. There were about 300 of us Bevin Boys there and I was in a hostel with some of them but I wasn鈥檛 actually working with them. And I was there for three years until 1947 when I was demobbed.

Those boys, the colliers, were the salt of the earth, the finest people you could wish to work for, they were marvellous and they were marvellous to us too, I can鈥檛 condemn them. But going down and working in the black and the dust and the heat it was just awful. But I still meet up with some of the boys I was in the hostel with, that鈥檚 56 years since we were last together.

I feel bitter about the way the Bevin Boys have been treated since the war 鈥� or rather not treated. What we did has never been officially recognised. One memory I have is waking up one morning and they said: 鈥淵ou鈥檇 better go and see your mate, he鈥檚 in the sickbay."

When I asked why they said: 鈥淗e broke his leg with you yesterday.鈥� We鈥檇 had too much cider, 5p a pint it was then, and had been messing about on the mountain when he fell and the mountain rescue team had to come and get us.

The worst part of coalmining was if someone was injured and you were a young man you had to help carry them out and that could be as much as three miles.

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