大象传媒

I was 13 in '39 and I joined the Air Training Corps, and the local Defence Corps, which later became The Home Guard.
I spent a long time guarding buildings, I didn't know what was in the buildings but they warranted our attention. So there I was guarding a building that could have contained anything.

On quieter nights I used to go on patrol with my father.
I remember one occasion when I saw a V1 come down.
There was the usual noise, like a motor bike engine, a silence and then a bang and flash.
In the flash I saw my father running towards me, I just got down on the ground.
I saw a couple of hundred yards ahead of us a gap where a row of houses was a few moments before.
Suddenly there were ambulances and rescue workers everywhere.
My father sent me home to tell my mother we were alright, and so another night passed.

There were land mines, those were dangerous, they came down on parachutes, landed gently and without much noise. They had timers that could be set for anytime; therefore we didn't know how long we'd got to get away. Sometimes it could even be days before the explosion.
You never knew.
All you could do was get away as fast as possible and wait until it exploded usually destroying everything around it.
There were engineers who would risk their lives to attempt to defuse these bombs. They were probably the bravest men around, or so I thought.
At that time the Germans were sending planes from dusk 'till dawn. It was such a frightening time.
This lasted a week. Towards the end of the week our anti aircraft guns retaliated.
You should have heard the cheer that went up as the guns started, to get our own back.

Eventually I was old enough to join up and in 1944 I volunteered for the Air Force but I wasn't wanted. They told me to join the army. I held back from that thinking that my years in the Air Training Corps would get me into the Air Force anyway.
When I was finally called up I found I was going to be working in the coalmines, and became a Bevan Boy.
This was Ernest Bevan's 'marvellous' scheme to call up young boys from all over the UK to work in the coalmines to replace the miners that had been called up. I would imagine after the war many of them would not want to return to the mines.
They had escaped.
We had to do their work.
During my time as a miner I was never ostracised by the miners, but after the war, when the other service personnel were recognised for their war effort, we got none, neither uniforms, nor medals.
We just disappeared, that was until 1995 when The Queen mentioned the existence of Bevan Boys in a speech. From then on we have been heard. We even parade at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in November.

When I entered the mines a lot of my friends thought I was a conscientious objector. Definitely not. In most cases we wanted to fight for our country in the armed forces, but were chosen to do something closer to home.

I was in South Yorkshire, near Doncaster. I was injured underground, and after a year I was invalided out, but did not receive a pension. In fact Bevan Boys that were killed, of which there was many, their families didn't receive any compensation at all.

I trained near Doncaster for about three weeks, a general toughening up programme.
When we got to the working pit it was a shock, totally different, dark, dirty, greasy, and in a lot of cases we had to provide our own tools we made from bits of iron and wood we found lying around, and it was so dangerous although it was not expected that a Bevan Boy would work at the coal face until he'd worked in the mines on other duties for a couple of years.

I was directed by the deputy to a particular point, a junction near a donkey engine that was used to supply the power to pull trucks and cables through the mine.
It was my job to handle trains of empty trucks from the pit bottom, about a mile away, break then up into shorter trains and send them down to the miners who would fill them with coal. I would get them back full. I'd then join the short trains together and send them onwards towards the surface.
An endless cable running between the rails hauled the trucks. The cable was about half the thickness of my wrist. We had a special tool, which we could clamp onto the cable, which then linked with the trucks, and so they could be moved.
The semaphore signal system was complicated. If something went wrong I had two wires which when joined together they would ring a bell at the donkey engine, and the controller would stop the cable. When the problem had been fixed I had to give ten rings for the engine controller to restart the cable.
Occasionally a truck came off the rails and it was quite difficult to get it back. When the truck was empty it was okay, but filled with coal, it would weigh about a ton, and a different problem much more difficult to fix.
I quickly learnt how to fix it and get the truck back on the rails.
It was exciting times but very hard dirty work.
At the pit where I worked we had baths, but there were a lot of the Bevan Boys and the miners working in pits that didn't have pit head baths. This meant they had to go back to their digs or homes and share a tin bath full of water in a usually vain to attempt to get clean. Not an easy task.
I was living in a hostel on the outskirts of Doncaster. I was surprised there was well over 1000 of us there.
By the end of the war there was 48000 of us Bevan Boys, working usually on haulage, electrics, and maintenance. Some pits still had pit ponies which dad to be cared for. So the Boys had quite a variety of horrible jobs, but very essential for the general war effort, I didn't like working there, but I didn't regret it.

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