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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Rebecca Hood of the People's War Team in Wales on behalf of Derek Warren and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The story was gathered at a meeting of the Bevin Boys Association at the Museum of Welsh Life near Cardiff in May 2005.

I spent three years in technical college at the beginning of the war and then when I was booked to go the officers training corps for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers I thought I had a career. But to my dismay I received calling up papers for the mines and I had no option but to go to the mines.....
living in South London, the furthest thing from my mind was the fact that you’d go down the mine. We were quite used to travelling on the underground so there wasn’t the question of the underground being a problem for us — I don’t think any of us realised where coal came from. In those days….apart from the fact that you bought it from a place down the road, where would it come from?
I was sent up to Durham and had to travel up to Durham from Kings Cross Station and we were locked into railway carriages to stop us from escaping on the way. And it was something like a ten hour journey with no food or drink on and eventually finished up at a place called West Hartlepool and we were taken by bus to the miners hostel at Easington Colliery where I spent the next month in horrendous conditions because it ...started snowing before we left London and it was six weeks before we saw a blade of green grass because it was that bad a winter!

We spent four weeks training….some time down the colliery and certain time doing physical exercises to supposedly make us fit and a bit of classroom work. Then we got sent to our separate collieries….I was sent to Houghton le Spring and finished up actually working — we didn’t do coal hewing…but we were at pit bottom working on haulage systems. And I was fortunate enough that where I worked was in fluorescent light — fluorescent light was provided by air compression not by the normal electricity as you would expect. And I worked there in normal light — I worked there for 18 months. I was billeted with another Bevin Boy in a miners family. And eventually because I didn’t like the billet I was in I applied for a transfer back to Easington Miners Hostel; was granted a transfer and went to work at Easington Colliery.

At Easington Colliery I was working on the end of a conveyor belt…and once again I was working in fluorescent lighting but it was terribly dirty, obviously, because the place was just flying with dust the whole time. As it was coming off the conveyor belt it was falling down and shooting into the tubs and that’s what I was responsible for — filling the tubs. And if you didn’t fill them to the correct amount — or judge the correct amount — you were in trouble because the miners then, who were being paid tonnage, would be on a lower rate. So you had a responsibility there.

When I first went up there at 17 we were paid just over two pounds a week — once you’d passed your training and went into the colliery I think it was something like two pounds ten shillings a week. Of which twenty-five shillings a week went to the hostel for your board and lodgings — but if you were unfortunate enough to be billeted in lodgings the lady of the house then usually demanded two pounds a week from your two pounds ten shillings. And then being as you already had stoppages for the pit baths, the doctor, for the catholic church, for this that and the other you finished up with very little money indeed.

It wasn’t too bad going to a hostel to start with and fortunately if you were then sent to the local area you had the opportunity to get a certain amount of relationship with the local people. Most of them were very much aware of the fact that you were replacing people who had gone to the forces from their own families very often. One problem I heard of with two friends of mine — they were offered a billet with a lady whose husband had gone to the forces and believe it or not the local Miners Lodge went into conference to talk about whether it was suitable for two virile young men to be billeted with a young lady whose husband had gone away! And eventually they decided they could do…and they were billeted with this lady it was perfectly OK…but that was the attitude…these are strangers…they’re not our sort they come from elseshwere — they were from South London as we all were….

Being a Bevin Boy totally threw me in the sense that I was never able to take up the cadetship with the officers of the REME — they just didn’t want them after the war.

I finished up going back into the job I was involved with before I was called up — which was in Battersea Power Station. So I am one of the odd people…I have actually dug coal….I have actually sold coal through a coal merchant I worked for…..and I actually burnt coal in a big way..at Battersea Power Station! And also, having worked in two separate collieries, I think that’s a bit odd for a Bevin Boy!

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