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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 John Nicholson 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 in South Wales in May 2005.

I received a letter on 23rd of December 1943 … an early Christmas present from Ernie Bevin the minister for labour in Churchill’s national government…to say that I had been “directed” to work underground instead of going in the Royal Artillery, which is where I wanted to go. I was being drafted to go in the forces and it was the Royal Artillery I wanted to go to because my father in the First World War was an officer in the Artillery. I was living in Streatham Hill in South West London and I worked in a bank. Soft hands, soft muscles…I wasn’t an athletic type..and I was taken out of West End banking in Oxford Circus and had to join the boys down the pits in South Wales on the coalface.
I thought to myself “this is a surprise” I knew it might happen to me …but I just resigned myself, it was part of the war effort, and I just went. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I did write a letter to my father later on (and I still have a copy of that letter) of not only my experiences, but my feelings as a young man being transplanted from West End banking to do this sort of work in a community which of course was different from my own — I lived in suburban south west London and here I was in a close-knit community in a Welsh Valley.

I was living just north of Abersychan in Monmouthshire — just north of Pontypool — in the village there, living in a miner’s cottage where the lavatory was down the bottom of the garden, my bedroom was a small one…I had to actually go through my landlady and her husband, their bedroom, in order to get to my own. But they treated me royally…the man said …because I worked with him as well as lived with him ..“I’ll treat you like my own son” which he did.

If there was any danger….ripping top for example as we called it taking the rock from above, then because that was rather dangerous he would move me back and say “you stay there while I’m doing this”. He was a really nice man. We kept in touch after the war and I always remember the kindness of this man.

Physically I found it very difficult…but eventually my muscles hardened. I was just a boy to the man and in the heading and stall system that was used in those days and each man and boy had a piece of the coal face to work on. As I say, I was just a boy I wasn’t in command of the situation, but yes I got used to working in these terrible conditions. I wrote in a letter to my father that I wouldn’t wish any human being to have to work in these conditions at all.

I was there almost three and a half years, well beyond the end of the war because the demobilisation number that I had was the same as those leaving from the army and they were trying to hold back army people. So the naval and the air force they had numbers which would release them earlier. So it wasn’t until September 1947 — two years after the war finished — that I was actually demobilised and went back to the bank….Not that my job was guaranteed because I’d been taken on as temporary staff by the bank anyway…and you couldn’t guarantee jobs to everyone who’d left or been called up…on top of that as a Bevin Boy because I had a job, I had a job at home, because unlike a military man being demobilised I had a job and therefore I wasn’t guaranteed one. If I’d been in the military or navy I would have done.

In the army or services I would have had a greater experience…because I would have gone abroad and experienced that. I think after about six months I’d learned enough about heavy industry, about trade unionism, about all these things I didn’t know about in the field of banking. And of course this community, this close community, who experienced - of course in Wales as well as other places - experienced the depression for years.

I married a girl from the valley and her father who had been on the dole for ten years…when eventually he got his job back just before the war, what happened to him? He was fatally injured in an accident underground — he was a hollier a chap who deals with the horses — so I never actually met him, but I’ve kept my ties with Wales. My wife unfortunately died eight years ago but that — she- was the one thing I gained out of this whole Bevin boys thing — I had a wonderful wife, she was faithful, she was hardworking, and - as my son said on one occasion — “mother you are incredibly thrifty” She had been taught how to be thrifty because of the conditions in the thirties when there was no dole etc.

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