Called Up, Sent Down

The Bevin Boys' War

Tom Hickman

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780752457499
• eBook ISBN: 9780750979566
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

At the outbreak of the Second World War the government short-sightedly allowed thousands of miners to enlist in the armed services. By 1943 the war effort was in danger of grinding to a halt because of a lack of coal. In answer Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, sought service volunteers – and compulsorily sent 20, 000 18-year-olds, who'd expected to fight for their country, down the mines with them. Some were so angry that they preferred to go to prison. The majority went to do their best. But some were psychologically, and others physically, unsuited to such dangerous work. Many were injured; some died. Called Up, Send Down is an enthralling oral and social history of an episode of war that has never been fully told.

Notes

Chapter One

1. In 1938, a Schedule of Reserved Occupations was drawn up, exempting certain key skills from conscription; the government was determined not to repeat the mistake of the First World War, when the over-eager recruitment of men into the military left war production dangerously short of workers. The scheme was complicated, covering 5 million men in a vast range of jobs, including miners – but at this stage only those underground, not surface workers; they were given reserved status after the war started. Railway and dock workers, agricultural workers, doctors and schoolteachers were in reserved occupations as were those in engineering, the industry with the highest number of exemptions. Ages of reservation varied between industries and could change, the government frequently reviewing the situation as the need for men to join the armed forces grew greater.

2. Through the Dark Night (Gollancz, 1941).

3. The weekly minimums were £4.3s underground and £3.18s on the surface. At the outbreak of war miners were earning an average of £2 13s 9d and stood eighty-first in the list of industrial wage rates. This second increase of the war, to an average of £5 2s 5d, only raised them from fifty-fourth to twenty-third.

4. The assumption from the way in which Bevin described the ballot is that, other than on dates when two draws were held, a consistent tenth of registering men were diverted into coalmining. The table below, relating only to the Midlands region, not only shows this wasn’t so but that on some occasions numbers were drawn on a regional basis.

The fifteen single-figure draws in 1944 and the one in 1945 were probably national, taking one man in ten; the double draws (in December 1943; and January, October and November 1944) were also likely to have been across the board, taking one in five.

But the nine double-digit ballots (in March and May 1944, and all but January’s in 1945) seem to indicate that only one man in a hundred was picked. As it is statistically impossible that Bevin could have conscripted the numbers he did if the nine double-digit draws were nationwide, then these must have applied regionally.

Whether this interpretation is correct – presumably to control intakes, dependent on the capacity of the training centres and perhaps an ‘evening out’ across the country – or whether other regions also had regional draws from time to time, can’t be answered. No coalmining records other than those of the Midlands have survived. A lot were lost in the transfer of the industry from the colliery owners to the Coal Board on nationalisation in 1947; and in the 1950s the Public Records Office, now the National Archives, destroyed the bulk of what it held, for reasons of space, keeping only the Midlands records as being representative.

Dates	Numbers Drawn
1943
14 December	0 & 9
1944
15 January	6 & 9
29 January	2 & 5
16 February	7
1 March	2
16 March	64
31 March	9
15 April	8
8 May	13
20 May	8
3 June	5
20 June	1
10 July	1
24 July	9
5 August	3
19 August	3
2 September	0
16 September	4
7 October	8 & 9
18 October	1 & 2
1 November	0 & 2
22 November	4 & 6
6 December	8
20 December	6
1945
3 January	0
17 January	30
5 February	37
19 February	74
5 March	23
23 March	40
6 April	33
23 April	11

Note: One other ballot was held, on 7 May 1945 (in the Midlands it drew the double-digit 36). Victory in Europe brought its cancellation and the end of the Bevin ballot scheme.

5. Anthony Shaffer died in 2001, the year in which Picador published his memoir, So What Did You Expect? He remained a miner until 1948; his brother developed an ulcer and was released after two years. Anthony is best known for his thriller Sleuth, later filmed with Sir Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. Sir Peter is best known for Equus and Amadeus, also filmed.

6. The change in the public’s attitude to women working was astonishing. Before the war, a single woman who took a job she didn’t need was frowned on for taking it from someone who did need it. The Civil Service, the BBC, nursing and teaching were among careers from which a woman had no choice but to resign when she married.

7. Not much had changed thirty years on. In 1976, the year he died, Sir William Lawther, former Labour MP and wartime president of the Federation, recalled parents in tears seeking help to get their sons exempted. ‘You would have thought the boys were being sent to Dartmoor in chains,’ he said.

8. Throughout the war male students in science, engineering, medicine and dentistry were able to finish their courses, unless they failed examinations. For arts students it was different. Until 1941 it was possible for them to complete two years at university provided they showed ‘exceptional promise as potential officers or intellectual ability above the average, or evidence of a balanced combination of the two’. From March 1942, however, two years was cut to one and from the December, all arts students were conscripted at eighteen. In the period up to then, universities accepted seventeen-year-olds so that they could complete a year before call-up.

9. Whether the South Shields apprentice went down the pits I’ve been unable to trace. Surely he did: the government could hardly have given in on the issue.

On one occasion during the post-war period of national service, the government of the day resorted to the same tactic. In June 1955 an unofficial strike of merchant seamen – a group exempt from military service – was preventing liners in Southampton and Liverpool from sailing. Two hundred men of conscription age were sent notices of call-up. They immediately re-registered with the shipping pool.

Chapter Two

1. The nine English training centre collieries, from north to south: Lamb, at Cramlington, Northumberland; Horden (with nearby Easington colliery as an auxiliary establishment), at Horden, and Morrison, at Annfield Plain, County Durham; Prince of Wales, at Pontefract, Birley East, at Woodhouse, and Askern Main, at Doncaster, Yorkshire; Newtown, at Swinton, Lancashire; Creswell, at Creswell, Derbyshire; and Haunchwood, at Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

Additionally, the Kemball colliery in Stoke-on-Trent, which in 1942 had established a training centre for boys in North Staffordshire coming into the mining industry, became part of the government network. In Kent, the Chislet colliery took on training for the four pits in the county.

The Scottish centre was at Muircockhall, near Dunfermline in Fife; the Welsh at Oakdale colliery at Blackwood near Newport in Monmouthshire.

2. Run on a non-profit basis by local authorities at the government’s request, around 2,000 British Restaurants were set up during the war in schools, church halls and any other available premises to offer the public a cheap meal (three courses: minced beef with carrots and parsnips a typical main dish, 9d) for which they didn’t have to surrender coupons from their ration book. The government encouraged people to use them once a week as a way to supplement their rations. British Restaurants were very basic but popular, with long queues.

3. Use of the Coventry Sally continued well into 1944. On 31 March George Griffiths, the Labour MP for Hemsworth, raised the conditions there in the House. According to the Daily Worker, he said, there were not enough baths, the food was poor, men, often mining trainees, went to work without breakfast – and when they went home for a weekend, tramps were allowed to sleep in their beds. Bevin replied that there were twelve baths and five more were being added; the food was good; and the beds of men away for a weekend were reserved for them. It was true that a night watchman, since dismissed, had on one occasion allowed the beds to be used by other workmen. Bevin said the Daily Worker article ‘is a tissue of lies, but that is the Communist method of supporting the war’.

4. In relation to what perhaps was a more comparable group – the eng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• One: Unlucky Dip
• Two: Problems, Problems
• Three: Learning the Ropes
• Four: Notes from the Underground
• Five: Hurt or Worse
• Six: Getting to Know You
• Seven: Life’s What You Make It
• Eight: On the Black Side
• Nine: The End of the Beginning
• Epilogue: Boys Forever
• Acknowledgements
• Biographies
• Notes
• Picture Section