Forgotten labours of the men underground
SIR – Without wishing to belittle the contribution of the Bevin Boys to the war effort (Arts, March 23), it is worth remembering that the conditions in which they worked were the same as those endured by thousands of ordinary coal-mine workers in the years before, during and for a long time after the Second World War.
My grandfather, a colliery blacksmith, did not want his sons to “go down t’pit”; however, the depression years of the Thirties meant that my father and his brothers lost their jobs in other local industries and were “lucky” to find employment in the mines.
Have they, along with the men and women who worked throughout the war years in other vital and often dangerous industries, ever received full recognition for their labours? Rodney Bedford
Lytham St Annes, Lancashire
SIR – One of my brothers chose the Navy for his National Service, but was selected as a Bevin Boy. He decided to stay in the mines and worked there until his retirement.
He told me of being taunted, in the early years, as a coward for avoiding military service – as if he had a choice. He remembers hacking at two- or three-foot seams on his knees (he was just over six feet tall), and has quite a few scars from falls underground. Joseph Galvin
Keighley, West Yorkshire
SIR – It should not be forgotten that mining was regarded as heroic during the First World War, both in the pits at home and at the Front.
The association was made in the powerful poem, “Miners”, by Wilfred Owen, written in Scarborough in January 1918. It was initially written in response to an explosion at Podmore Hall Colliery, Halmerend, in which 140 miners perished, but as Owen started to compose it he found that he got “mixed up with the War”:
I thought of all that worked dark pits Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes Peace lies indeed.
It concludes, thinking of people sitting safely by their coal fires:
But they will not dream of us poor lads, Left in the ground.
Owen, of course, returned to the Front after writing the poem, and was killed a week before the war ended. Bernard Richards
Brasenose College, Oxford