Rare pictures of Britain’s ‘forgotten army’ of Bevin Boys

Yet in their time, Britain’s “Bevin Boys” were as much photographed as the other contributors to the war effort, and these rarely-seen archive shots are testament to their toils.

At the start of the war in 1939, thousands of experienced miners left the pits to join the armed forces and by 1943, with only three weeks’ supply of coal remaining for the power stations, Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour and National Service, devised a ballot scheme in which a proportion of conscripted men would be sent to the collieries rather than the armed services.

Every month, two numbers were drawn from a hat, and those whose National Service registration number ended with the matching digits were directed to the mining industry.

They came not just from pit towns but from every region and from all social classes. Their number included a young Eric Morecambe. Not all worked on the coal face; many were put to work as assistants or on maintenance duty.

The scheme was not universally popular, especially among mining families who had seen their own children drafted into the armed forces, only to be replaced by “outsiders”. And because the Bevin Boys were not in military uniform, some mistook them for draft dodgers.

The ballot scheme was abandoned after VE Day and the last Bevin Boys demobbed three years later – but unlike other conscripts they had no right to go back to their previous jobs and received no service medals, demob suits or letters of thanks.

It was not until 2008 that the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, awarded commemorative badges, featuring a pithead motif and a silhouette of a miner, to 27 surviving conscripts.

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