UNSUNG HEROES | WORLD WAR TWO
Between late 1943 and early 1948, an army of young men – many of them conscripts – descended into the pits to fulfil a desperate need for fuel. Stephen Robertsshines a light on the dangerous work of Britain’s Bevin Boys.
“A little pony called ‘Nipper’ probably saved my life down there. We were working a mile or two from the cage, deep underground. I was late leaving at the end of the shift and ‘Nipper’ stopped stone dead and wouldn’t budge. He could be a right villain and I thought he was just playing up again, but he must have had a sixth-sense. A fall of stone came down in front of us. The other guys came back and dug us out as I’d resolved that I was not coming out without ‘Nipper’. The animal promptly repaid me by scarpering!” Phil Robinson recalls a near-death experience from his time as a ‘Bevin Boy’. Born, raised and educated in Wallasey on the Wirral, Phil had already known hardship because his mother died of rheumatic fever when he was just five or six, leaving his father to bring up two children. The family was bombed out during the war and evacuated to Nantwich in Cheshire. He was determined to ‘do his bit’ when he came of age and had been passed ‘A1’ at an ar…
