Unsung heroes of the Home Front

Mar 8 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

He went down the pit for his country and she served him porridge. Now, 60 years after the last Bevin Boys were demobbed, their love is stronger than ever. David Charters reports

"HE'S my toy boy,” she says with a gentle, little smile, full of knowing, while carrying the tea and biscuits from the kitchen of the terraced house.

Here, in the polished respectability of another age, they have always lived together, in love.

But Charlie Phillips wasn't a toy boy on the distant morning when they met, before the sun had risen over that pit head with the clanking cage, in which men sank, deeper and deeper, into the black, where the coal is cold.

Then he was a boy becoming a man and Florence Mitchell was serving him with porridge at the colliery canteen.

They called lads like Charlie Bevin Boys, after Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), the portly and rather self-important Minister of Labour, who sent them down the pits to help ease the nation’s coal shortage.

During his 18 years in Liverpool, Charlie had not found a real girl, you know, one you could call a sweetheart.

But this Yorkshire lass serving porridge looked very nice, he thought, and, though she was 10 months older than him, she had not stepped out with a sweetheart either.

Now they’ve been married to each other for nearly 60 years and he has been her only boyfriend and she is his only girlfriend – not many people will be able to say that in the years to come.

Charlie, who was 82 on Thursday, hadn’t wanted to be a Bevin Boy at all. He had hoped to be conscripted into the RAF and to work in a ground-crew, looking after Allied bombers which were then pulverising Germany’s industrial bases and military zones.

But there was also a crisis on the Home Front. We weren’t digging enough coal. More than 36,000 miners had joined the armed services. Most had not been replaced.

“We need 720,000 men continuously employed in this industry,” said Bevin, announcing his scheme in December 1943. “This is where you ‘boys’ come in. Our fighting men will not be able to achieve their purpose unless we get an adequate supply of coal.”

Earlier attempts to improve recruitment by voluntary means had failed, so it was decided that one out of every 10 men eligible for conscription would be sent down the mines. Numbers were drawn from a hat. If your draft card ended with the designated number, you became a Bevin Boy.

By then the war had swung strongly in favour of the Allies, but bitter fighting was raging in Italy and the Normandy landings, which would liberate western Europe, were still being planned. It was easier for a young man to see how Germany would be defeated over there, rather than a mile or so down in the Stygian gloom of dank tunnels and coal faces illuminated by oil lamps.

At the end of Charlie’s identity number was a nine and that sealed his fate, simple as that. But if his number had been different, he wouldn’t have met Florence and then they wouldn’t have had their fine children, George and Anne.

Charlie was the only boy among the seven children born to Mary Phillips and her husband Thomas, a drayman, in Upper Pitt Street, Liverpool. After six months, the family moved to the house next-door to their present home in Elaine Street on a Toxteth rise, overlooking Liverpool Cathedral.

After Upper Park Street School, Charlie had various jobs, working in a factory making fuses for the Royal Navy and helping with the clearance of bombed streets. During this time he had served with the Air Training Corps in anticipation of being conscripted into the RAF.

“I had been with the ATC for two years and was a corporal,” he recalls, “but my number came up for the Bevin Boys. I had to go with them. There was no choice. If I had refused to go I would have been sent to jail.

“As it turned out, it was good, but then I would definitely have preferred to go into the Air Force. I did not know what the coal mines were like. When I first went down I expected to see something like an office or works, you know with passages.”

He did a month’s training at the Prince of Wales colliery in Pontefract, where they were met by the vicar, who escorted them to their accommodation.

“I went down straightaway in the cage, Charlie says about the start of his service at the Barnborough Main pit. “I didn’t go to the coal face, but I was on haulage. It was the first time I had really been away from home. There were about five of us and the family in a house. I didn’t really like it. Pontefract was very quiet compared to Liverpool. Everything was closed down on Sundays.”

From, there Charlie moved to the Bevin Boys’ Hostel in Mexborough, where there were 10 boys to a dormitory. This was much livelier with snooker and other games. “We got two meals a day,” he says. “There was porridge for breakfast, but I can’t remember what else.”

“Poached eggs and bacon,” Florence reminds him.

“It’s called old-timers’ disease,” says Charlie with a rueful smile.

“I started work there as a canteen assistant soon after him,” says Florence. “I had worked in the mills first but then I got tinnitus and the doctor said that I couldn’t work anywhere near heavy machinery. I used to serve over a big counter when they came in. I was serving porridge when Charlie came in.

“Yes, we met over a bowl of porridge. It was four o’clock in the morning, I was on nights and he was on days. I did look at him, but he seemed very stern. I didn’t know if it was shyness. I am a very shy person.”

“I had to be down the pit by six, so I had to be up by four,” Charlie says. “I did enjoy working in the pits to be honest. Taking the trucks up and down and making sure that they didn’t come off the rails. I was on my own all day. I didn’t see anybody.

“I didn’t really think of it as part of the war effort to begin with, though there was some recognition later. I think the boys in the service uniforms saw us in our ordinary clothes and thought we were dodgers. We had no badge, nothing.”

But the other miners were usually kind. “We all got on well. There were Welshmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen. One fellow called Fred Jackson took me under his wing,” remembers Charlie, a cloud crossing his eyes. “The only problem was when I got demobbed, he was off sick and I didn’t know where he lived, so I never said goodbye to him. He was the main man on haulage.”

Charlie and Florence were able to see each other in the hostel every day. A date was a walk in the country or a visit to a picture palace – the Majestic, the Empire or the Royal. She lived a tram ride away in the pit village of Denaby Main.

But what did her parents, William, also a miner, and Elsie, think of this Liverpudlian who had suddenly arrived in their lives?

“They took to him right away,” she replies, looking at her father’s Davy lamp, sitting in pride by the fireplace, below photographs of the grandchildren.

“We always talk about those days,” says this couple, staring at each other with a love which has matured into deep affection, since their wedding at St Philomena’s Church, Liverpool, 60 years ago.

“The reason I went with her in the first place is that my mate, Stan Taylor, was going to ask her for a date,” confides the Bevin Boy, as his wife sips her tea.

“He still sends us a Christmas card from London,” says Florence. “I had never had a boyfriend and Charlie had never had a girlfriend before. He was 18 and I was 19.”

“I used to go dancing in Liverpool and all that, but I never really bothered with the girls,” he says.

Charlie, who was paid three pounds five shillings a week (£3.25), from which his accommodation was deducted, left the Bevin Boys, after three and a half years, in 1947 and became a drayman in Liverpool. At the end of this month, he will receive his badge, comfirming the part he played in our victory

“You take things easy now,” says Florence, “don’t go leaving me on my own.”

davidcharters@dailypost.co.uk