The story of the Bevin Boys on their 25th anniversary.

On Christmas Eve 1943 a junior clerk at the Ministry of Labour drew the numbers out of a hat, and a few weeks later, early in 1944, the first batch of conscripts for the mines reported for duty 'would happily have swapped a twenty-mile march in the infantry to going down the pits'

'I'd go down again, like Prince Philip I'd go down, but not to work there any more' ' Mining brought me out completely. It knocked this superior white-collar attitude out of me for a start'