A new documentary highlights the Bevin Boys, who were conscripted to the mines in the Second World War but did not receive the recognition they deserved. Steve Pratt talks to one of them.

ALF Gaddas was expecting to go off to war like his four brothers. At 15, the Air Training Corps turned a blind eye and let him in, although he was too young, according to the rules.

But when his call-up papers arrived, he received a shock. Instead of the armed forces, he was sent down the mines in Ferryhill. His role in the war effort was digging for coal as one of the Bevin Boys.

These conscripted miners are recalled in a Tyne Tees Television documentary about a group of war workers that have been forgotten and maligned. Some branded them cissies for not fighting or wrongly accused them of being conscientious objectors.

The Bevin Boys weren't officially recognised until 1995, on the 50th anniversary of VE Day, in speeches by the Queen and the then Prime Minister John Major. As a result, for the first time, they were allowed to participate in the procession past the cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday, and, locally, join marchers at the Durham Miners' Gala.

Mr Gaddas, now 76 and living in Northallerton, was one of more than 48,000 lads, from different backgrounds, forced to work underground because of a severe shortage of coal. Minister for Labour, Ernest Bevin, decided they should work down the pits rather than join the armed forces.

One lad in ten was forced to become a pitman between 1943 and 1945. Nearly a quarter of them ended up in mines in the North-East. Alf was one of them - chosen, like the others, by lottery. A number was drawn out of a hat and if it matched the last digit of their national identification number, they became miners.

Alf left his rural home in Westmorland for a month's training with retired miners at Anfield Plain. "They were pretty understanding and gave us some idea of what we were supposed to do," he recalls.

"I was clueless about mining, having only worked at the Post Office. There were classroom lectures about coal. They took us down a pit, and told us about the gases present in coal and the dangers. Then we were allocated to an area, where there was another two weeks of lectures among men who were actually working."

He was assigned to work at the Dean and Chapter Pit at Ferryhill, where he lived for the next three years in one of three big sleeping blocks on the site. He moved from the outdoor life on Westmorland to a world of narrow shafts, pit ponies and life underground.

"It was suddenly growing up. I went from the fresh, country air to a place where there was the smell of pits everywhere," he says. "I got my first fright when I went underground. I was crawling along on my stomach and when my back hit the ceiling I got a sudden feeling of, 'Is the top coming in?'." He admits he was scared but it wasn't something that you owned up to at the time.

The Bevin Boys were mainly employed, Alf says, on the more mundane jobs as the regular miners worked at the coalface. There were four shifts, usually seven-and-a-half hours long, with the first beginning at three in the morning, which meant getting up at 1.30am, having breakfast and walking to the pit.

They were employed as what was called day pay labourers. "I was paid two pounds and 17 shillings a week, and had to pay for my hostel accommodation out of that. When your miners' boots wore out, you had to buy your own. I ended up with half a crown a week," says Alf.

"Sometimes you got to work a double shift. That only happened once in six months. I looked forward to it because I was ten shillings better off."

Sometimes he could afford to take a trip to Darlington or Durham. Every month, the dining room was cleared and a dance held at the hostel. At one of these he met the Ferryhill girl who became his wife, Sybil Atkinson. Romance happened despite her father's objections. "He told me not to go with a Bevin Boy because they were cissies," she recalls. "But I went on seeing Alf, I never did as I was told."

The couple have now been married 53 years.

After the war, Alf continued down the mines until 1948 as there was still a shortage of miners. After demob, he went back to the Post Office, where he had started as a telegraph boy, and eventually became a head postmaster.

He was recruited to take part in the Tyne Tees programme by producer-director Charles Bowden at a Bevin Boys' Association reunion in Harrogate. The group's secretary, Warwick Taylor, believes there's been a lot of misunderstanding about Bevin Boys.

"Because they weren't called up to the armed services, people accused them of being conscientious objectors. But nothing could be further from the truth," he says.

He calls them "the forgotten conscripts". Although they've been recognised in recent years, they're still barred from receiving assistance from the Royal British Legion. This only recognises men and women who have served under military command.

"We did our bit during the war," says Mr Taylor. "That should be properly recognised."

* The Bevin Boys is on Tyne Tees Television on Thursday at 7.30pm.