They were the forgotten conscripts of the Second World War - young men called up not to fight but to work in the mines. As a campaign gets underway to recognise their contribution to the war effort, Nick Morrison talks to a former Bevin Boy about life underground.

HE was not yet 18 but David Reekie was faced with a stark choice: go to work in the mines or go to prison. It was not what he had anticipated when his call-up papers arrived. He'd had set his heart on joining the Navy.

"We had been at war for four years and every young lad growing up worked on the assumption that he would go into the armed forces. I suppose our attitude was a bit gung-ho," he says. "I was appalled when they said I had to go to the mines, absolutely appalled.

"I was so looking forward to going into the Navy. Most of my family background was to do with the river and the sea, and I had trained for a trade in the Navy so all that would be wasted if I was sent to dig coal."

His call-up papers had arrived in October 1943, three months before his 18th birthday. He protested, and was given the opportunity to put his objections to a tribunal. They rejected his request. "I was faced with the prospect of either accepting it or go to prison. In the end I chickened out and obeyed," he says.

David, who lives in Aiskew near Bedale in North Yorkshire, was in the first batch of Bevin Boys, young men conscripted to work in the mines instead of the armed forces. As coal production slumped, the Government realised it had to replace the miners who had gone to fight.

But the contribution of the Bevin Boys towards the war effort has gone largely unacknowledged. Official recognition came only on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war last year, and last week Labour MP Gordon Banks launched a campaign to bestow an official honour, similar to a campaign medal, to those who worked in the mines.

A Londoner by birth, David was 14 when war broke out. Leaving school at 16, he worked for a publishing company, and enrolled in 376 Press Squadron, an air training corps. It was there he learnt telegraphy, the skill he hoped he would carry into the Navy.

But all the young men coming up to 18 were given a registration number, and if that number ended with a particular digit, they went to the mines instead of the services. David's number had the misfortunate to match. It wasn't all bad news, however. His sister had married a Yorkshireman, whose uncle was a mine-owner, and David managed to get posted to one of his mines.

After a month's training - marching in mining boots, exercising and learning the rules of mining - he arrived at Bruntcliffe, a drift mine near Morley in West Yorkshire. Judged not skilled enough to dig coal, he was put to hauling the coal out and making sure the colliers were supplied with tubs. With colliers paid by the tub, and angry if they were waiting for empty tubs, it was a demanding job.

"The conditions were appalling. The main road underground was never more than five feet high, and the side roads were sometimes as low as three feet," says David, now 80. "Trying to get six feet and half an inch through a three foot high roadway, pushing and pulling the tubs, your back often coming into contact with the wooden beams that held the roof up, having scabs knocked off your back, was quite excruciating.

"There was a period where a section of the mine was semi-flooded and we had to work through that, working in water the whole of the time. If it was high enough we would jump on the tubs and ride them downhill without getting too wet."

Shifts began at 7am and ended at 3pm, with 6am to midday on Saturdays counting as a half day. Pay was three pounds ten shillings a week at 18, going up to 75 shillings at 19, £4 at 20 and £5 at 21.

Unlike deep mines, the danger in drifts was not from gas explosions, but from suffocation. Miners worked by candlelight and if the candle blew out it was a sign of dangerous black damp. There were other hazards too. Rats were everywhere, and bodily functions carried out on the spot. "The miners would spread a piece of newspaper down, do what they had to do and then bury it. The smell was quite ripe," he says.

Although it was not considered as hazardous as a deep mine, there was also the risk of roof falls. Covering for a sick colleague, David had been pressured by a miner to take three tubs to the gathering point. The hurriers, as they were called, wore clogs and put one clog on each rail and slid behind the tubs, putting a wooden spigot in the tub wheels to slow them down. On this occasion, the momentum of the tubs going downhill was too much.

"I set off and I just went faster and faster until I left the rails and the tubs started knocking the props off and the roof started coming down," he says. "My candles went out and I was in darkness and all this stuff was falling down on top of me. Fortunately the big chunks missed me, and I was the only person in that mine who ever wore a hard hat, all the others wore flat caps. I just had to wait until somebody came, but the management played hell with me."

Unlike many others, David was the only Bevin Boy at his mine. It meant he was billeted with a local family instead of living in a hostel and he found the isolation difficult. "I was very lonely at first, extremely lonely. I used to walk the streets in the evenings and at weekends, and walk past people's houses and hear the jollity going on inside. I felt I was on a different island," he recalls.

Eventually, it was singing that saved him. "Most houses, even the smallest cottages, had a piano, and when people realised I could sing they invited me to join them, so my Sunday evenings became absolutely wonderful. I became known as the Singing Bevin Boy," he says.

He started to sing semi-professionally, at chapels, airforce bases and prisons, some weeks earning enough to double his wages. He met Mavis, his future wife, at a dance, and became so immersed in village life that when he was demobbed in November 1947 he decided not to return to London. Instead, he took a job as a clerk, before working in a brewery and then moving to North Yorkshire to run a pub.

His experience has given him a tremendous affection for mining communities, but he has no hesitation in saying he would still rather have gone into the Navy. But he acknowledges that what at the time seemed like misfortune may have been a stroke of good luck instead.

"The thing that hit me at the time was being surrounded by people my own age who were in the Forces, coming home on leave and having the glamour of the uniform, and I was apart from that," he says. "But I was also surrounded by people who had lost husbands and sons, and I knew lads who didn't come back. It would be churlish not to thank God I was not exposed to that."