From nationalisation to Bevin Boys: Confronting the UK’s fuel crisis in the 1940s

Problems in the coal industry had been brewing for years. Gluts in supply during the 1930s saw pits close and workers chronically underemployed. Investments in new technologies and improving safety standards also stagnated. 

The outbreak of war became an opportunity for young miners to find new opportunities in the armed services and war industries. By the 1940s, these factors laid the foundation for an energy crisis that could only be addressed by nationalising the coal industry.

In the early years of the war, the problem was getting the coal where it needed to go. Transportation links were under threat, as were established distribution points. London, hard hit by the Blitz, set up coal dumps in bombed sites to enable residents to access their rations.

With the objective of ensuring the coal supply, in 1942 the newly formed Ministry of Fuel and Power assumed operational control of Britain’s mines. Their lights often burned late into the night as the new Ministry tried to deal with the ongoing crisis.

By 1943, more than 36,000 men had left the coal industry to join the armed services or take better paid (and less risky) work in the war industries. The British government estimated 40,000 men were needed to meet civilian and military demands for coal.

Mining was a rapidly aging industry. Training a new generation of skilled miners was essential. Here, a cohort of 120 teenage boys from County Durham arrive at the Ministry of Fuel & Power’s experimental training centre for juvenile entrants at New Kyo.

Ernest Bevin, Wartime Minister of Labour and National Service, provided another solution to the labour shortage: a portion of military conscripts were sent into the mining industry. Between 1943 and 1948, 48,000 young men from across Britain became ‘Bevin Boys’.

Bevin Boys faced discrimination from the public and police because they didn’t wear military uniforms—people assumed they were deserters, dodgers or spies! These men are on their way back from a strike meeting, something else that made them unpopular with a coal-starved public.

In a move aimed at stabilising coal production—and celebrated by miners—the wartime nationalisation of coal was extended through the establishment of the National Coal Board in 1947. The state purchased approximately 1,500 collieries operated by 800 private companies.