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IT’S been a long time coming but on Friday Willie McLaren was given the medal he so rightly deserved for his war work.
In 1943 he didn’t go to the front, but went down the mines as a ‘Bevin Boy’, a hard, dirty and dangerous job that has never been honoured until this year, 50 years after the last Bevin Boy was discharged from service. In March this year the Prime Minister presented the first of the veterans’ badges to the remaining Bevin Boys.
Mr McLaren, aged 81, was a gardener at the Skipness Estate, waiting for his call up papers.
‘I was 18 on the Sunday and on Monday I was on a MacBrayne’s bus for Glasgow,’ he said. He spent six weeks training at a pit near Sheffield before being moved to Nottingham where he stayed for the war.
‘There was a lot of us in the same boat, we’d never been down a mine before,’ he said and Mr McLaren remembers how his stomach lurched the first time he entered the cage which took them down the mine to the coalface.
‘There were pit ponies that never saw daylight,’ he said. But one thing he remembers fondly was a kind landlady who ‘looked after me like her own’.
The heat and dust of the mines was a shock for a young man used to the open countryside and fresh air.
‘When you came home for your week’s holiday you spent it coughing up coal,’ he said.
Mr McLaren had no inclination to stay on as a miner after the war: ‘There was always a grudge against the job, that you were forced into it.’ He returned to gardening at Skipness and was a church elder for 30 years; he and his wife Betty have a son, also William, who is a church minister.
There was a presentation of the Bevin Boy medals at an exhibition pit near Edinburgh, but Mr McLaren didn’t attend as he did not feel well enough to make the journey.
‘Besides, I was never in a Scottish pit, I was always in England,’ he said.
Instead he was presented with the honour by Councillor Donnie MacMillan at his home in Market Place, Tarbert, on Friday. ‘It is a pleasure to present this to a man who has been a perfect gentleman all his life,’ said Councillor MacMillan; Argyll and Bute Council also gave a gift of a quaich.
