Our tour guides to the world of the Bevin Boys, the teenage coal miners conscripted by Churchill’s Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, were Harry Parkes, Peter French and Geoff Rose – three spry-sounding gentlemen with a collective age of nearly 270. Yet the crucial witness in Martin Williams’ adroitly fashioned tribute (27 May) lurked off-stage. This was an elderly lady named Betty Nunn, who confessed to her son that she was the person who had picked the names of Bevin’s work force out of a hat and that she “didn’t want it on her conscience”.What was so bad about being one of the 48,000 or so young men compelled, between 1943 and 1948, to swap military service for two years down the nation’s mines? Item one, naturally, was disappointment, bar