Edward Cassidy
Dewsbury
Served: 1944 - 1949; Shawcross
Edward Cassidy lives with his wife in their home town of Dewsbury. When he left school he took up an engineering apprenticeship with the Dewsbury Bus Company. He was an Air Cadet so when conscription approached he assumed he would be drafted in to the RAF. He was not to know that his number had been drawn in the ten percent of conscripts marked down as Bevin Boys.
He reported for training at Shawcross Colliery, near Dewsbury. It was a huge pit with about 3,000 employees. More people than the average mining village. Because of his engineering background he trained for three months to take up a job in the Engineering Shop. Most of the miners were local men so he was quickly assimilated into the workshop team. It was their job to keep machines of all kinds running seven days a week, day and night. Edward worked some incredibly long hours. He remembers one week when he did 17 shifts! There are only 21 shifts in a full week. Although they were allocated shifts it was pretty meaningless as they had to work when they were needed. He recalls a shift of 37 hours, punctuated here and there by a catnap. In 1947 five feet of snow fell and it stuck around for many weeks. The winding gear had to be kept free of ice so every night, a man called Duxbury climbed the 120 feet up the winding gear to place a glowing brazier in the appropriate spot.
It was incredibly hard work, but it was his job and like all his fellow miners, he just got with it. He was demobbed in early 1949. He was undecided what career to pursue. At that time he was helping a close friend look after his dying wife. One day she told him that she could imagine him in a hospital in a white coat, helping people. This seemingly casual remark changed his life. After considerable thought, he took himself down to Dewsbury Hospital where he signed up to be trained as a nurse. He turned out to be a natural and stayed all his working life and retired as a Charge Nurse.
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