South Yorkshire Times – Saturday 18 April 1942

Back to the Mine.

Herbert Verdun Newsome (25), son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Newsome, 47, Wright Crescent, Wombwell, joined the Grenadier Guards in Feb., 1940, with the idea of making the Army his career, with a possible chance of getting into the Police Force.

He is now back where he started, in the mine. He is a haulage band at Houghton Main Colliery, and one of the vanguard of men from the Forces who are being returned to the mining industry to replenish dwindling stocks.

Newsome says he knows at least two others who have been returned from the Forces to Houghton Main Colliery in the past few days—one from Darfield and the other from Great Houghton.

Guardsman Newsome, named “Verdun” because his birthday coincided with a memorable action in the last war, told me he had come back to pit life not because he has any desire to leave the Army, but because he understands that It is “the best for the country.”

“To come back to pit life,” he said, “was the last thought in my head. I have enjoyed Army life,” he said “and have had better health than ever I had in civil life.” He emphasised that he had merely been relegated to “W” reserve temporarily, and was subject to recall. Newsome has come back to the pit he was employed at before the war. To get ready for the pit he has to rise at 4 a.m. In the Army he had two hours’ sleep after that before “Reveille.”

When a “Times” reporter asked him if the pit made him tired after an open air life he said “Not a bit; I am as fit as a fiddle.” Newsome says that while working in the pit he would like to do some spare-time “soldiering,” and for preference would choose an instructor’s job in the Air Training Corps. Under the assumption that he was booked for the Army for the “duration,” Miss Joyce Lowcock, of Wombwell, his fiancee, has recently joined the A.T.S.