Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee are rightly recognised as giants of 20th-century British politics. Nye Bevan, too, gets a look-in for his role in founding the NHS. One name, however, is often overlooked: Ernest Bevin. In some respects, he was the most remarkable of them all.
To the extent he is remembered now, it is for having been foreign secretary at that critical post-war moment when the political map of the world was being redrawn, and Britain was coping with the painful realisation that it was no longer a world power of the first rank. But there was much more to him than that. Bevin was a dominant figure in the labour movement from the late 1920s onwards. Without him, Attlee might never have become Labour leader and, even if he had done so, would not have survived long enough to become, arguably, our most successful peacetime prime minister. As Minister of Labour in Churchill’s war cabinet Bevin, more than anyone, helped to mobilise the workforce onto a war footing and to establish a broad social settlement between workers and employers that endured for more than 30 years.
But after a couple of decades in which every prime minister, from John Major to Boris Johnson, has claimed to make “social mobility” their cause, there is something else that makes the recent neglect of Bevin more striking. In contrast to the likes of Churchill and to some extent Attlee, who came from privileged backgrounds, Bevin was born into West Country penury in a remote Somerset village. He was the seventh child of a penniless single mother who died of cancer when he was eight, leaving him to be brought up by a half-sister in north Devon. In later life, he recalled having to read aloud from newspapers for members of the family who were illiterate. Aged 11, he left school to work as a farm labourer. Aged 13 he made his way to Bristol where he lodged with an elder brother and found work as a dogsbody in a restaurant, for six shillings a week plus meals. Later on, he drove a horse and cart around the city; one of his jobs was delivering mineral water to the homes of the prosperous. Many years later, at the Foreign Office, on learning that the family of his principal private secretary’s wife came from Bristol, he inquired as to the precise address. “Ah yes,” he said, “I know the house. I used to deliver the laundry.”
His education continued at non-conformist Sunday schools and later at evening classes run by the Workers’ Education Association. Baptised aged 20, Bevin became a tub-thumping local preacher. “Chapel was to Bevin,” says Andrew Adonis in his new biography, “what Sandhurst was to Churchill.” It gave him self-confidence and social standing. Although by the age of 40 his personal faith had lapsed, he remained a preacher for the rest of his life.
By 1905, aged 24, he was organising Bristol’s Right-to-Work Committee, campaigning for a programme of public works to relieve unemployment among the city’s rapidly growing army of labourers who had migrated from the surrounding countryside. In 1910 he had a leading role in the Avonmouth Docks strike, recognising from the outset that effective trade unionism required the creation of a single large union, rather than many smaller ones competing with each other. In due course he was the architect of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, founded by an amalgam of 14 smaller outfits, which became the largest trade union in the democratic world. In 1922 Bevin became its first general secretary, an office he held until becoming foreign secretary 23 years later.
By the early 1920s he was a national figure. The event that propelled him to fame was a strike by dock workers in support of a demand for a minimum wage of 16 shillings a day. These were turbulent times. The end of the First World War had been followed by deep recession, mass unemployment and bitter class conflict. The Labour Party was beginning to supplant the bickering Liberal factions of Lloyd George and Asquith, and the ruling class was afraid that the contagion of the Russian revolution might spread to Britain. Rather than reject the 16-shillings-a-day claim outright, the government offered the strikers a court of inquiry presided over by a law lord. Bevin persuaded the strike leaders to accept the offer and then to appoint him the workers’ spokesman at the inquiry which was held in a glare of publicity at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.
Here, a man educated as he later put it, “in the ‘edgerows of life,” found himself up against some of the smoothest and most expensive barristers in the land—and he ran rings around them. His opening statement, spread over three sessions, lasted 11 hours and attracted widespread praise. His cross-examination of the employers was masterly, and eventually resulted in the court upholding the claim in full. This, says Adonis, was Bevin the pragmatist, willing to work within existing institutions. He could drive a hard bargain, but he was never a revolutionary. On the contrary, the more he learned about communism the more he reviled it, although—as his first biographer, Francis Williams, observed—Bevin possessed “the same peasant shrewdness as Stalin.” Astonishing though it is to contemplate, he would one day find himself sitting at the same table as the Soviet tyrant.
[su_pullquote]"Aged 13 he made his way to Bristol, where he found work as a dogsbody in a restaurant for six shillings a week plus meals"[/su_pullquote]
By the mid-1930s, as leader of the country’s largest trade union, Bevin was inevitably a major player in Labour politics. Following the disaster of Ramsay MacDonald’s desertion, the parliamentary party had been reduced to little more than a rump in the election of 1931. At a time when the Nazi threat was becoming increasingly apparent, it was led by George Lansbury, a vacillating pacifist. It was Bevin who ruthlessly -disposed of Lansbury with a devastating speech at the 1935 party conference, in which he accused the Labour leader of “hawking your conscience round from body to body, asking to be told what you ought to do with it.” With an election looming Attlee was installed as interim leader, but after the election, with Bevin’s support, Attlee was re-elected—over the head of Herbert Morrison, who never forgave Bevin. The feeling was mutual. “Herbert’s his own worst enemy,” someone later commented, giving rise to Bevin’s famous response: “Not while I’m alive, he ain’t.”Many times in the years ahead, even in the immediate aftermath of Attlee’s great triumph in the 1945 election, Bevin would be called on to protect Attlee from the plotting of Morrison and others. Thanks in large part to Bevin, Attlee would go on to become Labour’s longest serving leader.
By now Bevin had formed an alliance with the economist John Maynard Keynes. Some years earlier they had both been members of the Macmillan Commission, which was set up by Ramsay MacDonald’s government to consider the relationship between finance and industry in the wake of the Wall Street Crash and as the Depression took hold. In defiance of what was in those days the received wisdom Keynes, supported by Bevin, proposed the nationalisation of the Bank of England and a programme of public investment to revive the economy and reduce unemployment, but he and Bevin were in a minority. This was the beginning of a partnership that endured until Keynes’s death in 1946, by which time his economic philosophy had triumphed.
In international relations, as well, Bevin often proved to be on the right side of history. Unlike many on the left, he was never under any illusion about the Soviet Union. A good deal of his energies in the 1930s were devoted to resisting the malign influence of Communists in the trade union movement. Adonis writes: “The equation of fascism and communism and the imperative to resist both, was Bevin’s most fundamental and consequential insight.”
Bevin was one of the first public figures to become alert to the menace of Nazism. One of Hitler’s first acts was to destroy the German trade unions, arresting and imprisoning many of their leaders. Bevin, who had visited Germany, was acquainted with many of them and he did not hesitate to speak out. Nor, unlike Churchill, was he under any illusion about Mussolini. When the Italian dictator invaded Abyssinia in 1935 Bevin advocated firm action: it was this crisis that caused him to bring down Lansbury.
Well before Munich, Bevin was warning against appeasement of Hitler. “If ever there was a time, whether it is popular or unpopular, we have got to tell our people the truth, it is now,” he told the 1936 Labour Party conference. With hindsight it is unsurprising that, come the war, he was Churchill’s first choice for minister of labour and national service in the coalition government. “He is the Labour man I want. He has no defeatist tendencies,” said Churchill.
A seat was found for him in parliament and before long he was a key member of the war cabinet, touring the country urging employers and employees to work together for the war effort. Although he had a range of draconian powers at his disposal, he avoided using them as far as possible, preferring instead to encourage, cajole and conciliate. Some workers, notably farm labourers and miners, received substantial pay rises. Health and safety, collective bargaining and arbitration were enshrined by law. In 1945 he set up a series of wages councils on which employees, employers and the state were represented. They covered about five million people and effectively set a minimum wage in various low-paid occupations.
It was always part of Bevin’s plan to use the exigencies of wartime to lay down a template for industrial relations in the future. “They say that Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 to 1930,” he was fond of saying, “I intend to be minister of labour from 1940 until 1990.” He wasn’t far out. Many of the changes to working conditions and industrial relations that he pioneered lasted until the Thatcher government in the 1980s; the final wages councils were abolished in 1993.
Come the end of the war and the Labour landslide of 1945, Bevin was expecting to go to the Treasury, but at the last minute Attlee changed his mind and appointed him foreign secretary instead. Bevin received the news at 4pm on 27th July 1945, and by next evening he and Attlee were in Potsdam, negotiating the future of Germany with Stalin and Truman. Various explanations have been offered for Attlee’s late change of mind. According to Tommy Lascelles, George VI’s private secretary, it was the king who persuaded Attlee to change his mind, and there is speculation that the king’s intervention may have been prompted by Churchill. Many years later, Attlee said he had been concerned to keep Bevin and Morrison (now deputy prime minister) apart. Others have suggested that Attlee was concerned that Hugh Dalton, whom he had intended to appoint, might not be tough enough to stand up to the Russians.
But whatever the explanation, according to Bevin’s biographer, Alan Bullock, there was no sign that he was disturbed by the sudden change in his political fortunes. He made no attempt to dissuade Attlee and took to the foreign office like a duck to water.
[su_pullquote]Bevin was committed to the UK developing its own nuclear weapons: 'we’ve got to have this thing…' he said, and 'we’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it'"[/su_pullquote]
The foreign office in those days was a stronghold of toffs (today the toff count is still relatively high) educated at our finest public schools and universities, and suddenly there was a man in charge who had left school at the age of 11, who spoke with a thick Somerset accent and who dropped his aitches. It was—unfairly—said of Bevin that there were only two foreign office jobs for which he was qualified, either that of a lift attendant or secretary of state. It could have gone badly wrong but, on the contrary, he rapidly earned the respect of those who worked with him. To this day he is regarded by many as the greatest British foreign secretary of the 20th century.No British government has ever had to confront such a range of issues as those faced by the Labour government that took office in 1945. Although the country was regarded—and regarded itself—as one of the world’s great powers, in truth it was all but bankrupt. Stalin’s massive shadow had fallen across Eastern Europe and threatened to extend further west: there was every prospect that Communists might take power in France and Italy. It should not be forgotten that, in the immediate post-war period, there were not yet the institutions or an idea of “the west” as we would come to know it. Above all, the Americans were, in this brief moment between victory against the Axis powers and the beginning of the Cold War, committed to withdrawing their armed forces entirely from the continent within two years. That would have left much of western Europe at the mercy of the Russians. What’s more, the Americans initially took a rosy view of Stalin (as did Churchill, incidentally), believing that he was a man with whom they could do business.
Bevin, under no such illusion, would have none of it. At the outset, he was almost alone at the conference table in confronting the Russians, and quickly grasped that the best hope of defeating communism in western Europe was to merge the US, British and French occupation zones and consolidate them into a separate West German state. As this began to take shape, Stalin responded with an 11-month Soviet blockade of Berlin which, in due course, led to the founding of Nato thereby committing the US to the defence of western Europe. The US reversed its policy of withdrawal and instead came up with the Marshall Plan, a massive injection of capital that helped revive the devastated western economies. Bevin was a key player in this.
What made his achievement all the more impressive was that, for much of his time as foreign secretary, Bevin was in poor and deteriorating health. He had a history of heart problems and, like Churchill, smoked and drank too much in defiance of his doctors. By the late 1940s he was at times barely able to climb stairs. He was also exhausted, having been continually in high executive office for nearly 30 years—including a decade in two of the most demanding posts in government at a time of unprecedented crisis.
In March 1951, Attlee reluctantly bowed to the inevitable and replaced Bevin as foreign secretary with his old enemy, Herbert Morrison. By way of consolation Bevin was appointed Lord Privy Seal. Barely a month later he was found dead, propped up in bed, the keys to his ministerial red box in his hand. He had worked until the last moment of his life.
Until now the standard work on Bevin has been Alan Bullock’s massive three-volume biography, which will remain an important source for scholars of Bevin and the age in which he lived. Andrew Adonis, however, has done us a great service with this biography, introducing a new generation to one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century and one whose legacy lives on to this day. It is not a hagiography, however—the judgments are balanced and well sourced.
There is a chapter devoted to Bevin’s failings, not least in Palestine where he resisted attempts to create from the outset a two-state solution, opting instead to relinquish Britain’s UN mandate. He failed to take seriously the Schuman Declaration which would lead to the European Coal and Steel Community and in due course the EU. And he was, to the end of his days, an imperialist committed to the preservation of the Empire in its new guise as a commonwealth. To which I would add—though Adonis does not—the part he played in committing the UK to developing its own nuclear weapons (“we’ve got to have this thing…” he said and “we’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it”), albeit with a view to standing up to the Americans rather than the Russians. Bevin’s critics would argue that he rendered the UK unduly dependent on the US with consequences that are still apparent but, given the stark realities of the post-war era, what choice did he have?
Some will see it as stretching a point to place Bevin, as Adonis does, on the same pedestal as Churchill, but Churchill himself remarked that, after the generals, Bevin did more than anyone to win the war. Although they were cut from very different cloth, they were both right about two of the great issues of the 20th century—the rise of Hitler and the threat posed by communism to western democracies.
In the age of Trump, the west that Bevin helped stitch together may at last be coming apart. This poses the most fundamental questions about Britain’s role in the world since his day, and these are felt especially keenly in a Labour Party where, somewhere along the convulsive journey from Blair to Corbyn, foreign policy became uniquely neuralgic. Adonis concludes by lamenting the absence of any figure who compares with Bevin in the labour movement since, but I am not sure this is reasonable. Although Bevin’s formidable qualities were evident from the 1920s onwards, it took a world war and its aftermath for his full greatness to be recognised. Like Churchill, he was a one-off.
Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill by Andrew Adonis (Biteback, £20)
