Ernest Bevin

Bevin in 1920

Bevin was born in the village of Winsford in Somerset, England, to Diana Bevin who, since 1877, had described herself as a widow. His father is unknown. After his mother's death in 1889, the young Bevin lived with his half-sister's family, moving to Copplestone in Devon. He had little formal education, having briefly attended two village schools and then Hayward's School, Crediton, starting in 1890 and leaving in 1892.[2]

He later recalled being asked as a child to read the newspaper aloud for the benefit of adults in his family who were illiterate. At the age of eleven, he went to work as a labourer, then as a lorry driver in Bristol, where he joined the Bristol Socialist Society. In 1910 he became secretary of the Bristol branch of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers' Union, and in 1914 he became a national organiser for the union.[3]

Bevin was a large, strong man, and by the time of his political prominence, very heavy. He spoke with a strong West Country accent, so much so that on one occasion listeners at Cabinet had difficulty in deciding whether he was talking about "Hugh and Nye (Gaitskell and Bevan)" or "you and I". He had developed his oratorical skills from his time as a Baptist lay preacher, which he had given up as a profession to become a full-time labour activist.[4]

Bevin married Florence Townley, daughter of a wine taster at a Bristol wine merchants. They had one child, a daughter, Queenie Mildred Wynne (6 May 1911 – 31 January 2000). Florence Bevin (died 1968) was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1952.[5]

In 1922 Bevin was one of the founding leaders of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU), which soon became Britain's largest trade union. Upon his election as the union's General Secretary, he became one of the country's leading labour leaders, and their strongest advocate within the Labour Party. Politically, he was on the right-wing of the Labour Party, strongly opposed to communism and direct action—allegedly partly due to anti-Semitic paranoia and seeing communism as a "Jewish plot" against Britain.[6] He took part in the British General Strike in 1926, but without enthusiasm.

Bevin had no great faith in parliamentary politics, but had nevertheless been a member of the Labour Party from the time of its formation, and unsuccessfully fought Bristol Central at the 1918 General Election, being defeated by the Coalition Conservative Thomas Inskip. He had poor relations with the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and was not surprised when MacDonald formed a National Government with the Conservatives during the economic crisis of 1931, for which MacDonald was expelled from the Labour Party.

At the 1931 general election, Bevin was persuaded by the remaining leaders of the Labour Party to contest Gateshead, on the understanding that if successful he would remain as general secretary of the TGWU. The National Government landslide resulted in Gateshead being lost by a large margin to the Liberal National Thomas Magnay.[7]

Bevin was a trade unionist who believed in getting material benefits for his members through direct negotiations, with strike action to be used as a last resort. During the late Thirties, for instance, Bevin helped to instigate a successful campaign by the Trades Union Congress to extend paid holidays to a wider proportion of the workforce.[8] This culminated in the Holidays with Pay Act 1938, which extended entitlement to paid holidays to about 11 million workers by June 1939.[9]

During the 1930s, with the Labour Party split and weakened, Bevin co-operated with the Conservative-dominated National Government on practical issues, but during this period he became increasingly involved in foreign policy. He was a firm opponent of fascism and of British appeasement of the fascist powers.[10] In 1935, arguing that Fascist Italy should be punished by sanctions for her recent invasion of Abyssinia, he made a blistering attack on the pacifists in the Labour Party, accusing the Labour leader George Lansbury at the Party Conference of "hawking his conscience around" asking to be told what to do with it.[11] Bevin's efforts to promote sanctions were successful, with an overwhelming majority of delegates voting in favor of sanctions.[12]

After the vote at the conference. Lansbury resigned and was replaced as leader by his deputy Clement Attlee, who along with Lansbury and Stafford Cripps had been one of only three former Labour Ministers to be re-elected under that party label at the General Election in 1931.[13] After the November 1935 General Election, Herbert Morrison, newly returned to Parliament, challenged Attlee for the leadership but was defeated. In later years, Bevin gave Attlee (whom he privately referred to as "little Clem") staunch support, especially in 1947 when Morrison and Cripps led further intrigue against Attlee.[14]

Sketch of Bevin commissioned by the Ministry of Information in the World War II period

In 1940 Winston Churchill formed an all-party coalition government to run the country during the crisis of World War II. Churchill was impressed by Bevin's opposition to trade-union pacifism and his appetite for work (according to Churchill, Bevin was by 'far the most distinguished man that the Labour Party have thrown up in my time'), and appointed Bevin to the position of Minister of Labour and National Service.[15] As Bevin was not actually an MP at the time, to remove the resulting constitutional anomaly, a parliamentary position was hurriedly found for him and Bevin was elected unopposed to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament (MP) for the London constituency of Wandsworth Central.[16]

The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act gave Bevin complete control over the labour force and the allocation of manpower, and he was determined to use this unprecedented authority not just to help win the war but also to strengthen the bargaining position of trade unions in the postwar future.[17] Bevin once quipped: "They say Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 until 1930. I'm going to be at the Ministry of Labour from 1940 until 1990," suggesting he aspired to have his doctrines remain at the Ministry of Labour as long as Gladstone's economic policies had governed the Treasury's approach. The industrial settlement he introduced remained largely unaltered by successive postwar administrations until the reforms of Margaret Thatcher's government in the early 1980s.

Ernest Bevin standing to the right of Winston Churchill who waves to crowds on Whitehall on VE Day, 8 May 1945, after broadcasting to the nation that the war against Germany had been won.

During the war, Bevin was responsible for diverting nearly 48,000 military conscripts to work in the coal industry (these workers became known as the Bevin Boys) while using his position to secure significant improvements in wages and working conditions for working-class people.[18] He also drew up the demobilisation scheme that ultimately returned millions of military personnel and civilian war workers into the peacetime economy. Bevin remained Minister of Labour until 1945 when Labour left the Coalition government. On VE Day he stood next to Churchill, looking down on the crowd on Whitehall.[19]

Ernest Bevin (left) with Clement Attlee in 1945

Potsdam Conference: Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin, William Daniel Leahy, James F. Byrnes and Harry S. Truman.

After the 1945 general election, Attlee had it in mind to appoint Bevin as Chancellor and Hugh Dalton as Foreign Secretary, but ultimately changed his mind and swapped them round. One of the reasons may well have been the poor relations which existed between Bevin and Herbert Morrison, who was scheduled to play a leading role in Labour domestic policy.[20]

Bevin at the Potsdam Conference

At that time diplomats were recruited from public schools, and it was said of Bevin that it was hard to imagine him filling any other job in the Foreign Office except perhaps that of an old and truculent lift attendant. In praise of Bevin, his Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office (Alexander Cadogan) wrote, "He knows a great deal, is prepared to read any amount, seems to take in what he does read, and is capable of making up his own mind and sticking up for his (and our) point of view against anyone."[15] An alternative view is offered by Charmley, who writes that Bevin read and wrote with some difficulty, and that examination of Foreign Office documents shows little sign of the frequent annotations made by Anthony Eden, suggesting that Bevin preferred to reach most of his decisions after oral discussion with his advisers.[20]

However, Charmley dismisses the concerns of contemporaries such as Charles Webster and Lord Cecil of Chelwood that Bevin, a man of very strong personality, was “in the hands of his officials”. Charmley argues that much of Bevin's success came because he shared the views of those officials: his earlier career had left him with an intense dislike of communists, whom he regarded as workshy intellectuals whose attempts to infiltrate trade unions were to be resisted. His former Private Secretary Oliver Harvey thought Bevin's staunchly anti-Soviet policy was what Eden's would have been had he not been hamstrung, as at the Potsdam Conference, by Churchill's occasional susceptibility to Stalin's flattery, whilst Cadogan thought Bevin “pretty sound on the whole”.[20]

According to Geoffrey Warner:

Bevin's personality was a strange mixture of Jekyll and Hyde. He was adored by his officials, not only because there was never any doubt that foreign policy was made in the Foreign Office while he was its head, but also because he was as solicitous of their welfare and conditions of employment as he had been of those of his union members. His word was universally regarded as his bond and his loyalty once given was unstinting. At the same time, as even his admirers have conceded, he was long-winded, vain, vindictive, profoundly suspicious, and prejudiced against—among others and in no particular order—Jews, Germans, Roman Catholics, and intellectuals of all kinds, groups that, when taken together, comprised a large proportion of those with whom he had to deal.[21]

Empire

British Empire and Commonwealth in 1945

Bevin was unsentimental about the British Empire in places where the growth of nationalism had made direct rule no longer practicable, and was part of the Cabinet which approved a speedy British withdrawal from India in 1947, and from neighbouring colonies. Yet at this stage Britain still maintained a network of client states in the Middle East (Egypt until 1952, Iraq and Jordan until 1959), major bases in such places as Cyprus and Suez (until 1956) and expected to remain in control of parts of Africa for many more years, Bevin approving the construction of a huge new base in East Africa. Bevin wrote “we have the material resources in the Colonial Empire, if we develop them … which will show clearly that we are not subservient to the United States … or to the Soviet Union”. In this era colonial exports earned $150m a year, mostly Malayan rubber, West African cocoa, and sugar and sisal from the West Indies. By the end of 1948 colonial exports were 50% higher than before the war, whilst in the first half of 1948 colonial exports accounted for 10.4% of Britain's imports. After the war Britain helped France and the Netherlands recover their Far Eastern empires in the French Indochina and Dutch East Indies, hopeful that this could lead towards the formation of a third superpower bloc. Bevin agreed with Duff Cooper (British Ambassador in Paris) that the Dunkirk Treaty would be a step in this direction and thought that Eden's objection – in 1944 when Cooper first proposed it – that such moves might alienate the Soviets no longer applied.[30]

In December 1947 Bevin hoped (in vain) that the USA would support Britain's “strategic, political and economic position in the Middle East”. In May 1950 Bevin told the London meeting of foreign ministers that “the United States authorities had recently seemed disposed to press us to adopt a greater measure of economic integration with Europe than we thought wise” (he was referring to the Schuman Plan to set up the European Coal and Steel Community). In May 1950 he said that, because of links with the US and the Commonwealth, Britain was “different in character from other European nations and fundamentally incapable of wholehearted integration with them”.[31]

Palestine and Israel

The security zone in Jerusalem was dubbed "Bevingrad" during Bevin's term in the Foreign Office

Bevin was Foreign Secretary during the period when the Mandate of Palestine ended and the State of Israel was created. Bevin failed to secure the stated British objectives in this area of foreign policy, which included a peaceful settlement of the situation and the avoidance of involuntary population transfers. Regarding Bevin's handling of the Middle East situation, at least one commentator, David Leitch, has suggested that Bevin lacked diplomatic finesse.[38]

Leitch argued that Bevin tended to make a bad situation worse by making ill-chosen abrasive remarks. Bevin was undeniably a plain-spoken man, some of whose remarks struck many as insensitive. Critics have accused him of being anti-Semitic. One remark which caused particular anger was made when President Truman was pressing Britain to immediately admit 100,000 Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust who wanted to immigrate to Palestine. Bevin told a Labour Party meeting that American pressure to admit Jews was being applied because "There has been agitation in the United States, and particularly in New York, for 100,000 Jews to be put in Palestine. I hope I will not be misunderstood in America if I say that this was proposed by the purest of motives. They did not want too many Jews in New York."[39] He was merely restating what he said he had been told by James F. Byrnes, the United States Secretary of State.[15]

For refusing to remove limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine in the aftermath of the war, Bevin earned the hatred of Zionists. According to historian Howard Sachar, his political foe, Richard Crossman, a fellow Labour Party member of parliament and a pro-Zionist member of the post-war Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, characterised his outlook during the dying days of the Mandate as "corresponding roughly with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a Tsarist fabrication written to inflame anti-Semitic prejudice. In Sachar's account, Crossman intimated that "the main points of Bevin's discourse were ... that the Jews had successfully organised a conspiracy against Britain and against him personally."[40][41] Bevin's biographer Alan Bullock rejected suggestions that Bevin was motivated by personal anti-Semitism.[42]

Count Folke Bernadotte's funeral September 1948: From left: Sir Alexander Cadogan, Ernest Bevin, George Marshall, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Britain's economic weakness and its dependence on the financial support of the United States (Britain had received a large American loan in 1946 and the Marshall Plan began in mid-1947), left him little alternative but to yield to American pressure over Palestine policy. At the reconvened London Conference in January 1947, the Jewish negotiators were only prepared to accept partition and the Arab negotiators only a unitary state (which would automatically have had an Arab majority). Neither would accept limited autonomy under British rule. When no agreement could be reached, Bevin threatened to hand the problem over to the United Nations. The threat failed to move either side, the Jewish representatives because they believed that Bevin was bluffing and the Arabs because they believed that their cause would prevail before the General Assembly. Bevin accordingly announced that he would "ask the UN to take the Palestine question into consideration."[43]

A week later, the strategic logic of Britain retaining a presence in Palestine was removed when the intention to withdraw from India in August of that year was announced.[43] The decision to allow the United Nations to dictate the future of Palestine was formalised by the Attlee government's public declaration in February 1947 that Britain's Mandate in Palestine had become "unworkable." Of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine which resulted, Bevin commented: "The majority proposal is so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how, in Sir Alexander Cadogan's words, 'we could reconcile it with our conscience.' "[44]

During the remainder of the Mandate, fighting between the Jewish and Arab communities intensified. The end of the Mandate and Britain's final withdrawal from Palestine was marked by the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when five Arab states intervened in the inter-communal fighting. The Arab armies were led by Jordan, the most effective state, whose military forces were trained and led by British officers.[45] The war ended with Israel, in addition to the territory assigned by the UN for the creation of a Jewish state, also in control of much of the Mandate territory which had been assigned by the UN for the creation of an Arab state. The remainder was divided between Jordan and Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of, overwhelmingly Arab, civilians had become displaced.[46]

Bevin was infuriated by attacks on British troops carried out by the more extreme of the Jewish militant groups, the Irgun and Lehi, commonly known as the Stern Gang. The Haganah carried out less direct attacks, until the King David Hotel bombing, after which it restricted itself to illegal immigration activities.[43] According to declassified MI6 files, the Irgun and Lehi attempted to assassinate Bevin himself in 1946.[47][48][49]

Bevin negotiated the Portsmouth Treaty with Iraq (signed on 15 January 1948), which, according to the Iraqi foreign minister Muhammad Fadhel al-Jamali, was accompanied by a British undertaking to withdraw from Palestine in such a fashion as to provide for swift Arab occupation of all its territory.[50]

Bust of Ernest Bevin in Southwark, South London

Owing to failing health, Bevin reluctantly allowed himself to be appointed Lord Privy Seal in March 1951. "I am neither a Lord, nor a Privy, nor a Seal", he is said to have commented.[51] He died from a heart attack[52] in the following month, still holding the key to his red box. His ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.

When, on Stafford Cripps's death in 1952, Attlee (by this time Leader of the Opposition) was invited to broadcast a tribute by the BBC, he was looked after by announcer Frank Phillips. After the broadcast, Phillips took Attlee to the hospitality room for a drink and in order to make conversation said:

"I suppose you will miss Sir Stafford, sir."
Attlee fixed him with his eye: "Did you know Ernie Bevin?"
"I have met him, sir," Phillips replied.
"There's the man I miss."

James Chuter Ede, Home Secretary throughout the time that Bevin was at the Foreign Office (and for a few months after his death), had worked with Churchill, Attlee, Keynes and many other significant figures. When Bevin's biographer, Alan Bullock, asked Chuter Ede for his view of Bevin, he replied:[53]

"Was he the biggest man I met in the Labour movement? He was the biggest man I met in any movement."

A bust of Bevin has been placed opposite Devon Mansions and the former St Olave's Grammar School in Tooley Street, South London. Bevin was offered many honours as his reputation grew, but declined all of them.[54]

Martin Folly argues that assessments on Bevin as foreign secretary divide into two schools.[55] After the opening of the British archives, historians, led by biographer Alan Bullock celebrated Bevin as one of the great men in British diplomatic history.[56] They argued he dominated foreign-policy, led the Foreign Office by strength of character and clarity of vision, and carried through on his grand design for Britain's revised role in world affairs, especially in close alliance with the United States, his support for NATO, and his rejection of an alternative of Britain as a neutral third force as advocated by the left wing of his party. He succeeded in convincing the United States to take over some of Britain's burdens, especially in Greece. He thereby became a major influence in pushing the United States into a leadership role through the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Cold War. However, a revisionist approach appeared in the late 1980s. It portrays Bevin as a narrow-minded anti-Communist and gives more credit to the Foreign Office for the new foreign-policy. In this interpretation, Bevin lost the opportunity to make Britain a leader in European affairs, and it instead became more of a tail on the American kite.[57]

• Aneurin Bevan, a rival minister in the same Labour government; he was to the left of Bevin
• Ernest Bevin College
• History of trade unions in the United Kingdom
• SS Exodus
• Information Research Department (IRD)

• Adonis, Andrew. Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill (Biteback Publishing, 2020).
• Bullock, Alan. The Life & Times of Ernest Bevin: Volume One: Trade Union Leader 1881 – 1940 (1960); The life and times of Ernest Bevin: volume two Minister of Labour 1940–1945 (1967); The life and times of Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, 1945–1951 (1983) online
  • Alan Bullock's magisterial three-volume biography was re-published in a single-volume abridged version by Politicos Publishing in 2002.
• Charmley, John (1996). Churchill's Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship 1940–57. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 978-0-340-59760-6. OCLC 247165348.[Discusses Bevin's policies apropos of Anglo-American relations of the era]
• Deighton, Anne. "Entente Neo-Coloniale?: Ernest Bevin and the Proposals for an Anglo–French Third World Power, 1945–1949," Diplomacy & Statecraft (2006) 17#4 pp 835–852. Bevin in 1945–49 advocated cooperation with France as the base of a "Third World Power," which would be a third strategic center of power in addition to the United States and the Soviet Union.
• Folly, Martin H. "‘The impression is growing...that the United States is hard when dealing with us’: Ernest Bevin and Anglo-American relations at the dawn of the cold war." Journal of Transatlantic Studies 10#2 (2012): 150–166.
• Goodlad, Graham. "Attlee, Bevin and Britain's Cold War," History Review (2011), Issue 69, pp 1–6
• Greenwood, Sean. "Bevin, the Ruhr and the Division of Germany: August 1945 – December 1946," Historical Journal (1986) 29#1 pp 203–212. Argues that Bevin saw the Ruhr as the centerpiece of his strategy for the industrial revitalisation of Europe. He insisted on keeping the Soviets out, and this position made him one of the principal architects of a divided Germany. in JSTOR
• Inman, P.F. Labour in the munitions industries (1957), official WW2 history.
• Jones, J. Graham (2001). "Ernest Bevin and the General Strike". Llafur. 8 (2): 97–103.
• Denis MacShane contributed an essay on Bevin to the Dictionary of Labour Biography, Greg Rosen (ed), Politicos Publishing, 2001.
• Ferdinand Mount, "The Importance of Being Ernie" (review of Andrew Adonis, Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, Biteback, July 2020, 352 pp., ISBN 978 1 78590 598 8), London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 21 (5 November 2020), pp. 27–28.
• Ovendale, R. ed. The foreign policy of the British labour governments, 1945–51 (1984) ·
• Parker, H. M. D. Manpower: a study of war-time policy and administration (1957), official WW2 history.
• Pearce, Robert. "Ernest Bevin: Robert Pearce Examines the Career of the Man Who Was Successively Trade Union Leader, Minister of Labour and Foreign Secretary" History Review (Dec 2002) online
• Pearce, Robert. "Ernest Bevin" in Kevin Jefferys, ed., Labour Forces: From Ernie Bevin to Gordon Brown (2002) pp 7–24
• Saville, J. The politics of continuity: British foreign policy and the Labour government, 1945–46 (1993)·
• Stephens, Mark. Ernest Bevin – Unskilled Labourer and World Statesman (1981)·
• Vickers, Rhiannon. The Labour Party and the world, volume 1: The evolution of Labour's foreign policy, 1900–51 (Manchester UP, 2010). online free
• Warner, Geoffrey. "Ernest Bevin and British Foreign Policy, 1945–1951" in The Diplomats, 1939–1979 ed. by Gordon A. Craig and Francis L. Loewenheim. (Princeton UP, 1994) pp. 103–134 online
• Weiler, Peter. "Britain and the First Cold War: Revisionist Beginnings," Twentieth Century British History (1998) 9#1 pp 127–138 reviews arguments of revisionist historians who downplay Bevin's personal importance in starting the Cold War and instead emphasise British efforts to use the Cold War to perpetuate imperial regional interests, through containment of radical national movements, and to oppose American aggrandisement.
• Williams, Francis. Ernest Bevin: Portrait of a Great Englishman (Hutchinson, 1952) online
• Wrigley, Chris. "Bevin, Ernest (1881–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, January 2008 accessed 2 June 2013 doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31872; brief scholarly biography

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ernest Bevin.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Ernest Bevin.

• Chanter, Alan; Chen, Peter (2007). "WW2DB: Ernest Bevin". Retrieved 4 November 2007.
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Ernest-Bevin
• Peter Day. Jewish terrorists plotted to assassinate Ernest Bevin in 1946, The Sunday Times, 5 March 2006.
• From the hedgerows of Devon to the Foreign Office – Roger Steer.
• Annotated bibliography for Ernest Bevin from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues Archived 5 May 2010 at the Wayback Machine
• Catalogue of Bevin's trade union papers, held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick
• "Archival material relating to Ernest Bevin". UK National Archives.
• Portraits of Ernest Bevin at the National Portrait Gallery, London
• Newspaper clippings about Ernest Bevin in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW