Ernest Bevin

Ernest Bevin (9 March 1881 - 14 April 1951) was a British labour leader, politician, and statesman best known for his time as Minister of Labour in the war-time coalition government, and as Foreign Secretary in the post-war Labour government.

Early life

Bevin was born in the small village of Winsford in Somerset, England. His father, whom he never knew, was an agricultural labourer and his mother was a housemaid who died when he was eight. He had little formal education, leaving school in Crediton, Devon in 1890. At the age of eleven he went to work as a labourer, then as a truck driver in Bristol, where joined the Bristol Socialist Society. In 1910 he became secretary of the Bristol branch of the Dockers' Union, and in 1914 he became a national organiser for the union.

Transport and General Workers Union

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 country's leading labour leaders, and their strongest advocate within the Labour Party. Politically, he was a moderate socialist, strongly opposed to communism and direct action. 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. He had poor relations with the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and was not surprised when MacDonald defected and allied with the Conservatives during the economic crisis of 1931. Bevin was a pragmatic trade unionist who believed in getting material benefits for his members through direct negotiations, with strike action to be used as a last resort.

Foreign policy interests

During the 1930s, with the Labour Party split and weakened, Bevin co-operated with the Conservative 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. In 1935 he made a blistering attack on the pacifists in the Labour Party, leading to the resignation of Labour leader George Lansbury and his replacement by Clement Attlee.

Ministerial office

In 1940 Winston Churchill formed an all-party coalition government to defend the country in the crisis of World War II. As part of this he appointed Bevin to the position of Minister for Labour and National Service. He was determined to make his mark in office and 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." In this post he became the director of Britain's wartime domestic economy. The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act gave him complete control over the labour force and the allocation of manpower. During this period Bevin was responsible for diverting nearly 48,000 draftees away from military service to work in the coal industry. These workers became known as the Bevin Boys. Shortly after his appointment Bevin was elected unopposed to the House of Commons for the London constituency of Wandsworth Central.

Foreign Secretary

Bevin remained Minister of Labour until 1945 when Labour left the Coalition government. 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. Some claim that he was persuaded by King George VI to do so; but others note that whoever was Chancellor would have to work with Herbert Morrison, with whom Bevin did not get on. Indeed, it was once noted that Bevin, on overhearing a (supposed) private conversation in which somebody commented "the trouble with Herbert [Morrison] is that he is his own worst enemy", immediately responded with a booming "Not while I'm alive he ain't!"

Just days after Labour's 1945 landslide election victory which effectively established Bevin as the Foreign Secretary, he was shown to his desk in the Foreign Office late on a Friday afternoon by two old-fashioned civil servants who expected him to be totally overwhelmed by the mass of red ministerial boxes which awaited him. The civil servants explained to Bevin that this was unfinished business left over from his predecessor and he should read the papers in each box and sign them accordingly. Bevin was told to take his time and go through them at his own pace and was even offered the choice to take the boxes home if he so desired. On resuming work the following Monday morning the two civil servants rushed to Bevin's office and expected to see him slumped over his desk in a state of total exhaustion. Instead, they found the boxes as they had left them on the previous Friday with a note which simply stated "nice thought, but erroneous"!

Bevin became Foreign Secretary at a time when Britain was almost bankrupt as a result of the war and could no longer afford to maintain its overseas Empire. Bevin was unsentimental about the British Empire, and approved an immediate British withdrawal from India and other territories.

In 1945, Bevin advocated the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, saying in the House of Commons that "There should be a study of a house directly elected by the people of the world to whom the nations are accountable."

Bevin was a determined anti-Communist, and was a strong supporter of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. Two of the key institutions of the post-war world, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Marshall Plan for aid to post-war Europe, were in considerable part the result of Bevin's efforts during these years.

Bevin once defined his foreign policy as the type which would allow him to "go to Victoria station and buy a ticket to anywhere I damn please".

Bevin, Palestine and Israel

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

As Foreign Secretary, Bevin failed to secure British objectives in the British Mandated Territory of Palestine. Personally, Bevin was opposed to the plans of the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state, and supported the creation of a unitary and exclusively Arab state in western Palestine.

When dealing with the Middle East situation, some commentators have suggested that Bevin lacked diplomatic finesse. This critique argues that Bevin had a tendency to make a bad situation worse by employing ill-chosen abrasive remarks, and his obstinacy in adhering to policies which were a public relations disaster, including the policy of returning Jewish Holocaust survivors who tried to enter Palestine back to the Displaced Persons camps in Europe. Bevin was infuriated by the refusal of the USA to open its doors to more Jewish displaced persons.

Bevin was undeniably a plain-spoken man, some of whose remarks struck many as insensitive, but his biographer, Alan Bullock rejects suggestions that he was motivated by personal Anti-Semitism.

Bevin was infuriated by attacks on British troops by dissident Zionist groups, particularly those made by Menachem Begin's Irgun and Avraham Stern's Lehi. However, 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 mid-1947 was to see the launching of the Marshall Plan), left him little alternative but to yield to American pressure and allow the United Nations to determine Palestine's future, a decision formalized by the Attlee government's public declaration in February 1947 that Britain's Mandate in Palestine had become "unworkable." The Arab states intervened immediately following Britain's withdrawal, but failed to suppress the Jewish state despite British intervention.

One perspective on Bevin's stance is provided by Howard Sachar,

"An insight into the foreign secretary's mentality was provided by Richard Grossman (sic) [possibly a reference to the pro-Zionist Labour MP Richard Crossman ], who met with him on August 4, 1947, and afterward described Bevin's outlook as corresponding roughly with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic canard of the 1920s. The main points of Bevin's discourse were ... that the Jews had successfully organized a worldwide conspiracy against Britain and against him personally."

For his part, Bevin had deep disagreements with Crossman, one of the leading Zionists within the Labour Party: "Nothing I can say will make him alter his ideas about Palestine which derive from his lack of judgement and his intellectual arrogance."

One of Bevin's last comments on the topic was: "The majority proposal is so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how we could reconcile it with our conscience."

Later life

His health failing, Bevin moved to become Lord Privy Seal in March 1951. He died the following month. He died still holding the key to his red box. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Legacy

Bevin in office showed the same pragmatism combined with stubbornness that had characterised his years as a trade union leader. Like Churchill, he was an old fashioned English (as opposed to British) patriot, which was why the two leaders worked well together. But he was also an internationalist, a supporter of the American alliance and European unity. He saw clearly that Britain's days of imperial greatness were over, something he did not regret since, he said, the working class had never benefitted from the Empire.

Yet his most lasting legacy was the utter failure of his Palestine policy.

References

www.westminster-abbey.org

Further reading

• Alan Bullock's magisterial three-volume biography Life and Times of Ernest Bevin was re-published in a single-volume abridged version by Politicos Publising in 2002.
• Denis MacShane contributed an essay on Bevin to the Dictionary of Labour Biography, Greg Rosen (ed), Politicos Publishing, 2001.

See also

• Aneurin Bevan
• Ernest Bevin College
• Bevin Boys

External links

• The Ernest Bevin Society
• Peter Day. Jewish terrorists plotted to assassinate Ernest Bevin in 1946, The Sunday Times, March 5, 2006.
• British Security Service files on Jewish terrorist activities, The National Archives, released through Freedom of information legislation in March 2006.