(1) Aneurin Bevan, The Daily Express (1932)
In other trades there are a thousand diversions to break the monotony of work - the passing traffic, the morning newspaper, above all, the sky, the sunshine, the wind and the rain. The miner has none of these. Every day for eight hours he dies, gives up a slice of his life, literally drops out of life and buries himself. The alarum or the "knocker-up" calls him from his bed at half past four. He makes his way to the pithead. The streets are full of shadows with white faces and black-rimmed sunken eyes.
Down below are the sudden perils - runaway trams hurtling down the lines, frightened ponies kicking and mauling in the dark, explosions, fire, drowning. And if he escapes? There is a tiredness as the reward of exertion, a physical blessing which makes sleep a matter of relaxed limbs and muscles. This is the tiredness of the miner, particularly of the boy of fourteen or fifteen who falls asleep over his meals and wakes up hours later to find that his evening has gone and there is nothing before him but bed and another day's wrestling with inert matter.
(2) In 1921 Aneurin Bevan wrote an article in Plebs Magazine on the Communist Manifesto.
The Communist Manifesto stands in a class by itself in Socialist literature. No indictment of the social order ever written can rival it. The largeness of its conception, its profound philosophy and its sure grasp of history, its aphorisms and its satire, all these make it a classic of literature, while the note of passionate revolt which pulses through it, no less than its critical appraisement of the forces of revolt, make it for all rebels an inspiration and a weapon.
(3) Aneurin Bevan wrote about his first impressions of the House of Commons in his book In Place of Fear (1952)
The House of Commons is like a church. The vaulted roofs and stained glass windows, the rows of statues of great statesmen of the past, the echoing halls, the soft-footed attendants and the whispered conversations, contrast depressingly with the crowded meetings and the clang and clash of hot opinions he has just left behind in the election campaign. Here he is, a tribune of the people, coming to make his voice heard in the seats of power. Instead, it seems he is expected to worship; and the most conservative of all religions - ancestor worship.
(4) In her book, Tomorrow is a New Day Jennie Lee described how she and Aneurin heard that war had been declared in 1939.
Aneurin and I were at the cottage that Sunday in September when war was declared. We tuned into the one o'clock news for official confirmation that the fight had really begun. We had discussed all this so often and so much. Now at last it had come. Our enemy Hitler had become the national enemy. All those who hated fascism would have their chance to fight back. No more one-sided massing of all the wealth, influence and arms of international reaction against the workers of first one country then another. I thought of Spain. I had a guilty feeling about Spain. I said something to Aneurin that must have indicated the drift of my thoughts. He had been pacing up and down our long, low, white-washed cottage room, for once too excited for words. He stopped walking up and down to rummage in a corner among a disorderly pile of gramophone records. He found what he was looking for. He found records we had not dared to play for more than a year: the marching songs of the Spanish Republican armies.
(5) The Western Mail (December, 1941)
Every mannerism that he (Aneurin Bevan) cultivates, every speech he delivers, even the expression he wears in the most familiar photographs, bear witness to a profound consciousness of his own superiority. Socialists may believe in the equality of other folk, but Mr. Bevan always conveys the impression of living at a greater intellectual attitude than the rest of the miners' leaders.
(6) In March 1942 the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, threatened to ban the Daily Mirror after it published a cartoon by Philip Zec that criticised war profiteering. In the House of Commons Bevan defended Zec's cartoon.
I do not like the Daily Mirror and I have never liked it. I do not see it very often. I do not like that form of journalism. I do not like the strip-tease artists. If the Daily Mirror depended upon my purchasing it, it would never be sold. But the Daily Mirror has not been warned because people do not like that kind of journalism. It is not because the Home Secretary is aesthetically repelled by it that he warns it. I have heard a number of honourable members say that it is a hateful paper, a tabloid paper, a hysterical paper, a sensational paper, and that they do not like it. I am sure the Home Secretary does not take that view. He likes the paper. He is taking its money (waves cuttings of articles written by Morrison for the Daily Mirror).
He (Morrison) is the wrong man to be Home Secretary. He has for many years the witch-finder of the Labour Party. He has been the smeller-out of evil spirits in the Labour Party for years. He built up his reputation by selecting people in the Labour Party for expulsion and suppression. He is not a man to be entrusted with these powers because, however suave his utterance, his spirit is really intolerant. I say with all seriousness and earnestness that I am deeply ashamed that a member of the Labour Party should be an instrument of this sort of thing.
How can we call on the people of this country and speak about liberty if the Government are doing all they can to undermine it? The Government are seeking to suppress their critics. The only way for the Government to meet their critics is to redress the wrongs from which the people are suffering and to put their policy right.
(7) Aneurin Bevan, Tribune (23rd April, 1942)
The Government has tried everything to solve the problem of the mining industry. Semi-starvation, imprisonment, extortions, threats, the supplications of the miners' leaders, and what is almost the omnipotence of Churchill's oratory - all have failed. There is one thing they have not tried. They haven't tried getting rid of the coalowners. For the one truth the Government have not learned. You can get coal without coalowners, but you cannot get coal without miners. Let us not lose heart. The miners will teach it them one day.
(8) Aneurin Bevan, Tribune (January, 1944)
As Socialists we are bound to in duty to support Soviet Russia when it acts as a progressive Socialist power. But it is equally our Socialist obligation to raise our voice against any attempts of the strong as trampling over the rights of the weak. As Socialists we fight the reactionary ambitions and claims of the Poles; but we must defend Poland's right to self-determination and independence just as we defend the rights of any other nation oppressed or threatened by oppression.
(9) Barbara Castle, Fighting All The Way (1993)
As news of these feats of endurance seeped through to Britain the suspicion began to grow that some people in the British establishment would not be too unhappy to see Russia expend herself unaided in tying Hitler down, and the clamour for the opening of a second front to relieve Russia's agony grew in intensity. Aneurin Bevan was its most vociferous advocate both in the columns of Tribune and in Parliament. He was rapidly emerging as the most challenging figure on the left of politics, a thorn in the flesh of the Labour leadership and the favourite bogeyman of the right-wing press. He was politically and physically the product of the South Wales mining community from which he sprang; of stocky build and defiant temperament he was blessed with the gift of Welsh oratory that could encapsulate the experience of less articulate people in a vivid phrase. He once summed up his socialism with the words, "You can get coal without coal owners, but you cannot get coal without miners." It was the sort of phrase to set alight the political imagination of the most moderate. He had climbed from the pits to Parliament by fighting the coal owners and it had left him with bitter memories of the struggles he and his fellow miners had had to wage.
This bitterness was to be the source of both his strength and his weaknesses. He came into Parliament with a heavy sense of responsibility to the people among whom he had grown up and to his own class, and it gave him an outsize courage which few other politicians possessed. I did not know him well personally at that time but I was stirred by the accounts of his one-man battles in the House with Churchill the Goliath. The audacity of it was breathtaking, for Churchill was our war leader at the peak of his authority and a hero to everyone else.
Aneurin also deeply distrusted Churchill politically. He had warmly supported his replacement of Chamberlain, but was shocked when he proceeded to appease the appeasers by keeping so many of them in his War Cabinet. Even Chamberlain was retained as Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House, while the arch-Municheer, Lord Halifax, remained Foreign Secretary. Nor could Nye forgive Churchill's sudden assumption of the leadership of the Conservative Party in the middle of the war.
(10) Aneurin Bevan, speech at a Labour Party meeting (July, 1945)
There is no absence of knowledge, there is no lack of wisdom, as to what to do in Great Britain. What is lacking is that the power lies in the wrong hands and the will to do it is not there. We want to tell our friends on the other side that the men in the Services are not going to allow a repetition of what happened between the wars. We are not going to allow our financial resources to be sent all over the world, and idleness and starvation to exist in Great Britain. And we warn them we are entering this fight with this in our hearts. We were brought up between the two wars in the distressed areas of this country, and we have such biting and bitter memories we will never be erased until the Tories are destroyed on every political platform in the country. We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, now we are the builders. We enter this campaign at this general election, not merely to get rid of the Tory majority. We want the complete political extinction of the Tory Party.
(11) In her book My Life With Nye, Jennie Lee describes how one woman responded to the introduction of the National Health Service.
There was a strict rule in Nye's Ministry that any unsolicited gifts sent to him should be promptly returned. On one occasion, and only one, an exception was made. Nye brought home a letter containing a white silk handkerchief with crochet round the edge. The hanky was for me. The letter was from an elderly Lancashire lady, unmarried, who had worked in the cotton mills from the age of twelve. She was overwhelmed with gratitude for the dentures and reading glasses she had received free of charge. The last sentence in her letter read, "Dear God, reform thy world beginning with me," but the words that hurt most were, "Now I can go into any company." The life-long struggle against poverty which these words revealed is what made all the striving worthwhile.
(12) Fred Copeman, Reason in Revolt (1948)
It is no accident that Nye, born in the mining valleys of Wales, should be the most popular leader in the Labour Movement today. The new Health Bill could have no better champion. Fearless in debate, brilliantly intelligent in the political field, I have always been able to call Nye my friend, and am honoured to do so. We have had our battles (what Chairman of Housing worth his salt hasn't had them with the Minister of Health ?) but I always found him big enough to fight clean. I shall always remember a small incident at the reception given by the General Council of the T.U.C. at Norwich. I was introduced to Aneurin Bevan and he immediately asked me to go and get him a drink, in what I thought a rather high and mighty way. Feeling my position as Brigade Commander, I told him, " Go and get your own bloody drink." He laughed and replied, " All right, lad, and I'll get one for you too." I've looked back on this small incident as a rather bad show of conceit on my part and darned good nature on his. Nye keeps his enthusiasm burning. Above all he refuses to be drawn from the level of those who nurtured him - the workers. No fur coats here, nor top hats; I notice these things and so do millions of other workers. Ideologies are built on big ideas and simple actions, they start and finish with individuals.
(13) Harold Wilson, Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
Hugh Gaitskell had many fine qualities, including unswerving loyalty to his close band of friends and to the principles of economics as he interpreted them, together with great personal charm. But once he came to a decision, a remarkably speedy process associated with great certainty, the Medes and the Persians had nothing on him. Whether the argument took place in the Cabinet, or later in the Shadow Cabinet or the National Executive, any colleague taking a different line from his was regarded not only as an apostate, but as a troublemaker or simply a person lacking in brains.
Hugh Gaitskell and Nye Bevan were as temperamentally and politically opposed to one another as it was possible to be within a single political party. I had relations of fairly long standing with both of them. I had first come close to Nye during my housing stint at the Ministry of Works, although it had taken time for the relationship to develop. Nye was suspicious of university-trained MPs, particularly those from Oxford and above all economists, but I had broken down that barrier and we had great confidence in each other. I had early developed an admiration for Hugh Gaitskell's qualities and in many way we were intellectual partners. He was more doctrinaire and I was more of a pragmatist.
One other fact soon became clear about Hugh. He was certainly ambitious, and had close links with the right-wing trade unions. It was not long before that ambition took the form of a determination to outmanoeuvre, indeed humiliate, Aneurin Bevan. Hugh, for his part, despised what he regarded as emotional oratory, and if he could defeat Nye in open conflict, he would be in a strong position to oust Morrison as the heir apparent to Clement Attlee. At the same time he would ensure that post-war socialism would take a less dogmatic form, totally anti-communist but unemotional.
(14) Herbert Morrison, An Autobiography (1960)
At a private meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the early autumn of 1948 the subject of Bevan's 'vermin' reference came up. It will be all too well remembered that at an otherwise unimportant gathering at Manchester in July Bevan had recalled the burning hatred he had felt during his youth for the Tories. "So far as I am concerned," he had finished, "they are lower than vermin."
This remark came not long after he had said, at a pre-conference rally at Blackpool in May, that the British press was the most prostituted in the world. Not unnaturally the journalists were both voluntarily, and probably by editorial order, on the watch for the slightest chance to lambast their accuser and the result was headlines for the 'vermin' statement.
At the meeting I said that the best thing for the cause of socialism would have been for some prominent Tory to have called us vermin. Bevan was extremely annoyed at this and worked himself into a high pitch of indignation at the fuss being made about what he called an unimportant comment. Its importance or unimportance was perhaps better left to the opinion of Laski, an expert in making such estimates, who put the Tory gain from the 'vermin' slight at two million votes. I do not regard this as an exaggeration.
In face of the continued refusal of his colleagues to dismiss the words as unimportant Bevan fell back on the suggestion that he had been misreported. I am afraid that on occasion he is an expert in saying things which the shorthand writers seem to get wrong. I believe that he genuinely believes that he said something else and his more excitable and ill-advised outbursts must to some extent be forgiven because of his temperament. At a political meeting he lives as part of his audience. He is partly its master and partly its creature. When he is speaking to an audience which is almost entirely on his side there is applause for something he says which finds favour. This goes to his head and he is tempted against his better judgment to say something more to the audience's liking in order to transform the applause into an ovation.
(15) Aneurin Bevan, letter to Richard Stafford Cripps (July, 1950)
I have made it clear to you, the Prime Minister, and Gaitskell that I consider the imposition of charges on any part of the Health Service raises issues of such seriousness and fundamental importance that I could never agree to it. If it were decided by the Government to impose them, my resignation would automatically follow. Despite this, spokesmen of the Treasury and you have not hesitated to press this so-called solution upon the Government. But surely it must be apparent to you that it can hardly create friendly relations if, in spite of the knowledge of how seriously I regard this question, you continue to press it. I am not such a hypocrite that I can pretend to have amiable discourses with people who are entirely indifferent to my most strongly held opinions.
(16) John Freeman letter to Aneurin Bevan (April, 1950)
The Budget is popular in the Parliamentary Party, even among those who have indicated sympathy for your point of view. It will be popular, though perhaps less so, in the Labour movement in the country. If you resign now on the Budget there will be amazement as well as anger among our colleagues, and the consequences to the Party which would in any circumstances be extremely grave, will be catastrophic. Your own position, and the views we share will be, for some time ahead, seriously compromised. The impending election will find us disunited, without policy and with the reactionaries in full charge of the Party machine which will be used unscrupulously against you and those who stand with you. The result will be a debacle of 1931 proportions - and little or nothing gained.
If you could find some way of not making your resignation public at this moment and on this issue, you would not lack the opportunities in coming weeks - perhaps even days - to go out on an issue to which millions of Labour supporters would rally enthusiastically - the drive towards war, the absence of any coherent foreign policy, the inflationary and anti-working class character of our rearmament economies. The split on all this would be just as big; we should still probably lose the election, though not by so much; but three-quarters of the Labour movement would rally to you, and would hold the initiative and have a good chance of capturing the machine. I beg you to think long and earnestly before you throw away this tremendous opportunity which I believe to be close at hand.
(17) Aneurin Bevan, letter to Clement Attlee explaining why he was resigning (April, 1951)
It is wrong (to impose national health charges) because it is the beginning of the destruction of those social services in which Labour has taken a special pride and which were giving to Britain the moral leadership of the world.
(18) Harold Wilson, Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
The Shadow Cabinet passed a resolution for the approval of Labour MPs, forbidding the Bevanites to continue meeting as a group. This was carried by 188 to fifty-one. A further fifty-three were either absent or abstained. Looking back on these extraordinary events, I am certain that if a government nowadays, Conservative or Labour, were to issue such a ukase, the matter would be raised in the House of Commons as involving an issue of privilege and its reference to the relevant committee would lead to strictures on, and possibly the expulsion from Parliament of, the instigators.
I chaired the final meeting of the banned organization and issued this statement: "We deplore this resolution for three reasons. It is illiberal. It is based on allegations which are not true. It is prejudicial to Party unity." I argued that the resolution was unprecedented in parliamentary history. For anyone to assert that MPs should not meet without approval from on high, gave to the Party machine a power which it had never sought to exercise before. We were not, I proclaimed, a "party within a party". The leadership's move was completely based on insincerity. The Gaitskellites continued with their own meetings.
(19) Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall (1985)
Bevan and Jennie Lee stayed with us in Belgrade for a day or two. Plump, with a florid face and light blue "Welsh" eyes, prematurely gray, Bevan expounded his views slowly and patiently. But along with that went an inquiring mind, quick response, and sparkling wit. The qualities I most liked in him were the unconventionality of his sharp intelligence and a faith in socialism that was that of a man of the people, primordial, unshakable.
Between Bevan and me there was a curious affinity in our perception of the crisis into which both variants of socialism, Western and Eastern, were plunging. We both believed in moral boundaries in politics, though politics as such neither can nor need be moral. Those boundaries do not coincide with the striving for truth, but they are not totally distinct from it either. The later conjectures and charges that Bevan influenced me are untrue. Those charges were officially denied in Tito's letter to Bevan after accounts with me had been settled.
To the end, Bevan and Jennie Lee stubbornly protested against the pressures brought to bear on me, and he turned for help to the Socialist International. His death in 1960, while I was in prison, hit me like the loss of a very close friend. Other friends had long since abandoned me, and I had been anathematized by many. With me, affinities in viewpoint always blend with personal affection. When I first left prison, I dedicated my book Conversations with Stalin to Bevan, repaying as best I could the debt I owed this faithful and constant fighter.
Jennie Lee differed from her husband, not so much in the principles she stood for as in her way of interpreting them. More reserved, not as rhetorical, she was sharper and harder than her husband, who in his early youth had been a miner, whereas she had had a university education. For her, principles were the main thing; for him, testing them was equally important.
Jennie Lee came twice to Belgrade on my account, first when I was arrested in 1956 and again when I was released in 1961. The 1956 trip was without question a solace to Stefica and our small circle of sympathizers, but its impact on officials was probably limited to their meting out a "gentler" penalty. Her second trip reinforced our friendship and brought sad memories of Aneurin. We have continued corresponding - infrequently but warmly - to this day. When Stefica and I visited London in 1969, we were in effect guests of hers and under her constant care.
(20) Henry (Chips) Channon, diary entry (15th February, 1951)
Aneurin Bevan wound up brilliantly and, for once, without malice or even fireworks. We were told not to barrack or interrupt him; those were the orders from on high, since 'Nye' thrives on interjections. He was quick to detect our tactics, and so modified his manner and tone, which made him more effective.
(21) George Brown, In My Way (1970)
Aneurin Bevan was a strange man. He had great ability and great ambition. He could do the most contrary things, but you could never call him insincere. He had a burning faith in whatever seemed good to him at the time but, outside politics, had no personal faith at all. I have tried to write of what the Christian faith has meant to me in my approach to the Labour movement in its widest sense: many others in the Party have likewise come to Labour primarily because of religious faith - there is a long history of Christian Socialism in our movement. Others, of whom Ernie Bevin was one, grew up without religious faith, but acquired faith in such qualities as the dignity of man; it was a different sort of faith, but it gave them something that they stood by all their lives. Aneurin, and certainly his friends, seem to have grown up without faith in anything. He was a bigger man than his friends, a law to himself, and he had qualities which set him apart from those who were called (or called themselves) Bevanites. He certainly saw himself as a potential Prime Minister, a greater Lloyd George. He was flattered by all the attention and the publicity he got, but he never commanded that solid backing in the Labour movement which would have been necessary to give him the leadership.
Aneurin had great charm. Some people are naturally made to be bigots and they deliberately try to turn on charm when it suits them. Aneurin was the other way round; he was naturally made to be charming, and he had deliberately to turn on the bile. He was generous in every sort of way, and naturally kind. Paradoxically, he could also be a bully, but really he only bullied those who let themselves be bullied. If you stood up to him he would smile broadly, and accept that you were not going to let him get away with something. We had tremendous battles - I remember his describing me at one meeting of the Parliamentary Party as 'Arthur Deakin's lackey'. And yet, in spite of everything and our wide divergencies politically, there was a kind of friendship between us which couldn't be denied.
(22) In her book My Life With Nye, Jennie Lee describes how she tried to persuade Aneurin Bevan not to make his speech against unilateral nuclear disarmament.
I did not argue with him that evening, he had to be left in peace to work things out for himself, but he was in no doubt that I would have preferred him to take the easy way. I dreaded the violence of the Conference atmosphere which I knew would be generated by the dedicated advocates of immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament, but, like Nye, I did not foresee the bitterness of the personal attacks made by some delegates who ought to have known him well enough not to have doubted his motives. Disagreement was one thing: character assassination another. Were these his friends? Were these his comrades he had fought for over so many years? Could they really believe that he was a small-time career politician prepared to sacrifice his principles in order to become second-in-command to the right-wing leader of the Party?
(23) Aneurin Bevan, speech, Labour Party Conference (4th October, 1957)
I knew this morning that I was going to make a speech that would offend and even hurt many of my friends. I know that you are deeply convinced that the action you suggest is the most effective way of influencing international affairs. I am deeply convinced that you are wrong. It is therefore not a question of who is in favour of the hydrogen bomb, but a question of what is the most effective way of getting the damn thing destroyed. It is the most difficult of all problems facing mankind. But if you carry this resolution and follow out all its implications and do not run away from it you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber.
