Foot Aneurin Bevan: A Biography

Volume 1: 1897-1945
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28082-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 660 Seiten

Michael Foot's two-volume biography of Aneurin 'Nye' Bevan (1897-1960) - arguably Britain's greatest socialist, indelibly associated with the founding of the National Health Service, - is one of the major political biographies of the last century. It is the life of an inspirational politician, written by one who knew and unabashedly admired him. Volume I, first published in 1962, describes Bevan's life from his birth in Tredegar in the South Wales Valleys, through his abortive schooling, his employment at a colliery and the subsequent embrace of socialism that would make him a leader among South Wales miners. It follows his path to the House of Commons as a Labour MP with a fast-rising reputation as a defender of the working class; and his marriage in 1934 to fellow firebrand MP Jennie Lee. The volume closes with Labour's landslide election victory of 1945, and Bevan's appointment as Minister of Health.

Michael Foot (1913-2010) was a writer, journalist and politician, leading the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983. His numerous books range from the withering polemic Guilty Men (co-written with Peter Howard and Frank Owen) about the hapless appeasers of the 1930s to his magnificent two-volume biography of Aneurin Bevan.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Foot, Michael

Leseproben

1

THE BOY 1897–1911

It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter … No patriotism, no public spirit, not reared in that inclement sky and harsh soil, in ‘the hortus siccus of dissent’, will generally last: it will either bend in the storm or droop in the sunshine.

—WILLIAM HAZLITT1

ANEURIN BEVAN was born at number 32 Charles Street, Tredegar, in the Welsh County of Monmouthshire, on 15 November 1897, of good dissenting stock. His father was a Baptist, his mother a Methodist and the two had first met as members of the choral society attached to the chapels. Tredegar was a working-class town, almost exclusively a miners’ town; ninety per cent of the population drew their livelihood from the pits. Yet, despite this binding common interest, there were many shades and gradations of opinion and living standards within the mining community. For some the chapel provided not only a solace from the afflictions of industrial society but the sword and the armour they must use for all worthy striving in the future. ‘Drink’ was the enemy which appeared to exploit and to ravage more mercilessly than any coal-owners. In one sense the chapelgoers led a life apart from the violence and hopeless poverty which Tredegar also knew, and in this God-fearing section of the town the Bevan household in Charles Street held a secure, respected place. The family background was that of Welsh nonconformity in its heyday, with its self-reliance, pride, resource, music and the nurture, through its own logic and past struggles, of the richest soil for the cultivation of new heresies.

Aneurin’s father, David, was a native of Tredegar, although his forebears came from Carmarthenshire; he was a miner, the son of a miner, and a Welshman to the fingertips. Most of his working life he suffered from ‘a bad chest’ which qualified on his death certificate for the title of ‘bronchial asthma’ but was never scheduled for what it certainly was – the dreaded miner’s disease of pneumoconiosis. He was delicately handsome, frail, wayward, a dreamer without a scrap of ambition but with much gaiety and a strong vein of humorous sarcasm. Some even called him a weakling, but the charge could be conceivable only by colliers’ standards. Most days he had left the house to catch the colliers’ train by five-thirty and was rarely home again much before nightfall, yet he still managed to lead a full life in the home and the community. A fine craftsman at anything he touched, he built on a new room when the family moved to number 7 Charles Street, tended the garden, kept chickens, mended the children’s shoes and performed all the other domestic duties directed by his wife. He installed a gas stove – the first in Charles Street – a bathroom, an inside toilet, hot water, a water tub and an organ around which the family assembled to sing hymns and Welsh folk songs every Sunday night. Every Sunday morning and evening he walked to the Carmel Baptist Church in Dukestown and walked back with the deacons and the other mighty arguers, six or seven abreast across the road, debating the sermon and invoking his deep knowledge of the Bible.

At least this was his ritual in the days of Aneurin’s childhood. Later his chapel-going enthusiasm faded and perhaps his religious faith too. ‘The unholy trinity’ of the bishop, the brewer and the squire – not that Tredegar had seen much of the handiwork of the first or the third of these ogres for some decades – had to make way for other opponents. David Bevan became treasurer of his miners’ lodge. He was always ‘a Federation man’, not ‘a Company man’ – that is, a supporter of the nascent South Wales Miners’ Federation and its local branches in their clashes with the quasi-feudal overlord of Tredegar’s land, industry and institutions, the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company. In his early manhood he was a Liberal, and voted for Sir William Harcourt in the West Monmouthshire constituency, transferring his allegiance in 1906 to Tom Richards, the miners’ nominee. Once a ‘Lib-Lab’, like so many of his generation and upbringing, he must have become a Socialist while Aneurin was still at school. Robert Blatchford’s Clarion was delivered at the house every week. The mixture in its pages of glowing humanity, sentiment, humour, fierce debate and a splendid dream for the future suited David Bevan’s taste precisely. As for the struggle to make the dream come true, he was too tired for that, and who will blame him? And besides, there at his elbow was a paradise to be entered at will – the world of music and books. He bequeathed to all his children a love of music. He taught them all to sing, some including Aneurin with no great success, and occasionally pressed sixpence into their hands when they achieved the degree of perfection he desired. He quailed, despite all their mother’s promptings, at the thought of teaching them Welsh. He himself belonged to Cymmrodorion, the Welsh cultural organization, and won prizes at the inter-chapel eisteddfodau, one for a love poem which his wife could not read. Yet no communal joys could fully satisfy his spirit. He was a bookworm, begrudging all the other pursuits which dragged him back from his faraway realms of poetry and romance. Gradually and delightedly he discovered that he had one son who would accompany him there. No doubt all children reared in miners’ homes at the beginning of the century had hard lives. But a ray of light and tenderness is cast across the youth of Aneurin by the gentle character of such a father.

His mother was the organizer and disciplinarian, stern but just, guarding her brood against all comers, but determined that nothing she could give or inflict would be withheld if it could help them to ‘get on’ in the world; an English realist among these Welsh romantics. That she was English may at first seem unlikely since she was born in Tredegar, her family came from Radnorshire and her maiden name of Prothero is often considered Welsh. Moreover, her famous son, in later years, could easily be provoked to rail against ‘the bovine, phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons’, as if not one single drop of alien blood ran in his veins. Yet there seems to be no doubt on the point. Phoebe Prothero’s father, John, came from the little town of Hay on the Radnorshire-Hereford border. Whatever Welsh strains or habits she may have acquired, her ancestors were English. Her great-grandfather had been a sheriff’s bugler in Hereford and the portrait of him was carried from home to home when they moved as an emblem to prove the slightly greater eminence in the social scale from which the Prothero family had descended. John Prothero was the village blacksmith who moved to Tredegar to get a job in his trade at the Bedwellty pits. His daughter was strong and stubborn, regal in her bearing and the master of the household. She was more even than the matriarchal figure of so many working-class homes of that day. From the accounts of her sons and daughters it is clear that she had exceptional will and capacity.

She cooked, cleaned, ironed and kept house generally with tireless efficiency. No one beneath her roof ever went hungry even in the harshest times. She was up before five in the morning to get her husband’s breakfast and later the children’s. Then at nine o’clock her own work began, for she was a tailoress or seamstress, as clever with the needle as with the pots and pans. In the early days she ran the trade as a commercial proposition with six apprentices learning dressmaking in her front room and making her own patterns and designs. Later, when the family grew larger, she had to curtail this work and confine her efforts to the task of keeping her own children, on Sunday especially, among the best groomed in the neighbourhood. Clearly she must have made throughout a considerable addition to the household income. In any case, she was always the Chancellor of the family Exchequer, counting every penny. Time and money could be saved, she found, if she bought in bulk; a twenty-pound tub of butter, a side of bacon, or a massive ham. In one room she kept a huge chest of drawers stocked with clothes, new and old. The purchases were made with an eye for bargains when she went on her shopping expeditions to Newport, Cardiff or Bristol. No one but she knew what fashionable treasures the chest held or when they might be produced. When the new room was built at number 7, she was the architect, her husband the skilled labourer. On one occasion, half a century later, Aneurin recalled that ‘My Methodist parents used to say: have the courage, my son, to say “No”. Well, it takes a good deal of courage, but we shall have to say “No” more and more, because only by saying “No” more and more to many things can you say “Yes” to the most valuable things.’2 The slip about the common religious denomination of his parents was pardonable. Obviously, it was his Methodist mother who taught him the word and the moral. But David’s intellect did win one triumph over his formidable helpmate. After the marriage, she too became a Baptist and attended the English Baptist Chapel in Church Street. Usually, however, he was compelled to submit. Once, returning from a meeting of the dramatic society in full regalia, he threw open the door and announced himself: ‘Behold, Neptune, King of the Seas.’ ‘Never mind Neptune,’ retorted Mrs Bevan, ‘you get upstairs and keep an eye on the children.’

She bore...