Happy birthday Aneurin Bevan (15 November 1897 – 6 July 1960)

Aneurin Bevan , was born on the 15 November 1897 at 32 Charles Street, Tredegar into  a woking  class family.. It was one of a long row of four- roomed miners' cottages. He was the sixth of ten children born to Phoebe and David Bevan a coal miner of whom  only eight survived infancy and only six to adulthood.

More commonly known as Nye, he was a Welsh Labour party politician who served as Minister of Health from 1945 to 1951. He began  his own working life down the mines working with his father. as a collier's helper at the age of 13.

 Although a strong boy he found the work exhausting: "Down below are the sudden perils - runaway trains hurtling down the lines; frightened ponies kicking and mauling in the dark, explosions, fire, drowning. And if he escapes? There is a tiredness which leads to stupor, which forms a dull persistent background to your consciousness. 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."

Bevan developed a love of reading. He joined the Tredegar Workmen's Institute Library where he read the works of H.G Wells, Jack London, James Connolly https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/05/james-connolly-working-class-hero.html  and Eugene V. Debs https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/10/eugene-v-debs-5-11-1855-2010-26-working.html. He was also a keen attender at Plebs League  classes given fortnightly at Blackwood by Sydney Jones.

Bevan also joined the Tredegar branch of the South Wales Miners; Federation soon became a union activist and by the time he was nineteen he was chairman of his Miners' Lodge. Bevan became a well-known local orator and was seen by his employers, the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company, as a revolutionary. The manager of the colliery found an excuse to get him sacked. However, with the support of the Miners' Federation, the case was judged as one of victimization and the company was forced to re-employ him.

Bevan was also deeply influenced by the teachings of Noah Ablett, the leader of South Wales syndicalism. Ablett was an evangelist of aggressive Marxism who  produced a pamphlet,The Miners' Next Step (1912). Ablett called for a new type of unionism: "A united industrial organisation, which, recognising the war of interest between workers and employers, is constructed on fighting lines, allowing for a rapid and simultaneous stoppage of wheels throughout the mining industry."  Bevan also began attending the Tredegar branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Like most members of the ILP, Bevan was an opponent of Britain's involvement in the First World War. In 1917 he was called up under the government's Conscription Act.  He refused to join the British Army and claimed he would choose his own enemy and his own battlefield and would not let the Government do it for him. He was eventually rejected on health grounds as he suffered from nystagmus. Over the next two years Bevan was active in anti-war campaigns across Wales.

After his mining trade union  sponsored him to study politics, history and economics in London, in 1919 Bevan  discovered Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, solidifying his left-wing political outlook. He would soon become politically active and became a lifelong champion of social justice, the rights of working people and democratic socialism. Reciting long passages by William Morris gradually began to conquer a stammer that he had  had since he was a child.

Bevan remained in the college  until 1921, Not one of the most diligent students he found it difficult to follow an organised routine, including getting up for breakfast. Yet after overcoming his stammer, he went on to become one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, defending the rights of working people and the cause of socialism.

When Bevan returned home in 1921 the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company refused to re-employ him. For the next three years he was without work. During this time Bevan worked as an unpaid adviser to people living in Tredegar. Bevan considered emigrating to Australia but in 1924 he found work at Bedwellty Colliery. But after ten months the owners decided to close the colliery down and Bevan had to endure another year of unemployment. In February 1925, Bevan's father died of pneumoconiosis in his arms.

In 1926 he was appointed a union official just as the General Strike came into force.The strike brought Bevan to the fore as a leader of the South Wales miners, and he orchestrated the distribution of strike pay in Tredegar during the six months lock-out the miners endured after the industrial action. He gave his full support to  A.J Cook general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/11/ajcook-militant-miner-and-trade-union.html

He became a councillor on Monmouth County Council in 1928, then a member of parliament for Ebbw Vale in 1929. His maiden speech was an attack on Winston Churchill, who he saw as the main enemy of the miners.
Bevan married a fellow left-wing Labour MP, Jennie Lee, in 1934 and together they campaigned to support the Socialists in the Spanish Civil War against France as well as setting up the Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism. In 1936 a group of prominent left-wingers including Bevan set up a weekly Socialist newspaper, The Tribune, followed by trips around Spain during the Civil War. He famously declared ' Fascism is not itself a new order of society. It is the future  refusing to be  born."

His activism and agitation led to his brief expulsion from Labour in 1939, but he agreed to toe the party line and was readmitted.Despite opposing Churchill in mining matters, Bevan argued that he should replace Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. But once Winston Churchill was in power, Bevan criticised the wartime reductions in civil liberties

A colourful public personality and a brilliant spontaneous debater, he had great personal charm but was sometimes so rude to opponents that Churchill once called him a “merchant of discourtesy”. However Bevan always stood up for the underdog, and was a voice for the unemployed in the period between the two world wars when joblessness was a major domestic political issue. He was convinced that poverty was not the fault of individuals but that of the government’s inefficient and unfair distribution of the country’s resources. He remembered how people he knew were treated without dignity when they fell upon hard times, and his anger would often boil over.  

In 1945,the general election saw Labour returned comprehensively to government. Bevan  saw this post-war victory as a chance to implement radical social reform, and on 5 July 1948, while he was minister for health the National Health Service was created,  his most famous accomplishment that saw the provision of  medical care being introduced,  free at the point of need to everyone, regardless of wealth." .In 1945 Nye said ":We have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers, and now we are the builders,"

The initial idea came from the Socialist Medical Association, the president of which, Dr Somerville  Hastings,successfully proposed a resolution during the Labour Party Conference suggesting it should commit itself to establish a State Health Service. While is was a first feature of the Labour platform at the time, the proposal captured cross-party support in 1942. Then the Beveridge report of 1943 set the seeds and blueprints  for the creation  of the NHS  and the welfare state. Henry Willink, Conservative MP and Health Minister in 1944 circulated the A National Health Service white paper in Parliament. Aneurin Bevan ultimately took on the campaign to establish the NHS in 1945 and proposed the final concept in 1947. 

In his speech in Manchester on the night before the NHS was established, he made his infamous remark about the Tories being “lower than vermin”. In the next sentence he referred back to the governments of the inter-war years: “They condemned millions of people to semi-starvation.”  

He thought that it should be the clear responsibility of government to provide comprehensive healthcare; consistent high-quality healthcare across the country would be best delivered by nationalisation of the hospitals.

Bevan's 1949 Housing Act removed the restrictions of public housing to the ' working classes' so that council housing was available to all. For a short time, council  housing was a genuine alternative to private renting or ownership, and was built in large quantities. More council houses were built in Wales between 1945 and 1951 than have been built since 1975. 

Bevan’s contribution to the quality of council housing is less well recognised.  He insisted on good design, increased space standards and the provision of an upstairs and downstairs w.c. – all revolutionary at a time when two-thirds of houses in the Rhondda valleys did not have an indoor toilet.  It is no accident that post-war council housing remains some of the most well-built and popular even 60 years on.

 Bevan became Minister of Labour in January 1951 but resigned when Clement Attlee’s Government proposed the introduction of prescription charges for dental and vision care and decided to transfer funds from the National Insurance Fund to pay for rearmament. 

A well-read man, literary references were a feature of his speeches as a politician. Speaking out against NHS charges when he resigned from the Labour government, he referenced Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, declaring, “The health service will be like Lavinia – all the limbs cut off and eventually her tongue cut out too.” 

 In the years that followed, he was often the centre of controversy within the Labour Party and involuntarily gave his name to the party’s radical wing, ‘the Bevanites’. Nye's autobiography, In Place of Fear  came out in 1952. He would lead the left wing of the Labour Party from the back benches until he ran for the leadership of the party in 1955. He was defeated by Hugh Gaitskell, but was appointed Shadow Colonial Secretary and later Shadow Foreign Secretary. 

In 1959 he was elected deputy leader of the Labour Party, but  he was a very ill man suffering from terminal cancer. He held the post for a year until his death on July 6, 1960, at the age of 62 having made his reputation as father of the NHS.

Since 1960 he has been all but canonised, raised above criticism as the soul and conscience of the old Labour Party, and a source of emotional inspiration and legitimising quotations, while successive Labour leaders from Harold Wilson to Neil Kinnock have fallen over themselves to assert their claim to his mantle. 

Yes he courted  controversy during his political life with his acerbic comments about his political opponents and his views  on nuclear disarmament and devolution, which he opposed, and I wonder what  he would thing of the gathering momentum  for independence here in Wales. Oh and in his private life was known for his enjoyment of the good life. Despite some faults Nye Bevan hated the  Tories with a passion, and helped make the biggest improvements to the quality of life for the average British person on living memory, so I respect him for this. There can be no greater achievement than  better health and better housing for ordinary people. Bevanite remains a meaningful term, still today invoking a Labour  vision of a better and more equal society. Such a shame that it's current leader Keir Starmer seems to have forgotten and abandoned these principles. Who did he think Nye was talking about  when he said " The right wing of the Labour Party would rather see it fall into perpetual decline than abide by its democratic decisions ?" 

On the Tories famously said the following ,in a speech he made on July 4, 1948, " So far as I am concerned they are lower  than vermin." he went on. "They condemned millions of people to semi-starvation, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying, do not listen to the seduction of Lord Woolton.They have not changed, or if they have are slightly worse.,"

Nye didn't come to that conclusion because he was a mean spirited Welshman, he'd grown up in a world shaped by the Tories from cradle to grave. To him a tale of  neglect and abandonment and he knew exactly who was to blame.

I am reminded  that my quality of life owe more to a dead man than a whole Tory Government ever could. Everyone who has ever benefitted from NHS treatment should be grateful to this true working class hero and continue to heed his warning about "the art of Tory politics." Over seventy years on the NHS remains one of the most treasured services in the country.  

Because of Nye we can be proud that people in Britain do not live in fear of medical bills they cannot afford. We can congratulate those many thousands of health professionals who have given brilliant service to the sick and pushed so wide the boundaries of medical care. We can celebrate longer life and healthier living. So thank you Nye Bevan, happy birthday, to this man of deep  passion and principle.Now is the time to carry his great legacy forward. We should continue to defend the NHS with all our might..As Nye said " It will last as long as there are folk  with the faith to fight for it"

What I most admire about Bevan was his bravery, political and moral. Like every human being, not everything he did was right, not every position was popular, but what he did have was absolute conviction. We need more Nye Bevans on the green benches of Westminster. Sadly, that prospect is further away than ever.

 "If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution!" - Aneurin Bevan 

Nye Bevan speaks about the National Health Service