Ernest Bevin

Ernest Bevin (9 March 1881 – 14 April 1951) was a British statesman,

His most important role came as

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 and moved to Copplestone in Devon. He had little formal education; he had 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, he was very heavy. He spoke with such a strong

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 won a landslide, which 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

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 1931 general election.^[13] After the November 1935 general election, Herbert Morrison, who was 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]

Bevin was a member of the British delegation to the second British Commonwealth Relations conference. It was held at Lapstone, Sydney, Australia in 1938 organised by Chatham House and the Australian Institute of International Affairs with delegations from all the then existing Commonwealth countries.^[15]

Wartime Minister of Labour

In 1940,

During the war, Bevin was responsible for diverting nearly 48,000 military conscripts to work in the

Diplomats were then 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".^[16] 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. That suggests that Bevin preferred to reach most of his decisions after oral discussion with his advisers.^[21]

However, Charmley dismisses the concerns of contemporaries such as

Bevin's personality was a strange mixture of

Roman Catholics, and intellectuals of all kinds, groups that, when taken together, comprised a large proportion of those with whom he had to deal.^[22]

The historian Martin H. Folly argues that Bevin was not automatically pro-American. Instead, he pushed his embassy in Washington to project a view of Britain that neutralised American criticisms. He felt that Britain's problems were in part caused by American irresponsibility. He was frustrated with American attitudes. His strategy was to bring Washington around to support Britain's policies and argued that Britain had earned American support and ought to compensate it for its sacrifices against the Nazis. Folly considers that Bevin was not coldly pragmatic uncritically pro-American or a puppet manipulated by the British Foreign Office.^[23]

Bevin's complex position on the US is betrayed in the following quotation, which was given in response to an American visitor who asked Bevin why he had a portrait of

In 1945, Britain was virtually bankrupt as a result of the war but was still maintaining a huge air force and conscript army in an attempt to remain a global power. Bevin played a key role in securing the low-interest $3.75 billion Anglo-American loan as the only real alternative to national bankruptcy. He had asked originally for $5 billion.^[26]

The cost of rebuilding necessitated austerity at home to maximise export earnings while Britain's colonies and other client states were required to keep their reserves in pounds as "sterling balances". Additional funds, which did not have to be repaid, came from the Marshall Plan in 1948 to 1950, which also required Britain to modernise its business practices and to remove trade barriers.^[27]

Europe

Bevin looked for ways to bring

Bevin was unsentimental about the British Empire in places for which the growth of nationalism had made direct rule no longer practicable. He was part of the Cabinet that approved a speedy British withdrawal from India in 1947 and neighbouring colonies. However, Britain still maintained a network of client states in the Middle East (Egypt until 1952, Iraq and Jordan until 1959) and 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 approved the construction of a huge new base in East Africa. Bevin wrote that “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”. Colonial exports then earned $150 million 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, and 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 colonies in the French Indochina and Dutch East Indies in the hope that could lead towards the formation of a third superpower bloc. Bevin agreed with Duff Cooper, the 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.^[31]

In December 1947, Bevin hoped (in vain) that the US 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

He strongly encouraged the United States to take a vigorously anti-Communist foreign policy in the early years of the Cold War. He was a leading advocate for British combat operations in the Korean War. Two of the key institutions of the postwar world, NATO and the Marshall Plan, for aid to postwar Europe, were in considerable part the result of Bevin's efforts during these years. The policy, which was little different from that of the Conservatives ("Hasn't Anthony Eden grown fat?" as wags had it), was a source of frustration to some backbench Labour MPs, who early in the 1945 Parliament formed a "Keep Left" group to push for a more left-wing foreign policy.^[27]

In 1945, Bevin advocated the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly and said in the House of Commons, "There should be a study of a house directly elected by the people of the world to whom the nations are accountable".^[34]

In 1950, Bevin offered recognition to the

Attlee and Bevin worked together on the decision to produce a British atomic bomb despite intense opposition from pro-Soviet elements of the Labour Party, groups that Bevin detested. The decision was taken in secret by a small Cabinet committee. Bevin told the committee in October 1946, "We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs.... We've got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it". It was a matter of both prestige and national security. Those ministers who would have opposed the bomb on grounds of cost, Hugh Dalton and Sir Stafford Cripps, were excluded from the meeting in January 1947 at which the final decision was taken.^[36][37][38]

Palestine and Israel

Bevin was Foreign Secretary during the period when the Mandate for Palestine ended, and the State of Israel was created. During the 1945 British election, Labour pledged that to revoke the White Paper of 1939, permit free Jewish immigration to Palestine, and even the transfer of Arabs, and turn Palestine into a Jewish state.^{[citation needed]} However, in office, Bevin immediately broke this promise, wanting to protect British hegemony in the Middle East and viewing the Balfour Declaration itself as a mistake. He feared that a Jewish state could become a "racial state".^[39] Bevin's policies would spark a war between British security forces and Zionist insurgents in Palestine between 1945 and 1947.^[40] Richard Crossman, a pro-Zionist Labour MP who knew Bevin, said the war was fueled almost entirely by "one man's determination to teach the Jews a lesson."^[41]

Bevin failed to secure the stated British objectives in that area of foreign policy, which included a peaceful settlement of the situation and the avoidance of involuntary

For refusing to remove limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine in the aftermath of the war, Bevin earned the hatred of

Zionists. According to the historian Howard Sachar, his political foe, Richard Crossman, a fellow Labour Party member of parliament and a pro-Zionist member of the postwar 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 antisemitic 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".^[44][45] Bevin's biographer Alan Bullock rejected suggestions that Bevin was motivated by personal antisemitism.^[46]

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

UN General Assembly. Bevin accordingly announced that he would "ask the UN to take the Palestine question into consideration."^[47]

A week later, the strategic logic of Britain retaining a presence in Palestine was removed when the intention to withdraw from India in August that year was announced.

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.'"^[48]

The

had been displaced.^[50]

Bevin was infuriated by attacks on British troops carried out by the more extreme of the Jewish militant groups, the

Lehi, commonly known as the Stern Gang. The Haganah carried out less direct attacks until the King David Hotel bombing, when it restricted itself to illegal immigration activities.^[47] According to declassified MI6 files, the Irgun and the Lehi attempted to assassinate Bevin himself in 1946.^[51][52][53]

Bevin negotiated the Portsmouth Treaty with Iraq (signed on 15 January 1948), which, according to 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.^[54]

Later life

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.^[55] He died from a heart attack^[56] in the following month, still holding the key to his red box. His ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.

Upon Stafford Cripps's death in 1952, Clement 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."

Keynes and many other significant figures. When Bevin's biographer, Alan Bullock, asked Chuter Ede for his view of Bevin, he replied:^[57]

"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.^[58]

Assessments

Martin Folly argues that assessments on Bevin as foreign secretary divide into two schools.^[59] After the opening of the British archives, historians, led by the biographer Alan Bullock celebrated Bevin as one of the great men in British diplomatic history.^[60] They argued that 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 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 that 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.^[61]

In popular culture

Bevin was featured prominently in Jack Thorne's 2023 play When Winston Went to War with the Wireless, played by Kevin McMonagle.^[62]

See also