Portraits and Miniatures(8)

I, unlike Campbell, observed Bevan and knew him, although never intimately, over many years. In my adolescent, Oxford and army years he sat in Parliament for the adjacent constituency to my father’s. I was subsequently in the House of Commons with him for the last twelve years of his life. For the first three of them I admired him to the verge of extravagance. For the last nine I was separated almost completely from him by the bitter depth of the Gaitskellite/Bevanite divide in the Labour Party. Although the ideological gap between the two sections was narrower than that which convulsed the party in its lurch to the left in the early 1980s, the tribes were then more hermetically sealed.

There were a few MPs who managed to transcend this narrowness, but I was emphatically not one of them. Bevan could sometimes be generous across the floor of the House of Commons but amongst young Labour MPs he liked acolytes and not critics, and as a core Gaitskellite I was regarded as outside his pale. For five years or more I exchanged hardly a word with him. He would stalk past in a corridor with a scowling leonine disdain, unnodding and unspeaking. But he was an immanent presence in my early political life, and reactions to his echoing if often petulant and disruptive words and actions dominated a great part of my thoughts, conversations and tactical discussions.

Yet I do not think that this period of living in an opposing armed camp biases me against Bevan today. If anything, it does the reverse, for I am not proud of my narrowness of those years and regret having cut myself off from someone who, whether or not he was a great man, was certainly the second most striking personality of my early years in the House of Commons. During my immersion in Bevan books for the purpose of this essay I find that, like Campbell, I have half fallen under his spell, and wonder why I was so immune to it forty years ago. His phrases ring remarkably fresh down the decades, his arrogance (which was vast) appears fierce rather than ridiculous, and he makes nearly every present Cabinet minister, or his shadow, look tailor-made to be an under-secretary.

This does not, however, answer the question of whether he was a great man. Margot Asquith (whose judgements were far from infallible but who may have been right on this occasion) dismissed Kitchener as a great poster masquerading as a great man. Bevan was not that. Hand in hand with Barbara Castle, who was similarly linked on the other side to Hugh Gaitskell, he did get on to Labour billboards at the 1959 election, but in general he was regarded as too abrasive to be advertising material. A more typical visual image was a 1955 cartoon showing a reassuring Attlee mask covering the reality of a menacing Bevan which lay behind. But if he was not a great poster masquerading as a great man he may have been a great word-spinner, both in oratory and in conversation, whose judgement, self-discipline and achievement failed to live up to his verbal talent.

He was born in 1897 with few advantages beyond that of starting in the centre of the Labour heartland. He was a non-Welsh-speaking Welshman from Tredegar, a Monmouthshire mining community a couple of miles over a bare hillside from the steel town of Ebbw Vale and eight miles east of Merthyr Tydfil, the cradle of the South Wales industrial revolution where Keir Hardie became the first independent Labour MP three years after Bevan’s birth. The renowned but raw South Wales industrial community, which had erupted into the steep sylvan fortresses of Glamorgan and West Monmouthshire from about 1840 onwards, manifested the mixture of roughness and gentleness which was later to be a special characteristic of Bevan’s oratory. Its class conflict was jagged, its strikes were visceral, but it respected education and learning. Its men, like Bevan’s father, were often quiet and bookish, and its households, again like Bevan’s, were often matriarchal. Essex man would not have been esteemed in Tredegar.

Bevan was none the less not a typical product of the South Wales political class. He did everything too quickly, some would have said too superficially, and once he had an avenue of escape he seized it as completely as did Lloyd George from the very different background of rural North Wales, or Gracie Fields from Rochdale, or Richard Burton from the same South Wales. From his early thirties onwards Tredegar and Ebbw Vale were for Bevan a base and an audience, but not a home or even a place of rest and recreation.

He was a miner for only nine years, although he started at thirteen, as was normal at the time. He was chairman of his lodge (or union   branch) at nineteen. He went for two years to the Central Labour College in London soon after the 1918 armistice, but he was a lazy student. He never properly returned to the pits, although he remained in South Wales for eight subsequent years. He was a local councillor for six of them, and then an impatient county councillor for one. In the meantime he had played a central part in running the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute, half a home university library and half a medical insurance scheme. At the time of the General Strike (still aged only twenty-eight) he had filled a vacuum and seized almost as much of a commissar’s local role as on a national scale did his later enemy, Ernest Bevin. (‘His own worst enemy? Not while I’m alive he ain’t,’ as Bevin was to say of Bevan.) In 1929 he superseded the little more than fifty-year-old local MP, an almost unprecedented event in the job-preserving Labour culture. The victim must, however, have been very lackadaisical, for there were plenty of non-Bevan supporters who were anxious to get rid of him. As a result Bevan entered the House of Commons at the age of thirty-one, which was equally unprecedented in the semi-gerontocracy of South Wales miners’ parliamentary representation.