Importance of being Ernie Bristol lad who led the charge of ‘Bevin’s union’
With NATO making plenty of news headlines at the moment because of Putin’s war on Ukraine, Mark Steeds traces the amazing life story of the local boy who did more than anyone to bring the North Atlantic Alliance into being
BORN in Winsford, Somerset, in 1881, Ernest Bevin was the son of Mercy Bevin and had at least three older brothers and a half-sister.
His father deserted the family just before he was born.
Ernie was devoted to his mum until she tragically died aged 48 when he was just eight years old. Overcoming huge poverty, Ernie gained a 20-year non-conformist education starting at Winsford Wesleyan Sunday School under a Mrs Veysey, who shared his mum’s hatred of the “domination of Church and Squire” then rife in the countryside.
Orphan Ern then went under the care of his half-sister who sent him to work as a farm labourer. His woes piled up when the farmer he was working for savagely beat him for not harvesting enough turnips. In anger, Ernie ran at him with a billhook.
At 12 he escaped to Bristol to join his older brothers, and soon landed a job as a van boy working for Brooke & Prudencio mineral water manufacturers based in St Paul’s. Rural migrants like the Bevins trebled Bristol’s population before the First World War.
A variety of jobs followed including waiting and hotel work until he went back to Brooke & Prudencio to become a fully-fledged carter with his own horse and cart.
All the while Ernie kept up his education, even taking advantage of evening classes in his early 20s. With good lecturers like Bristol University economist H.B. LeesSmith, Ernie broadened his mind and honed his skills as an orator, fighting industrial and social injustice.
He also joined the Bristol Socialist Society whose fellow luminaries included Dockers’ leader Ben Tillett, and future Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald. Here he met Flo Townley whom he married in 1906 and set up home with at 39 Saxon Road, St Werburgh’s. Their daughter Queenie was born five years later.
By then Ernie had made himself organising secretary of Bristol’s Right-to-Work Committee, where he instigated construction of Eastville Lake by the unemployed, often called “Bevin’s Lake”.
This gave him a taste for politics and after failing to get elected to the city council in 1909 he got involved in the Avonmouth dock strike the following year where he urged hundreds of carters to unionise and join the dockers’ union.
Thus into being came the “Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers Union... – Bristol Carters Division, Ernest Bevin First President ... United we Stand, Divided we Fall”.
Within six months the fast expanding branch required a fulltime organising secretary, and Bevin got the nod at £2 a week, catapulting him into the fray of national events and within 11 years creating and leading what would become the largest union in the free world.
Although they owed more to Methodism than to Marxism, Britain’s burgeoning unions were flexing their muscles with collective power, and Bevin’s pragmatic and realistic approach was effective from day one. With several successful campaigns under his belt – Ernie would only undertake a campaign if he thought he could win – he rapidly went from assistant to national organiser by 1913.
Although not a pacifist, Bevin was not convinced by the arguments that led to WWI, and at a mass meeting on the Downs early in the war, Brother Bevin called for “action by the workers in all countries to prevent war”.
He was also against conscription in 1916, and then took the opportunity to go to the States to look at unions over there, despite the Lusitania having just been sunk. What he saw on his first overseas trip shaped his thinking for the rest of his life and informed him about international labour practices.
Ernie later argued for an international labour peace congress post war that included the Germans; unfortunately he was voted down.
In 1920 Bevin became a celebrity as the “Dockers’ KC” (King’s Counsel) in The Shaw Inquiry where he famously compared a docker’s dinner with that of a ship-owners lunch at the Savoy Grill. “These fellows quote statistics but they forget about human beings. I had to make ‘em remember they were dealing with human lives,” he said.
He won the case and managed to get the dockers 16 shillings a day; within three years though the Tories managed to slash it back to 10s.
Post war the country was racked with industrial disputes and PM Lloyd George, having already thought Bevin a potential revolutionary, came up against him big time when he tried to get Britain to back Poland in their fight against Russia. Ernie triumphed and war was averted, but not because he favoured communism, he found it “contrary absolutely to our conception of democracy”.
His next major triumph came in 1922 when, with amalgamation in the air, the Transport & General Workers Union was founded; Ernie’s erstwhile mentor Ben Tillett was ruthlessly pushed to one side. Very much Bevin’s brainchild, the T & G’s constitution solved many problems, but it was his leadership and organising skills that made it ‘Bevin’s union.’
Ernie forged strong and enduring working relationships, Churchill included, but it was his partnership with Clement Attlee that provided a career long friendship.
Unlike Labour’s first PM, Ramsay Macdonald however, who Bevin accused of “stabbing us in the back” during the General Strike of 1931.
With mass unemployment and industrial strife, the 1930s were no easier than the 1920s, but through organic growth and amalgamation, Bevin’s union kept growing and growing. He was recognised by governments of different hues and sat on many committees; on one such he proposed public works in order to cut unemployment. Full of ideas he even suggested a Severn Barrage and that was in 1929!
As well as the latest industrial developments, he kept an eye on economic and international affairs which included an unlikely alliance with economist John Maynard Keynes. Regular trips abroad saw him visit the States again and he went regularly to Geneva to attend International Labour conferences.
After war broke out in 1939 and a
series of disasters, a coalition government was formed in 1940 led by Winston Churchill; Clement Attlee became Deputy Prime Minister and Ernie Minister of Labour – and an MP. At a reception soon after, King George VI asked Bevin how he had acquired such vast knowledge, Ernie replied “Sir, it was gathered in the ‘edgerows of experience”.
Bevin’s contribution to the war effort was colossal and after Britain’s success in 1945, Churchill, chancellor of Bristol University, conferred an honorary degree on the former Bristol barrow boy.
During the ceremony Winston eulogised: “In Mr Bevin I have found a colleague who has handled most intricate and difficult problems in the maintenance not only of our armies, but of the vast effort of our factories, and who has laid a heavy but not in many cases an unwelcome hand upon every human being in the Kingdom.”
Much to their surprise, Attlee and Bevin led Labour to a landslide victory in the khaki election that followed, and then took on the formidable task of re-building Britain. Ernie was given the plum cabinet post of Foreign Secretary with his first job being to re-negotiate the country’s debt to the Americans which he did with his pal Keynes.
Next was to keep Stalin and communism out of Western Europe and then help West Germany establish a new constitution. Nearer to home, Labour set about forming the Welfare State and creating Nye Bevan’s NHS, despite Herbert Morrison’s persistent attempts to oust Attlee.
Once told that Morrison was “his own worst enemy,” Ernie retorted, “Not while I’m alive he ain’t.”
With the Cold War fermenting, Bevin also had to deal with the break-up of the British Empire, where India, Pakistan and Palestine were all being problematic.
Ernie helped establish and instigate the Marshall Plan of industrial aid to war-torn Europe and, perhaps his greatest achievement, helped create NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – a transatlantic alliance that ever since has underpinned European security and democracy.
Ill-health at the end of his career forced Ernie to move from Foreign Secretary to Lord Privy Seal – Attlee still needed him in his cabinet – he died of a heart attack in 1951, still clutching the key to his red box.
Throughout his working life there wasn’t a hint of corruption in any of Bevin’s dealings and he turned down numerous awards including a knighthood and a peerage. His ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.
One of his colleagues, Bristol East MP and Chancellor Stafford Cripps, died the following year and Attlee was invited by the BBC to broadcast a tribute, afterwards ‘Clem’ chatted to the interviewer:
“I suppose you will miss Sir Stafford, sir.”
Attlee fixed him with his eye: “Did you know Ernie Bevin?”
“I have met him, sir,” the interviewer replied.
“There’s the man I miss.” Since his death, the memory of Ernie has diminished. One who did remember him was raconteur Sir Peter Ustinov whose autobiography condemned Bevin’s role as Foreign Secretary simply because of his West Country accent, contriving to get cheap laughs out of it and comparing him unfavourably with his Russian and American counterparts.
Apart from a bust in Southwark, and three Blue Plaques including Saxon Road, there’s very little to remember him by. Should he be a candidate for the vacant Colston plinth?