Bevin of England
Ernest Bevin.
by Francis Williams.
British Book Centre. 288 pp. $4.50.
When writing a biography of the late Field Marshal von Hindenburg, whose name loomed so large during the 1914-18 war, John Wheeler-Bennett, the English historian, found a telling title phrase which once and for all delineated the character of that mustachioed German soldier—“The Wooden Titan.”
There is a temptation to apply a similar epithet to Ernest Bevin. I well remember attending the press conference in 1946 where he announced the formation of the Anglo-American Palestine Enquiry Committee. Bevin rolled on to the platform, a squat, broad-shouldered, elderly figure, slightly incongruous in formal dress—it might have been any elderly English shopkeeper or trade union secretary. This was the time when he was already increasingly angered because events in Palestine were patently not moving his way. He began to speak, almost apologetically, about the terrible complexity of the Palestine problem. He turned for information to a Foreign Office official beside him, got some incorrect figures, and repeated them. He next added some incorrect statements of his own—I saw one or two journalists in the audience raise their eyebrows. Thumping the table, he suddenly launched into protestations of his own good will: he only wanted a fair solution, to help the homeless Jews, to raise Arab living standards. (His words had an odd lack of conviction.) Thumping the table even harder, he declaimed that he would not, however, be deflected from seeking a just solution by violence from any side: not by the Jews, and yes, as an afterthought, not by the Arabs, either. Again the words sounded hollow, confused, mechanical. I recall how in an article the next day I said that as a strong man Bevin was no more “than an old wooden man—of— war camouflaged as steel.”
And yet, surely, this is not all. Mr. Williams has subtitled his biography, “Portrait of a Great Englishman.” In his foreword Clement Attlee uses the word “great” on three occasions. And one must remember that when Bevin became Foreign Secretary he was sixty-four; when the Palestine conflict flared up he was nearly sixty-seven and a sick man-the powerful body and the ruthless will were tragically breaking up. The new study by Francis Williams, a prominent British newspaperman and former editor of the Daily Herald, is a journalistic chronicle which does no more than pose the problem of Bevin’s power and personality; yet it does present the portrait of a most unusual, formidable, and in his way creative human being.
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Ernest Bevin was born in 1881, the son of a West of England farm worker. The family background was Methodist; and, as has often been said, the British Labor movement has always owed more to Methodism than to Marxism. We see Bevin orphaned at the age of seven, taken from school at eleven, working as a farm boy for sixpence a week, becoming a truck driver—and so on. It is an interesting difference between the British and American outlooks that Bevin in later years was always bored by any attempts to describe his early “log cabin” days, not through misplaced snobbery —on the contrary—but because he thought them irrelevant to his real political career, which began when at the age of nearly thirty he became trade union organizer of the Bristol dockers and transport workers, and the secretary of the West of England Unemployed Committee. Those were days of British workers’ militancy, as was the 1914-18 war, and here was the start of Bevin’s career. It had, I think, five highlights.
First, the famous occasion in 1920 when Bevin, then the dynamic left-wing leader of the dockers, spoke up on behalf of six million British trade unionists with his dramatic threat of a national strike against British military intervention on the side of Poland against the Soviet Union. (It would have been intriguing to know what Bevin thought about this act in later years.) Next, in the inter-war years, Mr. Williams shows Bevin efficiently and ruthlessly building his own empire in the Transport and General Workers’ Union—with its million and a quarter members, the largest or perhaps second largest union in the world. At the same time he was defending the outlook of the Labor movement against the intellectuals and ideologies he always mistrusted: against Ramsay MacDonald, whom he expelled in 1931, against George Lansbury, whose pacifism he brutally tore to shreds at the time of the Abyssinian sanctions crisis of 1935, and against Cripps and Bevan, whose expulsion from the party he helped to secure in 1936 for advocating a “United Front” with the hated Communists on the issue of the Spanish Civil War.
The next stage came in the summer of 1940. France was falling and the Germans were speeding towards the Channel, when Bevin, together with Attlee and Morrison, swung the Labor movement into unqualified alliance with Churchill. Bevin himself, as Minister of Labor, remained the undisputed chief figure on the British home front till the end of the war. In 1945 Bevin traveled to Potsdam as Prime Minister Attlee’s Foreign Secretary. The next two years provided one of the most interesting phases of his career. Almost single-handedly, at a time when Secretary of State Byrnes was still given to illusions about Soviet intentions, Bevin resisted Soviet aggression in such places as Greece and Trieste. A climax of achievement came in 1947-48, when Bevin persuaded Secretary of State Marshall to take over the British military commitment in Greece, and when by his swift response to Marshall’s announcement of financial aid to Europe he helped to lay the foundation for ERP and then NATO. True, in these transactions Bevin was at the receiving end, but his skill and patience in promoting Anglo-American collaboration cannot be gainsaid.
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After this, in 1948-50, came anti-climax: the crass failure in Palestine, the repeated failure to achieve an Egyptian treaty, the pathetic clinging to office of a sick and weakening man. To the Palestine issue Mr. Williams, as if embarrassed, devotes only two sketchy and apologetic pages which hardly merit discussion. He repeats some naive fallacies: that it was only President Truman’s hurried endorsement of 100,000 Jewish immigration certificates which destroyed the prospects of the Anglo-American Committee’s report, as if Bevin had not rejected the report out of hand the moment he saw it; or that the Yishuv was led from New York. Astonishingly, Mr. Williams does not even mention the existence of the Jewish Agency, or the names of Weizmann or Ben Gurion. Instead, he engages in such airy fancies as that Bevin “had private meetings with British Jews. With them he was convinced he could have reached a settlement. Indeed, there was one point where he thought he had secured undertakings which would make one possible. But these were immediately repudiated without notice by the American Zionists who were now in control and who were determined on a complete break with Britain.”
Palestine is evidently not Mr. Williams’ subject. I do not, indeed, recall any articles by him on the Middle East. But in writing passages like the above, he clearly could not have looked back into the files even of his own “Bevinite” paper, the Daily Herald.
Still, where Mr. Williams can draw on fairly well-documented historical material, he gives a readable account of Bevin’s life and political development. The latter especially is worth study, for in his ponderous way, with his readiness to collaborate with British or American “capitalists” combined with unshaken working class loyalty, Ernest Bevin did represent the inner spirit of the British Labor movement, that movement which foreign observers often fail to see clearly behind the pyrotechnics of British Socialist intellectuals, but which is always there, with its mixture of inertia and ability to change, of mistakes and good sense, and which is today slowly advancing—yes, towards what? But that is a question which Bevin in his later years as Foreign Secretary no longer seemed to envisage, and which Mr. Williams does not touch upon.
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