Word: bevan
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...hush settled over the House of Commons. On the benches, every member wore a black tie; the galleries were crowded with peers, ambassadors and solemn visitors. At 62, Aneurin Bevan was dead, and the House of Commons paid him homage. "He was a bonny fighter, and a chivalrous one," said Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, chief of the party Bevan had railed against all his life. Said Labor's Hugh Gaitskell: "His death is as if a fire had gone out-a fire which we sometimes found too hot, by which we were sometimes scorched, but a fire which warmed...
Lost Prize. All Britain mourned the passing of the wild-haired Welshman who, in 30 years of public life, had never quite made it to the top. Except for Churchill, Nye Bevan was the greatest orator Britain has known in this century. His lilting, cadenced speech struck passion into friends and foes alike; his fierce socialism demanded instant nationalization of industry, instant disarmament, instant betterment for workers and the poor. Yet in Nye, Socialism seemed locked in battle with a vaunting personal ambition. Time and again he reached the brink of power in his party and his country, only...
...Bevan was born to anger in the coal-seamed Ebbw Vale district of South Wales. He was one of the seven surviving children of a coal miner, grew up in a cramped, mud-floored cottage in the grimy town of Tredegar. At 13 Nye left school and went into the mines himself...
...Bevan's mission, as he saw it then, was the "bullying of tradition." and his bullying took a form unknown to the owlish Harold Laski or those doctrinaire Socialists, the Webbs. Once, when Churchill roared in exasperation, "There was a parliamentary democracy in this country before the Labor Party was born," Bevan roared back: "There wasn't. There was a Parliament but not a democracy. Your people were here and mine were not." He had no patience with Labor's own indecisive Ramsay MacDonald, "treading his resolutionary path from conference to conference." He also had words...
...first voices to call Winston Churchill to lead a national government, but in the midst of Britain's finest hour, he denounced the great man as "suffering from petrified adolescence." "Merchant of discourtesy!" stormed Churchill. "Better than being a wholesaler of disaster," countered Bevan. Churchill's most memorable phrase for Nye was "squalid nuisance," but the two had a wary respect for each other...