Word: bevans
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...youth; life could be sketched as a charcoal cartoon. In Tredegar, it was lived between the pits and the chapel. The visible enemy was the Tredegar Iron & Coal Co., and the audible heroes were the preachers in the chapels and the orators in the miners' lodges. Nye Bevan grew up in a time when Welsh nonconformity was moving from religion to politics, and Nye moved with the times. He easily shed the Methodist-Baptist faith of his home, because it transformed so easily into political evangelism. Roaming the green hills above the black pitheads, he spouted verses to cure...
...called because the company had docked a miner a day's pay: the idle fellow had taken off part of the working day to convey home the body of a comrade killed working down the pit. So the world was black and white for young Nye Bevan as he became the miners' voice, first in the lodge, then in the local council, then finally in the House of Commons...
...Bevan jeered at his party as a "Salvation Army which took to its heels on the day of judgment." What he felt for many of them, especially the office-hungry respectable bureaucrats of the trades unions, was nothing but a fine, aristocratic disdain. He raged not only against Baldwin and Chamberlain ("that dusty soul") but also against men who should have been his own comrades, like Trades Union Chief Sir Walter Citrine. He "suffers from files," Bevan said contemptuously...
...Bevan by temperament was an artist rather than a politician, and he sought his friends not among the worthy pedants of social reform in the "slouching, sluggish" Labor Party leadership but among artists like Jacob Epstein, writers like H. G. Wells, or even with an aristocrat turned columnist like Lord Castlerosse. Bevan behaved as if his own talent and exuberance gave him a spectator's seat rather than an underdog's role in the old British game of class soccer. After a fine meal with good wine he would quip: "You can always live like a millionaire...
...Seduction. Though his enemies gibed at him as "Playboy of the West End World," Foot claims that Bevan was not "seduced by the aristocratic embrace." Indeed, he had one quality rare in a politician of any party: he did not personally hunger for power or hanker for the managerial role in human affairs. Criticism was his long suit. Intellectual disdain kept his far-left course from Communist involvement. After a visit to Russia, he quipped, "We were slaves to the past; they were slaves o the future." And when war came, he demanded that the "undertaker" Chamberlain go, and called...