Word: bevans
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Hard Way to Shakespeare. When Aneurin (rhymes with a fire in) Bevan was a boy in Tredegar, South Wales, sickness and disaster were never far from the pithead. His father had been one of the founders of the Tredegar Workingmen's Medical Aid Society. Each member contributed three pennies out of every pound earned; in return, the society hired doctors and dentists to treat the miners or their families when they became...
...most vocal member. In a drab little shop, whose dusty windows bore the society's name in proud gilt letters, the committee met each week. Around the bare table sat 30 miners, some straight from the pit, the coal dust still runneled into their sweat-sticky faces. Bevan always spoke precisely and to the point. He had suffered from a bad stammer (caused by an uninformed but successful effort to "correct" his left-handedness), but had overcome it by reciting Shakespeare out loud and forcing himself to speak up in public...
...Said Bevan to the Tredegar Aid Society: "I believe that orthopedic surgery can be of great benefit to many miners and I would fight all the doctors of the British Medical Association to prove my point." Or he would cry in his Welsh singsong: "If a specialist is away in Bristol, why should we not be able to send our men to him? Why should not a miner have the right to the best treatment...
When the stiff-necked British Medical Association boycotted the miners' society, Aneurin Bevan got his chance to fight. "It was wicked, the way those fellows stood in the way of our getting health services to the people," he says, "but we won through...
...Little Brat." Bevan was born 51 years ago in the Welsh hills which are slag-pocked and crumpled like a tattered old flannel blanket. The names of his brothers & sisters sounded like a Celtic fairy tale-Blodwyn, Myfanwy, Arianwen, lorwerth. There was nothing romantic about the Bevans' tiny four-room house with its sanded floor. "There were never less than seven of us in the house, and an invalid relative occupied one room," recalls Bevan, now the King's minister in charge of housing. He was an avid reader. As he trudged along Tredegar's streets...