Word: bevans
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Aneurin was a 7th century Welsh warrior-bard, and Aneurin Bevan aptly bore his name. Roaring into the House of Commons in 1929, the original Angry Young Man, he became-second only to his archfoe, Winston Churchill -the most hypnotic orator and contumacious politician of 20th century Britain. One of seven surviving sons of a Monmouthshire miner who died of lung disease, "Nye" Bevan, even in his plummy days as a Buckinghamshire squire and playboy of the West End world, never forgot or forgave the hardscrabble existence eked out by the working folk of his native valleys. His principal monument...
False Teeth. As Minister of Health and (at 47) youngest Cabinet member in Britain's first postwar Labor government, Bevan not only carried the campaign to socialize medicine but charmed the stethoscopes off the doctors with a sound financial program and an appeal to the Hippocratic conscience, delivered in lilting Celtic cadences. In one of several exits and expulsions, he quit the Cabinet in protest against the government's decision to levy a small fee for patients' spectacles and dentures. Partly as a result, Labor was turned out of office in 1951; the electorate bit the hand...
...recklessly ignored Oscar Wilde's advice: "A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies." In the darkest days of the Hitler war, Bevan accused Churchill of "petrified adolescence." (The patrician Prime Minister, in the course of their 26-year feud, called Bevan a "squalid nuisance" and later "Minister of Disease.") In one of the worst gaffes of his career, Bevan denounced Conservatives-presumably, all 8,093,858 Britons who had voted the Tory ticket in 1945-as "lower than vermin." Nor were his own leaders spared Nye's spiced tongue. He thought of his Prime...
...this second, concluding volume of Bevan, Author Foot acknowledges that Nye was by conventional reckoning a failed man. The main reason he never made it from a dirt-floored cottage to No. 10 Downing Street was not his reckless invective but a stubborn insistence on such highly unpopular policies as Britain's retention of its own nuclear deterrent. "We should not," said Nye in one of his most famed declarations, "go naked into the conference chamber." Though he and Jennie Lee, his tough Scottish wife and fellow M.P., seldom lacked caviar or claret, Bevan railed eloquently against...
...death in 1960 the M.P. from his old constituency of Ebbw Vale, has completed what is obviously a labor of love, with personal insights and inside information rarely available to a political biographer. He depicts, to be sure, a Nye in shining armor. He also makes clear that with Bevan's demise the fire went out of the belly of British socialism...