Word: bevinly
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...notable exception: the late Ernest Bevin, one of whose pithier diplomatic exchanges was recounted in London last week by an old friend. Soon after Bevin took office with the Labor government in 1945, the Guatemalan minister in London asked for an audience. His mission: he wanted Britain to cede neighboring British Honduras to Guatemala. After a long, cool stare at the Guatemalan, Bevin politely asked: "What country do you say you represent?" The minister told him. "How do you spell it?" said Bevin. Irritably, the minister spelled out G-u-a-t-e-m-a-1-a. Again Bevin stared...
...during the period of the book, was plain Mr. Alfred Duff Cooper, successively army lieutenant, Minister of Information, civilian defense chief in Southeast Asia, liaison man in North Africa and, finally, Ambassador to France, writing the Treaty of Dunkirk, and at the embassy piano listening to "Ernie" Bevin sing cockney ballads. It is by a thousand such little cinema frame snippets that Lady Diana's book gains value as a personal portrait of a period-World War II and after-just as her other two volumes cover World War I, the twittering '20s and the fateful...
...Ernest Bevin: "He always professed he never understood the 'Ouse very much. But he'd get across all right. Provided he could be himself. But the danger was occasionally he'd want to read a Foreign Office brief. It was quite fatal...
...Yorkshire miner's son who went into the pits at 14, Frank Cousins switched to truck driving when depression made mine jobs scarce. Humping meat and machinery long distances at low pay, he caught the eye of Ernie Bevin just before World War II, and became a T.W.U. organizer along the northern roads. Brought to London in 1944, he scorned the desk, never lost a chance to get out among the men, in truckers' cafes and pubs, on docks and in warehouses...
...boss of the T.W.U., Cousins has modeled himself on Bevin. He is a hard-driving collective bargainer, proud to have won his truckers a 44-hour week, yet lecturing them: "I'll go forward on a 40-hour week without reduction in pay only on condition that every man puts in a full hour's work every hour." In T.U.C. general council meetings he hacks through prejudice and opposition in true ham-handed Bevin fashion: rival leaders complain that he starts off practically every argument with the words, "My union will . . ." Along with belligerence he has shown...