Word: bevins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Britons last week got an idea of the reception that the Beveridge Plan for social reform may soon meet in Parliament. Up in the House of Commons was a Catering Bill introduced by hornyhanded Labor Minister Ernest Bevin. A restaurant worker before he became a dock worker, Bevin asked for a commission to investigate the catering business from top to bottom, then recommend any necessary reforms...
Britain's catering industry employs 500,000 workers, who put in 7 2-hour weeks and earn as little as $10 per month. Said Bevin: "I need [the bill] for the war ... in the interests of public morale. ... I need it for the transition period. . . . Our people have had no holiday, no rest, no recuperation since the war broke out. ... I need it for the postwar period to [help] solve mass unemployment ... it is a bill small in character but great in potentialities...
...talk with the Archbishop of Canterbury (he has a laugh that rattles windows)-or knows the inside of H. G. Wells' house near Regent's Park (he likes to play charades, brags about his diabetes)-or what it is like to dine with Labor Minister Ernest Bevin at the Trades Union Club (he drops cigaret ashes on his front, wears colored shirts, talks about crossing carrier pigeons with parrots so they can deliver verbal messages...
When Tillet was head of Bristol's potent Dockers' Union he met young Ernest Bevin (now Minister of Labor), gave him his first union job and became the strongest influence in his life. After the abdication of his good friend the Duke of Windsor he said: "I regret that that great little gentleman did not let fly ... and tell us just what the bishops and politicians, who hounded him from public life, were pressing...
Patricia Strauss (Bevin & Co., TIME, July 7, 1941) might well have taken these words as the starting point for her valuable, fact-filled, respectful biography of Cripps. Long a worker within the British Labor Party and the wife of an ardent Crippsian (G. R. Strauss, Labor M.P. for North Lambeth), Author Strauss tries to show that the very lack of "finesse" and "political acumen" is what has made Cripps the hope of thousands of Englishmen. It is a position, she says, that he would lose only if "they came to suspect, even mistakenly, that he had lost his political naivete...