Word: bevins
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...neither the training nor the heart for the prancing and posturing of a high-stepping hackney. Like the farmers' dray horses that hauled their loads through the cobbled streets of the Somerset village where he was born to bitter poverty in 1881, big, bluff, tough Ernie Bevin had spent his life with his shoulders hard against the traces, his eyes ahead and his back braced for the long pull...
...Ernie Bevin had shouldered his 250-lb. bulk up to the chairmanship of Britain's Trades Union Congress, the top spot in British labor. At high council tables he used plain, blunt, carefully thought-out words and facts like clenched fists to pummel his opponents...
...Socialist way, Ernie seemed a reincarnation of John Bull. When Schoolmaster Attlee's Socialism supplanted Aristocrat Churchill's Toryism, it was Ernie rather than any of his more doctrinaire colleagues who symbolized Britain's New Order. But after he became Foreign Secretary, Bevin roared: "Everyone is expecting me to change our policy. They forget that facts never change...
Sixpence Apiece. The disturbing challenge of Soviet Russia, the hard knocks and humiliations forced upon the British Empire during Bevin's six years of office, dealt deadly blows to Britain's Foreign Secretary, but Ernie took them unflinchingly. Last month, racked with illness and fatigue, he bowed his head for the first time. "This will be the death of him," said a cabinet colleague, when Ernie turned his ministry over to Herbert Morrison in March and retired from the ring. "It is the only admission of failure he's ever had to make...
Foreign Office employees all over the world gave sixpence apiece to send Ernie a parting gift (a mahogany desk and Worcester dinner service). "When the history of this century comes to be written," said Clement Attlee, "the name of Ernest Bevin will stand very high indeed...