Word: tredegar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
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...
...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 (as an errand boy for the butcher), he was usually absorbed in an adventure story-Rider Haggard or Baroness Orczy...
...young people who had read, who could talk. They were fascinated by his exuberance, his brash charm, his wit. Bloomsbury apartments, Chelsea studios and Mayfair drawing rooms reverberated with the laughter which came from him in torrents as he threw back his massive head. But he remained true to Tredegar; he nourished his hatreds...
Back home after two years, he was elected checkweighman and disputes agent for his union. During the General Strike of 1926 he first showed his political mettle. In Tredegar the General Strike is still known as "Bevan's Siege." "They had the whole town in a straitjacket," recalls a Tredegar shopkeeper...