(b. Somerset, 7 Mar. 1881; d. 14 Apr. 1951) British; Foreign Secretary 1945 – 51 The illegitimate son of a midwife, Bevin left school at 11, working first as a farm boy and later as a tramdriver.

Bevin had two careers. In his first, he became the most powerful trade unionist of his generation. Starting as chairman of a branch of the Dockers' Union in 1910, he became its assistant general secretary in 1920. He then organized an amalgamation of unions to form the Transport and General Workers' Union, becoming its first general secretary. He was a member of the TUC General Council from 1925 to 1940.

Prominence in the industrial labour movement gave Bevin influence in the Labour Party. He was offered (but declined) the offer of a peerage during the second Labour administration, 1929 – 31. In the 1930s he advocated Labour support for rearmament to counter the threat from Nazism's rise in Germany. However, it was not until 1940, at the age of 59, that Bevin began his second — ministerial — career when Churchill appointed him Minister of Labour and National Service. He held the post until 1945.

Bevin was one of the most powerful members of the small War Cabinet. He was also one of the most successful, mobilizing the workforce with a minimum of industrial strife and establishing a framework for consultation between government and industry which persisted after the war. He also participated actively in the post-war reconstruction planning which led to the establishment of the welfare state.

When the post-war Labour government (1945 – 51) was formed, Bevin expected to be made Chancellor of the Exchequer; but, in a last-minute change of plan, Clement Attlee sent him to the Foreign Office. Although Britain emerged from the war no longer a world power to rank with the USA and the USSR, he was one of the most influential figures in the immediate post-war world. He took the initiative, in 1947, in the formation of the Organization of European Economic Co-operation and he was one of the prime movers behind the creation of NATO. In these areas his policies received widespread support, but his stance on the Middle East and especially Palestine (then a British protectorate) was more controversial. For this he came under sustained criticism (and even accusations of anti-Semitism), particularly from the left wing of the Labour Party.

Bevin's health deteriorated in the latter part of the government's term and Attlee was eventually reluctantly compelled to move him from the Foreign Office. He spent the last weeks of his life as Lord Privy Seal.

At the peak of his powers, Bevin had immense energy and a forceful personality. He was generally intolerant of criticism. Entering the Commons only in 1940, he was never an accomplished parliamentarian. In Cabinet, however, he was extremely effective and his loyalty to Attlee, with whom he worked very closely, was legendary. Indeed, he shielded the Prime Minister from at least one attempt to oust him.

The career of Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), English trade union leader and Labour politician, is often taken to symbolize the political rise of sections of the working class in 20th-century Britain.

Ernest Bevin was born on March 9, 1881, in Bristol, the son of poor, working-class parents. After finishing elementary school in Bristol, Bevin earned a precarious living in various manual jobs and was introduced to politics via the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the Marxist party. He organized the dockers and transport workers and from 1910 to 1921 led the Dockers Union. Through his union activities Bevin became involved in national politics; his brilliant advocacy at a commission of inquiry on dock conditions in 1920 led to greatly improved conditions for the dockers and national recognition for Bevin.

The noted historian A. J. P. Taylor has bracketed Bevin at this stage of his career with J. H. Thomas, the leader of the National Union of Railwaymen. They were both outstanding union leaders of a new type. Though aggressively working-class in character, they were no longer willing merely to resist. Nor would they put off improvement till the distant dawn of socialism. They bargained with the employers as equals, displaying equal or greater skill, and they never forgot that compromise was their ultimate aim, whether with a strike or preferably without.

Bevin's most important contribution to modern Britain was as creator and general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union from 1921 to 1940. Forging a national force out of scattered, locally organized, occupationally divided workers was a major achievement; in time, the T&GWU became the largest union in Britain.

In the late 1930s Bevin opposed George Lansbury and other pacifists in the Labour party and argued in favor of rearmament. When he entered Parliament in 1940, Bevin became a key figure in the wartime coalition as minister of labor and national service (1940-1945). Without him the Churchill government could not have achieved the levels of wartime production necessary to continue the war.

After the war Bevin served as secretary of state for foreign affairs (1945-1951) and was lord privy seal for a brief period in 1951. In spite of his controversial handling of the Palestine situation, he is generally regarded as a great foreign secretary. Perhaps this accolade springs from surprise that Bevin, a Labour minister, did not depart radically from traditional British policies in foreign affairs. He died in 1951.

Further Reading

The best source for Bevin's career is the uncompleted biography by Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin (1960). The two volumes so far published not only deal comprehensively with Bevin but also set him in the context of changing British society. Bullock's work is a fundamental source of 20th-century British social history. There is a useful biography by Francis Williams, Ernest Bevin: Portrait of a Great Englishman (1952). See also Sir Trevor Evans, Bevin of Britain (1946). To get the feel of Bevin's almost brutal power of argument and his handling of Labour party audiences, one should look at the Report of the Annual Conference of the Labour Party in 1931. A man like Bevin, whose strength lay in negotiation, organization, and domination of audiences in the labor movement rather than in originality of ideas, is best studied through others' reactions to him rather than through his own speeches and writings.

Additional Sources

Bullock, Alan, Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary, 1945-1951, Oxford Oxfordshire; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 1983.

Stephens, Mark, Ernest Bevin, unskilled labourer and world statesman, 1881-1951, Stevenage, Herts: SPA Books, 1985.

Weiler, Peter, Ernest Bevin, Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press; distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin's Press, 1993.

For more information on Ernest Bevin, visit Britannica.com.

Bevin, Ernest (1881-1951). Trade unionist and Labour politician. The illegitimate son of a village midwife, Bevin left school at 11. He became a full-time official of the Dockers' Union in 1911, and by 1920 was assistant general secretary. Bevin gained national attention in the immediate post-war years through his evidence to the Shaw Inquiry in 1920 on dock labour. He master-minded the amalgamation of eighteen unions into the Transport and General Workers' Union, of which he became the first general secretary in 1922. The failure of the General Strike of 1926 underlined his belief that unions should negotiate from strength.

The collapse of the Labour government of 1929-31 compelled Bevin further into the political arena and he played a major role during the 1930s in committing Labour to realistic policies on the economy and rearmament. A devastating speech at the 1935 party conference helped remove the pacifist George Lansbury from the leadership. By 1937 Bevin was chairman of the TUC and one of the most influential figures in the Labour movement.

When Labour joined Churchill's wartime coalition in May 1940, the prime minister made the surprise but inspired appointment of Bevin to the Ministry of Labour. At the age of 59 he entered Parliament. Probably no other figure could have secured the same level of co-operation from the work-force.

With the election of a majority Labour government in 1945 Bevin went to the Foreign Office. Here he laid the foundation stones of British foreign policy for the next 40 years. To the approval of the Conservative opposition, Bevin took a consistently strong line towards the Soviet Union. Under Bevin's influence the government went ahead with the construction of a British atomic bomb, and played a leading role in the creation of NATO in 1949.

Bevin had been in poor health since the 1930s. After the 1950 general election he was no longer capable of fulfilling his duties, and he died within a month of leaving office. He was a man of great intelligence, despite his lack of formal education.

(bĕv'ən) , 1881–1951, British labor leader and statesman. An orphan who earned his own living from childhood, he began a long career as a trade union official when he became secretary of the dock workers' union in 1911. In 1921, Bevin merged his own union with many others to form the powerful Transport and General Workers' Union, of which he became general secretary. From 1925 to 1940 he sat on the general council of the Trade Union Congress, serving as chairman in 1937. Bevin played a leading organizing role in the general strike of 1926, but after the failure of that strike he worked to achieve greater cooperation between labor and the employers. He was enormously influential in Labour party politics in the 1930s but did not enter Parliament until invited to join Winston Churchill's coalition government in 1940. In that government he was minister of labor and national service and thus was responsible for mobilizing manpower for war uses. As foreign minister in the Labour government of 1945 to 1951, Bevin devoted himself to building up the strength of Western Europe in close cooperation with the United States and helped lay the groundwork for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He favored the establishment of a federated Arab-Israeli state in Palestine, but that proved impossible to achieve.

Bibliography

See biography by A. Bullock (3 vol., 1960–83).

1881 - 1951

Foreign secretary of Great Britain (1945 - 1951).

Ernest Bevin was associated with the Bevin - Bidault agreement of December 1945, which provided for the evacuation of Britain's and France's troops from Syria and Lebanon. He was also responsible for the abortive Bevin - Sidqi agreement, signed between Britain and Egypt in October 1946, and the equally unsuccessful 1949 Bevin - Sforza Plan concerning Libya.

It was Bevin's involvement with the Palestine problem for which he is best known. When the affairs of the Palestine mandate came under the jurisdiction of the Foreign Office, Bevin took an active role in the formulation of British policy during the crucial years of the Arab - Jewish struggle for Palestine. In November 1945, Bevin announced the formation of the Anglo - American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. Although he desired the United States to become involved in the resolution of the Palestine problem, he envisaged a dominant role for Britain in the Middle East.

Although Bevin pursued a policy that closely followed the aims of the British white paper of 1939 - which restricted the number of Jewish immigrants from Europe to Palestine - it became clear that Britain could not resolve the differences between the Zionists and the Palestinians. In April 1947, Bevin decided to pass the Palestine problem to the United Nations. When the United Nations recommended partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, he refused to allow the British mandate authorities to participate in the implementation of the agreement. Instead, he ordered them to dismantle their administration and withdraw British forces by May 1948.

Many Zionists suspected Bevin opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, but recent revisionist scholarship has shown that he tacitly cooperated in implementing the partition plan. According to new accounts based on declassified documents from Israel's archives, Bevin met secretly with Transjordan officials in London and privately sanctioned King Abdullah ibn Hussein's plans to seize the West Bank. This plan had been arranged by Abdullah and Golda Meir, a prominent Zionist leader.

Bibliography

Shimoni, Yaacov. Political Dictionary of the Arab World. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Shlaim, Avi. The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists and Palestine, 1921 - 1951. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

— LAWRENCE TAL

Quotes:

"Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat."

"The most conservative man in the world is the British Trade Unionist when you want to change him."

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