The First Failure

He was as foreign to the morning-coated tradition of British diplomacy as a shire stallion between the shafts of a state coach. He had 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.

Sixpence a Week. Ernie (not even at Whitehall would anyone have thought of calling him Ernest) had once been a drayman's boy himself, and a shop clerk and a pageboy and a tram conductor into the bargain. An orphan at six, he had gone to work at ten as a farmhand for sixpence a week, and promptly struck for higher wages. The strike failed. Ernie was fired. Soon afterward he got another job at a shilling a week, plus a bonus of jam on Sunday for reading to his new boss out of Hansard's parliamentary reports. In 1908 he made his formal entry into the field of labor relations by setting up a pitch in front of Bristol Cathedral and badgering the wealthy for contributions for unemployed dock workers.

By 1937, 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.

"Give 'Itler 'Ell!" was Ernie's motto when he joined Winston Churchill in the Coalition Cabinet in 1940. Like Winnie, but in his own 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."

Last week, his work done, Ernie, appointed to the do-nothing job of Lord Privy Seal, sat alone in the ministerial flat at No. 1 Carlton Gardens. It was a cold, gloomy day, and Ernie had decided to let Flo, his devoted wife for more than 50 years, go to the England v. Scotland football match without him. While she was gone, his doctor dropped in, saw that his color was good, and left. Ernie read for a while, then went to bed and had a cup of tea. A sudden heart attack struck, and when Flo Bevin returned, the old fighter was dead.

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