The Angry Man

A hush settled over the House of Commons. On the benches, every member wore a black tie; the galleries were crowded with peers, ambassadors and solemn visitors. At 62, Aneurin Bevan was dead, and the House of Commons paid him homage. "He was a bonny fighter, and a chivalrous one," said Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, chief of the party Bevan had railed against all his life. Said Labor's Hugh Gaitskell: "His death is as if a fire had gone out--a fire which we sometimes found too hot, by which we were sometimes scorched, but a fire which warmed and cheered us and stimulated us." In a corner seat of the front bench below the gangway sat the solitary figure of Sir Winston Churchill, who had often been Nye Bevan's bitterest foe. When Gaitskell recalled some of Nye's fierce sallies, including the attack on Churchill when he cried that he welcomed the "opportunity of picking the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truth," Churchill gave a fleeting smile of remembrance and made a gracious bow toward the speaker.

Lost Prize. All Britain mourned the passing of the wild-haired Welshman who, in 30 years of public life, had never quite made it to the top. Except for Churchill, Nye Bevan was the greatest orator Britain has known in this century. His lilting, cadenced speech struck passion into friends and foes alike; his fierce socialism demanded instant nationalization of industry, instant disarmament, instant betterment for workers and the poor. Yet in Nye, Socialism seemed locked in battle with a vaunting personal ambition. Time and again he reached the brink of power in his party and his country, only to lose the prize by rash behavior that made even his fellow Socialists feel safer in the hands of a competent but unexciting eminence like Clement Attlee.

Bevan was born to anger in the coal-seamed Ebbw Vale district of South Wales. He was one of the seven surviving children of a coal miner, grew up in a cramped, mud-floored cottage in the grimy town of Tredegar. At 13 Nye left school and went into the mines himself.

He read all the books he could cart away from the Workmen's Institute, overcame a stammer by reciting Shakespeare to anyone who would listen, and at 21 was sent by his fellow miners to London's Central Labor College. The school's militant motto: "Educate, Agitate, Organize."

Even then he was a strange mixture of rabid rebel and good companion--the original Angry Young Man, full of both compassion and wit. The war with the Kaiser was none of his concern: his battle was with the thoughtless world of privilege that allowed his father to choke to death of a miner's lung disease and never offered a tuppence in workmen's compensation. In 1929 he burst upon Parliament "like some great disturbance of nature" as the new member from Ebbw Vale.

Youthful Ghost. The old Welsh fire brand, Lloyd George, had once advised that the best way for a newcomer to attract attention in the House was to attack the greatest men around. Nye started with Lloyd George himself. During Nye's blistering speech, said another M.P. later, "Lloyd George sat there fascinated. It was as though he had seen a ghost--the ghost of his own youth."

Bevan's mission, as he saw it then, was the "bullying of tradition." and his bullying took a form unknown to the owlish Harold Laski or those doctrinaire Socialists, the Webbs. Once, when Churchill roared in exasperation, "There was a parliamentary democracy in this country before the Labor Party was born," Bevan roared back: "There wasn't. There was a Parliament but not a democracy. Your people were here and mine were not." He had no patience with Labor's own indecisive Ramsay MacDonald, "treading his resolutionary path from conference to conference." He also had words for a young Scottish member named Jennie Lee, who could not make up her mind about socialism. Snorted Nye: "Why don't you get yourself to a nunnery and be done with it." By 1934 Jennie Lee had made up her mind--and Nye had changed his. "Miss Lee and I," he announced one day, "had a discussion in her chambers in the Middle Temple. We agreed to get married."

People flocked to his narrow Regency house in London or his squirish estate in Buckinghamshire and were dazzled by his private charm. In private or public there was no holding his mind or braking his tongue. He railed against his own party for not backing intervention against Spain's Franco, at one point was suspended from the House. With the coming of war, his was one of the first voices to call Winston Churchill to lead a national government, but in the midst of Britain's finest hour, he denounced the great man as "suffering from petrified adolescence." "Merchant of discourtesy!" stormed Churchill. "Better than being a wholesaler of disaster," countered Bevan. Churchill's most memorable phrase for Nye was "squalid nuisance," but the two had a wary respect for each other.

"We want," cried Bevan at a Labor Party conference in 1945, "the complete political extinction of the Tory Party." Finally, Labor got its chance. Clement Attlee became Prime Minister, and, to the consternation of many, he made Aneurin Bevan Minister of Health and then Minister of Labor and National Service. Bev an fathered the National Health Service, but when Attlee's new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, allotted more to armaments and less to welfare than Nye wanted, Bevan resigned from the Cabinet in disgust.

Next But One. He had become a bogeyman to everyone--the Tories, whom he called "lower than vermin." the academic Socialists, Hugh Gaitskell ("that desiccated calculating machine") and the U.S., which he regarded as the exponent of greedy capitalism and diplomatic ineptitude. Though he had thought well enough of Communism in theory in the 1930s to urge a popular front (a notion that got him briefly expelled from the Labor Party), he ultimately came to regard the Kremlin-directed Communist movement as deeply malevolent. When Moscow ordered the Berlin blockade, he was almost alone in Britain in demanding that the Allies send armored columns to break through it. With age there came a kind of mellowing, mixed with listlessness and bitterness. No longer did people say Bevan was "the next Prime Minister but one."

History had passed him by.

In 1957 Bevan made his peace with Hugh Gaitskell, accepting what he had once fought bitterly: the necessity for Britain to have its own H-bomb. To his fiercely loyal followers it was a "betrayal" they never forgave, and Harold Macmillan seemed right when he caustically described him as "a shorn Samson, surrounded by a bevy of prim and aging Delilahs."

At 4:10 one afternoon last week, Nye Bevan lost his long fight against cancer. His family and four close friends gathered at a South Wales crematory. There was no minister, no prayer, no eulogy. After the playing of the andante from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony on a gramophone, Nye's great body was burned to ashes. He will be buried on the desolate hill called Waunpound where he made his first political speeches. "When he was a young man," remembered one Tredegar housewife last week, "all he had to do was to run down the street and call, 'Come on, lads,' and they knew he was off to Waunpound and a speech. And they'd fall in after him like he was a Pied Piper."

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