OCCASIONAL BIOGRAPHIES : XV. ERNEST BEVIN
ALONG Thames-side the personality of Ernest Bevin, the dockers' leader, is supreme. He does not court popularity, and he seldom speaks at meetings in Dockland : perhaps because he would draw an audience which no local building could hold. Though everyone would like to see him his non-appearance is not resented. If he is not at the riverside it is because he is serving the dockers' cause in more important ways elsewhere. Faith in " Ernie " is absolute. And it is not confined to the members of the vast union he has built up. Steadily he has gained the admiration and trust of trade unionists and the followers of the Labour Movement as a whole. His appointment as Chairman of the General Council of Trades Union Congress will, of course, be popular. It would be more popular still if it were for longer than the customary period of twelve months. The world of Labour is troubled and apprehensive. It would welcome the conjunction for a long period as the leaders of trade unionism of men so outstanding in capacity as Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine.
A journalist recently referred to these two as being respectively the poet and the statistician of the trade union movement. There is a grain of truth in the com- parison. There is a dash of poetry in Bevin. He has vision and imagination. Pre-eminently, however, he is a man of action and affairs. His dreams, if he has any, are followed by a swift endeavour to give them form and substance. He may have dreamed beforehand of the mighty union which gradually he put together out of some thirty smaller and relatively ineffective unions. He may have dreamed of a mighty circulation for a Labour daily at a time when the Herald had a couple of hundred thou- sand readers and imposed a heavy financial burden on the trade unions ; it is, in fact, due above all to his practical genius that the Herald now claims the largest daily circulation in the world. He may have dreamed, too, of the great edifice of Transport House, another child of his audacity and confidence, in which his union now plays landlord to the National Labour Party itself as well as to many less important organisations. It required daring and prevision to stake, as he persuaded his union to do, a large sum on the erection of this building. Bevin brushed aside the doubters. " A petty - cash transaction," he said with a laugh.
His self-assurance, his gift of decision, his intrepidity, are the more remarkable because they do not run away with him. He likes a fight, without being bellicose. He has enough courage to refuse a challenge or to call off a battle when it is likely to end unfavourably. One does not know his part in the declaration of the General Strike. Perhaps he saw that it had to come to appease the sorely- tried and sensitive miners. Certainly he was one of those who kept it in hand and voted for ending it as soon as its fruitlessness became apparent. The same courage is enabling him gradually to banish " unofficial " strikes from the realm he controls. Though he is the idol of his following he will not pander to them. They are reminded that their case can be dealt with by orderly and constitutional process and told that it will not be dealt with in any other way.. Until work is resumed the union will give them no cover. Bevin has rendered no greater service to the world of trade unionism than his insistence upon the carrying out of engagements to which, on behalf of his members, he has put his name.
What about the beginnings of this formidable man who makes and manages trade unions, erects huge buildings, rearranges papers so that they become best- sellers and becomes outstanding in the Labour Movement ? He . was parentless at the age of eight, worked on a farm at the age of 10, roughed it in Bristol, and while stfll a child knew every type of hardship and unpleasant vicissitude. His contact with the trade union world began as the result of a certain speech which he excitedly outpoured at a Sweated Industries exhibition in Bristol. An excited outpouring by Bevin, a gigantic man with a gigantic voice, could not fail to be sensational. It brought Bevin notoriety. It also brought him the " sack." What folly to dismiss Bevin from so harmless an occupa- tion as tram-conducting I In doing so his employers liberated a lion. To the Dockers' Union, who promptly engaged him, Bevin, tub-thumper, organiser, diplomatist and born leader all in one, was a gift from the gods. Looking back on those days Bevin has said that his task was " to banish the idea of serfdom from the mind of the people." He did his best. When he was called to a position of greater responsibility in London he could boast that the South - West had been awakened and quickened.
The War gave him many. opportunities. I well remem- ber the memorable Trades Union Congress of 1915 when Mr. Lloyd George, attending to answer certain complaints of the trade unions, so emotionalised the audience that it forgot the object of his coming. Not so Bevin. Unmoved by the glorious but irrelevant rhetoric, he insisted doggedly in putting the predetermined questions. His fellows, now under Mr. Lloyd George's spell, were shocked. Bevin, persisting, was treated as one brawling in church. But he put his questions. At the end of the War, as member of many Reconstruction Committees and a prominent figure in large-scale industrial negotiations, he had come into his own. His fame was enlarged by his order to the dockers to refuse to handle munitions for use against the Russians and by his triumph in the case for the dockers' minimum wage claim. His forensic assault on the statistical witnesses in this case, and his closing speech of eleven hours' duration, won him the title of the Dockers' K.C. and enshrined him for ever in the hearts of dockers.
It is difficult to do justice to the new Bevin that gradually emerged from wider experience and added responsibility. Vehement as ever, robustious, a natural force which you impede at your peril, his interest has been caught in certain urgent problems of reorganisation, with plans for giving coal and steel and electricity and cotton their proper place in the national economy, for abolishing casual labour at the docks, for revising old age pensions and increasing the period of school attendance. With some study, too, of financial and monetary matters (assisted here by his membership of the Macmillan Committee) the agitator is changing into the planner and Labour statesman.
How will this dominating personality develop ? It is typical of Bevin that though he could have entered Parliament twenty years ago, and stayed there, he has chosen to labour in the industrial field. To the wisdom of his decision, the gains of the transport workers, his huge smooth-running trade union and other manifold achievements will testify. If he should now decide to occupy the place that awaits him in political life there will be loss, for his whole mind and energy might with advantage continue to play upon the problem of the constructive relationship of the trade union to industry, with which, especially in the transport industry, he has done so much. There would be gain, but still loss, because there is only one Bevin. The House of Commons might not like the thunder and lightning of his rhetoric, but it could not disregard them. Certainly it would admire the force, directness and authority as well as the practical sagacity and balance of an arresting and exceptional
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