Ernest Bevin

by Alan Bullock

"One of the true giants of twentieth-century history, Ernest Bevin started work on a farm when eleven years old, worked in the bakehouse of a Bristol restaurant at thirteen and at twenty became a carter earning eighteen shillings a week. Forming a branch of the Dockers' Union among the carters propelled him towards trade union leadership, and in 1921 he founded the Transport and General Workers' Union." "In 1940 Bevin, by then general secretary of the TGWU, was invited by Winston Churchill to join the War Cabinet as Minister of Labour, in which role he marshalled manpower for the war effort. From 1945 to 1951 he was one of Britain's greatest Foreign Secretaries - a key figure in implementing the Marshall Plan, launching the Treaty of Brussels and establishing NATO - but the strain was immense, and on his seventieth birthday Attlee moved him to the role of Lord Privy Seal. Bevin died, working on his papers, in April 1951." "Alan Bullock's monumental biography, originally published in th