Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), one of Britain’s greatest trade union leaders, an impressive Minister of Labour during World War II, and a formidable Foreign Secretary between 1945 and 1951. Yet he began life in the lowest of circumstances—he was born at Winsford, Somerset, in March 1881, the illegitimate son of a farm labourer. From the age of eight he was raised by his half-sister in Devon. He was a farm labourer from the age of 11, moved to Bristol at 13 years of age, and became a soft-drinks delivery man. In Bristol he became a lay preacher in the Baptist Church, joined the Bristol Socialist Society, and was married to Florence Townley, by whom he had a daughter in 1914.

In 1908 Bevin helped to organize the “Right to Work” movement in Bristol and then became an organizer of the dockers and carters on the Bristol docks, rapidly increasing the membership of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside, and General Labourers’ Union. He eventually became one of the three national organizers of the union and then its general secretary, pressing for the amalgamation of 14 unions into the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) in 1922.

As general secretary of the TGWU Bevin was projected forward into national trade union politics, becoming a member of the General Council of the TUC in 1924. He was subsequently appointed organizer of the General Strike of 1926, led by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in support of the coal miners. This ill-fated dispute lasted only nine days, between May 3 and May 12, and Bevin was upset by the fact that Jimmy Thomas and the negotiating committee of the TUC had arranged for the strike to be called off without any guarantees that the strikers would be re-employed. Nevertheless, it was he who bore the brunt of the charge of treachery levelled at the TUC by the Communist Party of Great Britain. It was also Bevin who therefore pressed for the TUC‘s “Black Circulars” in 1934 to ban Communist delegates in the trades councils and the trade unions of Britain. This led to much friction inside and outside his own union.

Bevin was a prominent figure within the Labour Party during the inter-war years, writing extensively on unemployment and representing it on the Amulree Committee which led to the Holidays with Pay Act in 1938. It was his speech to the Labour Party conference in 1935 that led to Clement Attlee replacing George Lansbury, a pacifist, as leader of the Labour Party and it was he who pressed Labour to prepare for re-armament in the face of the rise of fascism in Europe and the Spanish Civil War.

Such was Bevin’s skill as an organizer that Winston Churchill invited him to be minister of labour and national service in his wartime administration, formed in May 1940. Bevin entered the House of Commons after winning a by-election in the constituency of Central Wandsworth in London, and was quickly organizing the workforce of Britain. Famously, he arranged for just under 50,000 young men, conscripted into the armed forces, to be redeployed as mineworkers in the essential wartime industry—they were dubbed the “Bevin Boys”. Labour’s landslide general election victory in 1945 allowed Attlee, the new prime minister, to keep Bevin in government, as foreign secretary from 1945 to 1951. In this role, Bevin supported the Marshall Plan, a financial aid scheme for Europe arranged by the United States, and helped to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. However, ill-health forced him to resign as foreign secretary in March 1951 and he died on April 14, 1951, acknowledged as Britain’s greatest trade union leader and admired by the Foreign Office as one of its finest foreign secretaries.