Ernest (Ernie) Bevin was an iconic political figure of the mid-20th century. Minister of Labour in Churchill’s wartime inner cabinet, and Foreign Secretary in Attlee’s postwar Labour Government, Bevin was born in the Exmoor village of Winsford, just north of Dulverton, on 7 March 1881.
His mother Diana (Mercy) Tidbould married William Bevin in 1864, but William left the family around 1876-7, after which Mercy described herself as a widow. Ernest was her 7th and youngest child, but it is not known who his father was. When Mercy died in 1889, he lived with his sister, Mary Jane in Morchard Bishop in Devon. As his fame grew, he was sometimes wrongly described as coming from Devon, rather than Somerset.
Bevin did not seem to have fond memories of his Somerset upbringing. At a rally in Dorchester to commemorate the centenary of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1934, he said: “Whenever I am asked about the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the Nazis, or any other form of it, I reply that I was born in a village and held under a dictatorship until I was fourteen – and I will see you to the devil before I have any more.”
He had rather limited schooling. While still in Winsford he went to the local church school (records of his attendance can still be seen at the Somerset Heritage Centre in Taunton), and Sunday School. On his death in 1951, a local newspaper quoted one of his teachers at the latter, who was then still living in his birthplace of Winsford, as describing him as a boy who had his full share of boyish mischievousness, but there is no goodness in any boy who does nothing naughty. In Devon he attended two local schools, then worked on farms before moving to Bristol in 1894 to work with two of his brothers.
In Bristol, he had a range of jobs over the next 16 years, including a van driver for two mineral water firms, and a conductor on the horse trams. In the early years of the new century, he married Florence Townley, though the exact date remains a mystery. His political interests grew, both directly through the burgeoning left-wing groups of the period, and also as a by-product of his involvement in non-conformism religion and education.
The major turning-point in his public life was his trade union activities from 1910 in the Dockers Union in and around Bristol, and, especially during the Great War, more nationally. He also stood for Parliament as a Labour candidate in Bristol Central in December 1918, but, like so many, was soundly beaten by a Coalition-backed Conservative at the notorious ‘coupon election’. His activism led to the Bevin family’s move from Bristol to London in February 1920.
His union influence was consolidated when he helped engineer the creation of the TGWU in 1922, and he became its first general secretary. This was his industrial and political power base right up to the Second World War, through the great upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s. He again sought to become an MP in 1931, opposing the Tory-dominated National Government formed under Ramsay MacDonald, but, as in 1918, was crushed by a a coalition candidate. He eventually became an MP in 1940, when a seat at Wandsworth Central was found for him when he joined the new Coalition Government. He sat for that seat, and then for Woolwich East until his death.
Though a national, and even international figure, he still remembered his roots, as seen in October 1925, at a TGWU meeting at St Andrews Hall, Taunton, when he declared that he wanted to make a very earnest appeal to his own West Country folk. As a Somerset man, he wanted the county to send its quota of Labour men to Parliament. However, it is claimed that that he only returned to his Somerset birthplace of Winsford once in his adult life, in 1939 to see his mother’s grave.
Bevin died in April 1951, and was cremated, his ashes being interred at Westminster Abbey, as befitted such a major statesman. However, he was not neglected in his Somerset home. In 1981, an oak tree was planted in Winsford’s recreation field to commemorate the centenary of his birth. There is also a small, simple plaque on what is now known as Bevin Cottage (a Grade II listed building), which states: “Ernest Bevin Statesman was born here on 7th March 1881). Well worth a visit.
© JB Seatrobe (Barry K Winetrobe & Janet Seaton) 2018. A version of this article was published originally in the July 2016 issue of the Somerset Leveller, #15.