Bevan Aneurin - Aneurin Bevan: a biography. Volume 1, 1897-1945

It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter No patriotism, no public spirit, not reared in that inclement sky and harsh soil, in the hortussiccus of dissent, will generally last: it will either bend in the storm or droop in the sunshine.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

A NEURIN BEVAN was born at number 32 Charles Street, Tredegar, in the Welsh County of Monmouthshire, on 15 November 1897, of good dissenting stock. His father was a Baptist, his mother a Methodist and the two had first met as members of the choral society attached to the chapels. Tredegar was a working-class town, almost exclusively a miners town; ninety per cent of the population drew their livelihood from the pits. Yet, despite this binding common interest, there were many shades and gradations of opinion and living standards within the mining community. For some the chapel provided not only a solace from the afflictions of industrial society but the sword and the armour they must use for all worthy striving in the future. Drink was the enemy which appeared to exploit and to ravage more mercilessly than any coal-owners. In one sense the chapelgoers led a life apart from the violence and hopeless poverty which Tredegar also knew, and in this God-fearing section of the town the Bevan household in Charles Street held a secure, respected place. The family background was that of Welsh nonconformity in its heyday, with its self-reliance, pride, resource, music and the nurture, through its own logic and past struggles, of the richest soil for the cultivation of new heresies.

Aneurins father, David, was a native of Tredegar, although his forebears came from Carmarthenshire; he was a miner, the son of a miner, and a Welshman to the fingertips. Most of his working life he suffered from a bad chest which qualified on his death certificate for the title of bronchial asthma but was never scheduled for what it certainly was the dreaded miners disease of pneumoconiosis . He was delicately handsome, frail, wayward, a dreamer without a scrap of ambition but with much gaiety and a strong vein of humorous sarcasm. Some even called him a weakling , but the charge could be conceivable only by colliers standards. Most days he had left the house to catch the colliers train by five-thirty and was rarely home again much before nightfall, yet he still managed to lead a full life in the home and the community. A fine craftsman at anything he touched, he built on a new room when the family moved to number 7 Charles Street, tended the garden, kept chickens, mended the childrens shoes and performed all the other domestic duties directed by his wife. He installed a gas stove the first in Charles Street a bathroom, an inside toilet, hot water, a water tub and an organ around which the family assembled to sing hymns and Welsh folk songs every Sunday night. Every Sunday morning and evening he walked to the Carmel Baptist Church in Dukestown and walked back with the deacons and the other mighty arguers, six or seven abreast across the road, debating the sermon and invoking his deep knowledge of the Bible.

At least this was his ritual in the days of Aneurins childhood. Later his chapel-going enthusiasm faded and perhaps his religious faith too. The unholy trinity of the bishop, the brewer and the squire not that Tredegar had seen much of the handiwork of the first or the third of these ogres for some decades had to make way for other opponents. David Bevan became treasurer of his miners lodge. He was always a Federation man, not a Company man that is, a supporter of the nascent South Wales Miners Federation and its local branches in their clashes with the quasi-feudal overlord of Tredegars land, industry and institutions, the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company. In his early manhood he was a Liberal, and voted for Sir William Harcourt in the West Monmouthshire constituency, transferring his allegiance in 1906 to Tom Richards, the miners nominee. Once a Lib-Lab, like so many of his generation and upbringing, he must have become a Socialist while Aneurin was still at school. Robert Blatchfords Clarion was delivered at the house every week. The mixture in its pages of glowing humanity, sentiment, humour, fierce debate and a splendid dream for the future suited David Bevans taste precisely. As for the struggle to make the dream come true, he was too tired for that, and who will blame him? And besides, there at his elbow was a paradise to be entered at will the world of music and books. He bequeathed to all his children a love of music. He taught them all to sing, some including Aneurin with no great success, and occasionally pressed sixpence into their hands when they achieved the degree of perfection he desired. He quailed, despite all their mothers promptings, at the thought of teaching them Welsh. He himself belonged to Cymmrodorion, the Welsh cultural organization , and won prizes at the inter-chapel eisteddfodau, one for a love poem which his wife could not read. Yet no communal joys could fully satisfy his spirit. He was a bookworm, begrudging all the other pursuits which dragged him back from his faraway realms of poetry and romance. Gradually and delightedly he discovered that he had one son who would accompany him there. No doubt all children reared in miners homes at the beginning of the century had hard lives. But a ray of light and tenderness is cast across the youth of Aneurin by the gentle character of such a father.