The Life & Times of Ernest Bevin: Minister of Labour 1940-45

188 Pages·1960·14.549 MB·English

by  Alan Bullock

ALAN BULLOCK
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
ERNEST BEVIN
VOLUME TWO
Minister of Labour
1940 - 1945
Ernest Bevin in March 1942, aged 61. HEINEMANN:LONDON
William Heinemann Ltd
LONDON MELBOURNE TORONTO
CAPE TOWN AUCKLAND
Contents
First published 1967
Preface xi
© ALAN BULLOCK 1967
The Coalition and the Crisis of l 940 l -·
All rights reserved
2 Bevin's Labour Policy Takes Shape
3 Critics, Welfare and Wages
4 Character and Colleagues 98
~ 5 The Minister, the Unions-and the Conscription of
Women 124 '-.
6 Politics, Manpower and Coal 147 .,.
7 Bevin and Reconstruction 181
8 The Catering Wages Bill, the Beveridge Report and Coal
Again 220
f-09 Strikes, the Peak of Mobilisation and Post-War Plans 265 J
(8:>
More Post-War Plans, Demobilisation-and Greece
l 1 Resettlement 348
12 The 1945 Election 366
Bibliography 396
Index
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Bookprint Limited, London and Crawley
List of Illustrations
Ernest Bevin in March 1942, aged 61 Frontispiece
The War Cabinet in October 1941 (Mansell Collection) fadng page 82
Bevin in a Midlands factory; and on a tour of Lancashire
(Liverpool Daily Post) 83
One impression of the Minister of Labour (Radio Times Hulton) 114
Bevin in a different mood 115
Bevin on his way to a Cabinet meeting in December 1941
(Keystone) 178
With trainees at Letchworth; and at an L.C.C. technical
institute (Fox) I 79
Bevin opening Merchant Navy House, Newport (Western Mail) 210
The Minister of Labour and his wartime Director-General
of Manpower, Godfrey Ince 2 1 o
With Indian trainees outside the Ministry of Labour (Fox) 211
Victory in Europe: Churchill with Bevin and Anderson
(Imperial War Museum) 338
Britain's wartime leaders at Buckingham Palace on V.E. Day
(Sun) 339
Bevin at the Blackpool Labour Party conference, June 1945
(Radio Times Hulton) 370
Bevin speaking at the 1945 General Election (Sun) 371
The Party leaders, Attlee, Bevin and Morrison, after the
Labour Victory (Radio Times Hulton) 371
Two cartoons by Low pp. 379, 38o
vii
Acknowledgements
THE AUTHOR AND PUBLISHERS desire to thank the following for
permission to quote copyright material: Lord Attlee; Lord Citrine;
the late Lord Morrison; the late Lord Chuter-Ede; the Beaverbrook
Foundation; Mr. Randolph Churchill; the Rt. Hon. Julian Amery,
M. P.; Mrs. Frida Laski; the Passfield Trustees and the literary
executors of the late R. H. Tawney.
The Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office (History of the
Second World War: U.K. Civil Series); Constable & Co., Ltd.
(Winston Churchill, The Struggle for Survival by Lord Moran) ; Victor
Gollancz Ltd. (Harold Laski by Kingsley Martin); Hutchinson Ltd.
(Distinguished for Talent by Woodrow Wyatt); Frederick Muller Ltd.
(The Fateful Years by Lord Dalton); Cassell & Co. Ltd. (The Second
World War by Sir Winston Churchill); William Collins Sons, Ltd.
(The Turn of the Tide by Lord Alanbrooke); George Allen & Unw in
Ltd. (The Miners in Crisis and War by R. Page Arnot, Bevin by Trevor
Evans); Macmillan & Co. Ltd. (King George VI by Sir John Wheeler
Bennett, The British General Election of 1945 by R. B. Mc Callum
and Alison Readman); MacGibbon & Kee (Aneurin Bevan, Vol. I by
Michael Foot); Odhams Books Ltd. (Conflict without Malice by Emanuel
Shinwell); Faber & Faber Ltd. (Modern British Politics by Samuel
Beer); the Executors of the late John Winant and Hodder &
Stoughton Ltd. (A Letter from Grosvenor Square by John Winant); the
Executors of the late Lord Beveridge and Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.
(Power and Influence by Lord Beveridge); Cassell & Co. Ltd. (The
War Speeches of Winston S. Churchill, Vol. II, The Reckoning by Lord
Avon); Lord Chandos and The Bodley Head Ltd. (The Memoirs of
Lord Chandos); Eyre & Spottiswoode, the Beaverbrook Foundation
& the Controller, H.M.S.O. (Churchill and Beaverbrook by Kenneth
Young); William Heinemann Ltd. (A Prime Minister Remembers by
Francis Williams).
ix
Preface
MosT books are best left to speak for themselves. I have only three
points to make by way of preface.
It was my original intention to finish this work in two volumes.
After I had worked on the materials, however, I came to the con
clusion that it would be a mistake to compress the part Ernest Bevin
played in the wartime Government into the opening chapters of a
volume mainly concerned with foreign policy. The present volume
therefore presents a self-contained study of Bevin's five years as
Minister of Labour and a member of the War Cabinet. I now propose
to complete the whole work with a third volume dealing with his
years at the Foreign Office, 1945-1951.
I was fortunate to have made available to me by his executors the
papers Mr. Bevin had collected from this period with a view to writing
his own memoirs. I was equally fortunate in receiving much help from
those who worked closely with him during the war. These two pieces
of good fortune have made it possible to overcome at least some of
the disadvantages of working within a period in which access to
Cabinet records is not available.
Finally, I must remind the reader that this is a political biography.
I hope I have never lost sight of the fact that Ernest Bevin was a man
of formidable personality and I have tried to describe this and his
relations with other people in Chapter 4. My purpose, however, has
been to give an account of his public career, the task I was asked to
undertake by his executor Arthur Deakin. To this it is worth adding
that no man ever lived more fully in and for his job than Ernest Bevin
-it is there that the real man is to be found-and that his private life
in the last ten years of his career was not only uneventful but very
much curtailed by the demands of office.
I have had help from many people who have spared time to talk
about the events of these years. In view of the number involved, I
Xl
Preface
hope theywill not think me ungrateful if I express my thanks to them
without setting out a list of their names. To this I must make two
exceptions. I wish to thank Lord Attlee for talking to me several times
about Mr. Bevin and for allowing me access to the papers he has
deposited in the library of University College, Oxford. I also wish to
thank Miss Saunders who has again been of great assistance in TO MY WIFE
helping to collect much of the original material I have used.
In addition to inviting me to spend a month as their guest at
the Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation generously pro·
vided me with a grant with which I was fortunate to secure the
services of Mrs. Elizabeth Morgan as a research assistant. I have still
tried to do as much of my own research as possible, but without Mrs.
Morgan's help I could not have hoped to get through the mass of
parliamentary and newspaper material which I have been able to
use. I have also had much help from the staff of the Ministry of
Labour and, like other historians before me, have found. the vol·
umes of the official History of the Second World War (Civil Series)
of the greatest possible assistance.
I write an uncommonly illegible hand and there would never have
been a book at all if it had not been for the skill of, first, Miss Buttar
and then of my present secretary, Mrs. Janet Spincer, in discovering
what it must have been that I meant to say. I am very grateful to both
of them for their patience with my calligraphic shortcomings and
to Mr. Arthur Turner for reading the proofs.
When the draft of the book was finished, Lord Normanbrook, Mrs.
Margaret Gowing, Mrs. Morgan and Mr. D. ]. Wenden read it for
me. I should like to thank them most warmly for the trouble they took
and for their comments which spurred me to make extensive revisions.
Other demands on my time and energies since I published the first
volume had led me to fall badly behind with my writing and I should
hardly have found the heart to take it up again if it had not been for
the unfailing encouragement of my wife. She has borne more than her
fair share of the troubles which fall upon the head of any author's
wife; and she has throughout shown herself the most penetrating and
understanding of critics It is with a profound sense of gratitude that I
renew the dedication of this second volume to her.
ALAN BULLOCK
St. Catherine's College, Oxford
xii
CHAPTER I
The Coalition and the Crisis of 1940
I
IN MAY 1940 when he became Minister of Labour and National
Service in the Churchill Government, Ernest Bevin had just passed
the age of fifty-nine. Until his sixtieth year he had never held a
ministerial post, never sat in Parliament nor even been a member of
the National Executive of the Labour Party. From May 1940 until
his death in April 1951 he was to remain in office, with only six weeks'
interruption, throughout one of the most eventful decades in British
history, and to play a part in these events second only to that of the
two Prime Ministers, Churchill and Attlee. It was as unexpected a
climax as anyone could have devised to the career of a man who a
short time before the war had been talking of retirement.
Bevin, however, had little idea of beginning a political career when
he accepted office. The situation which faced the members of the
new Government left them no time to think about the future: they
needed all their resolution to believe there was going to be a future at
all.
Few wars have seen as sudden or complete a reversal of fortune as
that which took place between the beginning of April and the end of
June 1940. After the conquest of Poland in the previous autumn
Hitler made no overt move for six months. This was the phoney war
a
in which the French communique reported, day after day, "Rien
signaler". The Belgians and Dutch were still insisting on their
neutrality and neither side in the West had invaded the other's
territory. Then, in two campaigns neither of which lasted more than
a few weeks, the Germans completely reversed the balance of
advantage. Between April and June, they overran five countries,
knocked France out of the war and twice drove the British into the
sea, first in Norway, then at Dunkirk. All the efforts oft he First World
The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin The Coalition and the Crisis of 1940
War had failed to win the German High Command control of more Considering the continental resources which Germany now com-~
than the 50 miles of the Belgian coastline: now, at a blow, Hitler mantled, this was an optimistic estimate and could only be realised if
commanded the whole western shore of Europe from the North Cape during the next two years the British were able to restrict their
to the Spanish frontier and within a matter of months was able to military commitments and put their main effort into rearmament. ·-
make the Mediterranean as well impassable to British ships. From a Rearmament on such a scale meant nothing less than reorganisingl
hundred airfields the German Air Force was preparing to launch a the whole economy of the country, and doing this not only as fast as
continuous attack, not only on the sea communications on which the possible but under the handicap ofblack-outs and air raids and of the
British depended for food, oil and raw materials, but on their ports steady withdrawal of the younger men from industry to serve in the
and industrial cities, every one of which had been brought within Armed Forces. Moreover, a change of this magnitude could not be
easy bombing range. Without an ally left outside the Common carried through without consequences which went far beyond the
wealth, without any foothold left on the European mainland and at a organisation of war production and raised, one after another,
marked disadvantage, economically as well as militarily, the only economic or social issues-from state control of industry and in
future the British faced, in the judgment of the rest of the world, was dustrial relations to inflation, fair shares when supplies were short
one of violent bombardment from the air followed by invasion and and equality of sacrifice-issues which, unwisely handled, could
almost certain surrender or defeat. No British Government in modern threaten the nation's unity in waging the war and cripple it as surely
times had ever found itself-within almost hours of taking office-so as defeat in the field. These issues, far from being irrelevant or
close to disaster. extraneous to a modern "total" wat, were as much a part of the
In its first year of office it took all the new Government's energies Second World War as the deployment ofarmies and navies.
to meet and survive the successive emergencies thrust upon them: Bevin never lost sight of the fact that the war could only be won by
the battles in Belgium and France, Dunkirk, the defeat of France and the defeat of the enemy in the field. From first to last-and in the
the loss of the French fleet, the entry ofltaly into the war, the Battle second half of the war, when people were beginning to talk eagerly of
of Britain, the threat of invasion, the Blitz, the German conquest of the post-war world, at the cost of considerable unpopularity with a
the Balkans, the loss of Greece and Crete. Yet well before the summer section of his own party-he never wavered in his insistence that
of 1940 was over and the Battle of Britain won, it was clear that to victory in the fighting war had got to take precedence over everything
survive was not enough: even if Britain could get through the else. None the less, in practice, most of his time (and as a result most
dangers of the autumn and winter that lay ahead undefeated, its oft his volume) had to be devoted to the "other war'', the mobilisation
leaders had still to answer the question, how to win. It was not a of the country's economic resources and the problems to which this
.
--'
question that could wait for an answer. Even while they were trying gave nse.
desperately to find enough planes for the R.A.F. to hold off the The role which he was to play in this was not at all obvious in May
Luftwaffe, enough guns to equip the Army against invasion, the 1940. The administration which Churchill formed to meet tlte crisis
Government and its advisers had to start making preparations for the was a government of national union, representative of all three
time when they might hope to capture the initiative from the enemy. political parties and including virtually every political leader of
In 1940 and for a long time to come, this was an economic far more consequence in the country. No such coalition would have been com
than a military problem. British rearmament had only started in plete without a trade unionist among its members. But this meant
earnest in 1939 and after the losses of the summer, including the little. If the record of trade-union leaders in government was any
whole of the equipment of the British Expeditionary Force, it had\ thing to go by, th~ chances were that he would remain a passenger in
still a long way to go. In August 1940 the Chiefs of Staff reported to · the Cabinet excluded from anything more than a nominal share in
the Prime Minister that it would not be possible to build up sufficient power, or limited to departmental duties as George Barnes, also a
armed strength to go over to the offensive before the autumn of 1942. wartime Minister of Labour, had been in Lloyd George's coalition.
2 3
The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin The Coalition and the Crisis of 1940
Bevin had no experience of either war or government; he had never ministerial experience, possessed something much more important
even sat in Parliament as many other trade unionists had, and he was in the critical days of 1 940, the temperament ofa born fighter, a man
not at first considered for membership of the inner War Cabinet.1 whose nerve would not crack or power of decision falter in face of the
Like other ministers, he only attended when called in for a discussion storms that lay ahead.
of the matters which concerned his department, and his department The second reason was Bevin's position in the Labour Movement
was one which up to that time had ranked as a second-class ministry. and the use he made ofi t. Between the wars he had established him
None the less, within five months of joining the Government, self as the outstanding leader in the trade-union world, partly
Bevin was brought into the War Cabinet over the heads of other because of his power as general secretary of the biggest union, the
ministers, Labour as well as Conservative, who had far greater T.&G.W.U. which he had created, partly because the same
experience of office. And, once in the War Cabinet, he remained qualities which impressed Churchill impressed the General Council
there through all the subsequent changes until the coalition broke up and the annual congress of the T.U.C. It was because of this that
with the end of the war in Europe. Only four other men, Churchill, Churchill invited him to join the Government in the first place. But
Attlee, Eden and Anderson, equalled this record of uninterrupted to be a powerful trade-union leader in opposition was one thing, to
membership of the War Cabinet from the end of 1940 to May 1945 retain his influence with the unions when he became a minister was
and together with these four Bevin made up the small group of men quite another. Instead of trying to play safe, Bevin boldly asserted his
. who provided the country's leadership in the greatest episode of its claim to be, in a special sense, the representative of the trade unions
history. and the working class in the Cabinet and the spokesman of the
How did this come about? There are three answers to this question, Government to organised labour. It was a claim which would have
each corresponding to one of the main themes in the history that proved disastrous to a lesser man but to a surprising extent he
follows. vindicated it, and in this double capacity acquired a unique authority
The first is the impression which Bevin's personal qualities made which he retained to the end of the war.
on Churchill. "Another minister I consorted with at this time [the The final reason was Bevin's success in securing for his Ministry
summer of 1940]," Churchill wrote later, "was Ernest Bevin. ... I control over manpower, thers:by converting it into a key economic
was much in harmony with both Beaverb rook and Bevin in the white ministry. If manpower was bound to replace finance in wartime as
hot weeks."2 Beaverbrook was an old ally of Churchill's, but Bevin the determining factor in the allocation of resources, it was by no
was a new discovery in whom he recognised at once a toughness Of means certain that its control would be concentrated in the Ministry
mind, a self-confidence and strength of will which matched his own. of Labour or that the Minister of Labour would stay in the War
According to Lord Beaverbrook, 3 Churchill talked in the autumn.fOf · Cabinet when the Chancellor of the Exchequer was left out. If there
1940, if the Germans succeeded in landing in England, ofs etting up a was any doubt about Bevin's position it was settled when the Ministry
Committee of Public Safety, composed of himself, Beaverbroo..k and of Production was set up in 1942: manpower and labour were
Bevin to lead the British resistance. Whether this was a serious specifically excluded from its responsibilities and left, as Bevin was
stntf
suggestion or not, the fact that Churchill should have ed out determined they should be from the day he accepted Churchill's
Bevin in this way shows the opinion he had already formed of him. invitation, in the hands of the Minister of Labour.
Here was a man who, whatever he lacked in parliamentary or
2
1 This consisted of the two leaders of each of the two principal parties in the
coalition, Chamberlain and Halifax, Attlee and Greenwood, with Churchill in the
chair. In the course of 1939 the Chamberlain Government had at last
2 Winston S. Churchill: The Second World War, Vol. II, Their Finest Hour (1949), authorised a programme of rearmament which, within three years,
P· 287.
would put Britain on something like equal terms with her enemies.
3 In conversation with the author, June 1961.
4 5
The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin The Coalition and the Crisis of 19 40
l
The size of the programme was adequately conceived and was national effort in a "total" war would have to be, not financial, but
substantially taken over by the Churchill Government in 1940. Its physical-not whether the nation could afford to do more but
weakness lay in the late date at which it was started and in the rate at whether there was anything left at all, in capital assets, natural and
which it would begin to show results. The existing armaments -human resources, which could be thrown into the struggle.
industry of the country was quite inadequate to produce the volume ,Quite apart from the demands of the fighting war, the Govern
of weapons and supplies required: new factories had to be built and ment's rearmament programme could not be carried through without
equipped, management and the labour force expanded on a scale drawing all but a bare minimum of the country's manufacturing
which had been hardly conceived of before. This was bound to take capacity and labour force into war production and as a result cutting
time. The Government assumed it had the time: it had not. The civilian standards of living drastically. Yet the Government up to
strategic timetable to which production was geared was overtaken by May 1940 showed great reluctance to impose the controls which
events. By the summer -of 1940 the foundations had been laid for an would be necessary to secure this and a marked lack of confidence in
output ofm unitions greater than at any point in the First World War, the willingness of people to accept them. Even those who recognised
but the output itself would not appear until another year or even two the sort of measures which would be needed doubted whether there
had passed. Production was rising, but after nine months of war, at would ever be the will to enforce them.
best, was only preventing the Germans from drawing further ahead; ~ This failure to mobilise the country's resources adequately can be
it had not yet begun to close the gap. When the storm broke in a clash illustrated from every sector of the economy: it shows up most clearly
of arms which might well decide the issue of the war then and there, ( in the handling of manpower and the mobilisation oflabour.
the British forces had to face an enemy who enjoyed an absolute For twenty years Britain had been suffering from a glut of man
superiority in armaments. power expressed in unemployment. As late as April 1940, eight
How much more could have been done to 'speed up British re months after war had begun, the number of registered unemployed
armament, given the late date at which it was started, was a matter of was still above a million, despite the call-up ofone and a half million
dispute at the time, and remains so still. The Chamberlain Govern men for military service. The idea that the time would come when the
(
ment had stubbornly resisted the demand for a Ministry of Supply, lack, not of money, not even of raw materials or shipping, but of any
on the lines of Lloyd George's Ministry of Munitions, with re more men (or women) to be drafted into the Services and industry
sponsibility for the rearmament ofa ll three services. When a Ministry would set the final limits to the British war effort-this was as un
of Supply was finally set up in the summer of 1939-the "mule" familiar as the idea that Britain would ever be sh~rt of coal. No
ministry, as it was called by the critics-it took over responsibility for attempt had been made to match the future demand for men against
the Army's needs and certain common supplies, but the Admiralty the resources or to foresee how these could be increased by the
and Air Ministry continued to act as the supply departments for their . {-'employment of women: no one had yet thought of a manpower
own Services. Each department organised its programme in budget taking the place of the financial budget as the method by
dependently, making its own arrangements with the firms it chose to which the Government, from 1941 on, controlled the allocation of
carry out the work under government contract. ( the nation's resources, so many men for the Army, so many for the
Whatever the organisation at the top of war production before "aircraft industry, so many for the mines. If anyone had wanted to
May 1940, however, it is unlikely that it would have overcome the draw up such amanpowerbudget, theywould havefound thegreatest
lack of urgency and driving power which pervaded the Chamberlain difficulty in obtaining statistics with which to do it.
Government's preparations for war. It was still at heart a peacetime The one serious attempt made to investigate the manpower
Government, which had accepted the necessity and the cost of situation, the Humbert Wolfe Committee, 1 showed the limitations of
rearming but lacked the imagination, or the will, to recognise that
1 Humbert Wolfe, its chairman, was Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of
this implied-as Keynes saw and urged-that the only limits to the Labour. Educated (like the author) at Bradford Grammar School and Wadham
6 7