The Life & Times of Ernest Bevin, Vol1: Trade Union Leader 1881-1940

353 Pages·1960·21.541 MB·English

by  Alan Bullock

ALAN BULLOCK
. '
THE LIFE AND TI¥Es OF.'
ERNEST BEVIN
.. ...
,
~
VOLUME ONE.
Trade Union Leader
1881 - 1940
. ;•. HEINEMANN
LONDON MELBOURNE TORONTO
ERNEST BEVIN IN 1936.
William Heinemann Ltd
LONDON MELBOURNE TORONTO
JOHANNESBURG AUCKLAND
Contents
First published 1960
Reprinted i 969 Preface xi
Winsford to Bristol, 1881-1910
© ALAN BULLOCK 1960 2 Apprenticeship, 1910-1914
24
All rights reserved
3 War and the Transport Workers' Federation, 1914-1917 44
4 The Prospect of Change, 19r7-r918 58
434 09451 x
5 Labour's Offensive 1918-1919 89
6 The Shaw Inquiry and the Council of Action, 1920 I16 \
1054-305 7 The Triple Alliance and Black Friday, 1920-192 l 143
8 The Transport and General Workers' Union, 1921-1923 180
9 The Union and the First Labour Government, 1923-
1924 221
IO The Industrial Alliance and Red Friday, 1924-1925 248
I l The Mining Dispute, 1925-1926
279
12 The General Strike, l 926 316
f13 A Turning-Point, 1926
345
114 Aftermath of the Strike, 1926-1927
372
115 The Mond-Turner Talks, 1928-1929
392
116 The Search for an Economic Policy, 1930 417
117 The Second Labour Government, 1929-1931 448
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
118 The l 93 1 Crisis 476
Bookprint Limited, Crawley, Sussex
119 Intellectuals, Busmen- and Hitler, 1932-1933
5°4
v
Contents
120 Politicians, Lorry-Drivers and Sanctions, 1934-1935 538
121 Chairman of the General Council, 1936-1937 575
f22 The Commonwealth, War and Office, 1938-1940 617
A Note on Sources 655 Illustrations
Index 661
Ernest Bevin in 1936* Frontispiece
Bevin ·aged fourteen facing page l 6
Early days in Bristol
17
St. Augustine's Bridge in the r9oost
17
Unloading at Bristol Docks in the 19oos:j:
48
Ben Tillett in 19 r r *
49
J. H. Thomas in 191 r *
49
Arrests during the 1912 dock strike* 80
Transport workers' march in 1912* Bo
The I.T.W.F. committee in 1919 81
The I.T.W.F. conference 1919 81
Bevin at the coal crisis meeting of April l 92 r * 112
The 'Dockers' K.C.' and his colleagues* 112
End of the 1923 dock strike*
113
Court of Inquiry into the buses and tramways, I 924 * 113
Bevin as strike leader in Covent Garden
240
First meeting of a Labour Cabinet*
241
Labour's 'Big Four' in 1924 *
241
A.J. Cook*
272
Food convoy during the General Strike*
273
Herbert Smith and W.P. Richardson*
304
T.U.C. leaders during the General Strike*
304
Bevin's notes for May 2nd 1926
3°5
Harry Gosling*
336
A. J. Cook in 1926*
336
Stanley Baldwin*
336
Conservative Cabinet Ministers*
337
Vl
vii
Illustrations
T.U.C. leaders in November 1926* 337
Transport House and its creator* 464
Bevin on the T.U.C. platform* 465
Gateshead 1931 : "Votes for Bevin" 496
List of Abbreviations
Unemployment* 497
Bevin and Stafford Cripps§ 528
T.G.W.U. conference 1933§ 529
A.E.U., Amalgamated Engineering Union.
Labour Party conference 1935§ 529
A.F.L, American Federation of Labour.
George Lansbury* 560
A.S.L.E.F., Amalgamated Society of Locomotive Engineers and
Bevin and Walter Citrine* 561
Firemen.
Clement Attlee and Hugh Dalton* 561 B.S.P., British Socialist Party.
Bus strike inquiry 1937* 592 D.W.R. and G.W.U., Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers'
Card voting* 593 Union.
Bevin joins the War Cabinet§ 624 F.B.I., Federation ofBritish Industries.
I.F.T.U., International Federation of Trade Unions.
Minister of Labour§ 625
I.L.0., International Labour Organisation.
I.LP., Independent Labour Party.
I.T.F., International Transport Workers' Federation.
SOURCES
I.W.W., Industrial Workers of the World.
N.J.I.C., NationalJoint Industrial Council.
* Radio Times Hulton Picture Library
N.T.W.F., National Transport Workers' Federation.
t Reece Winstone
N.U.G.M.W., National Union of General and Municipal Workers.
t The Port of Bristol Authority
N.U.R., National Union of Railwaymen.
§ Daily Herald
N.U.S., National Union of Seamen.
N.U.V.W., National Union of Vehicle Workers.
N.U.W.C.M., National Unemployed Workers' Committee Move-
ment.
O.E.E.C., Organisation for European Economic Co-operation.
O.M.S., Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies.
P.L.A., Port of London Authority.
S.D.F., Social Democratic Federation.
S.S.I.P., Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda.
T.G.W.U., Transport and General Workers' Union.
T.U.C., Trades Union Congress.
U.V.W., United Vehicle Workers.
W.E.A., Workers' Educational Association.
W.T.A., Workers' Travel Association.
ix
Vlll
Acknowledgements
Preface
THE AUTHOR AND PUBLISHERS are indebted to the following for
permission to reproduce copyright material: The Controller of Her BETWEEN 1940 and 1951, Ernest Bevin played a leading part in ten
Majesty's Stationery Office, the International Labour Organisation, of the most critical years of this country's history. These years form
the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, the Daily Herald, The Spectator, the subject of the second volume of this work. The theme of this
the Yorkshire Evening News, Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. first volume is different: how Bevin acquired the authority and ex
(Beatrice Webb's Diaries 1912-24 and 1924-32), Messrs. Hutchinson perience which enabled him, when not even a Member of Parlia
& Co. (My Political Life by Leopold Amery and Ernest Bevin by ment, to step straight into the front rank of Ministers, to become the
Francis Williams), Messrs. Frederick Muller (Call Back Yesterday and most powerful Labour member of Sir Winston Churchill's inner War
The Fateful Tears by Hugh Dalton), Messrs. Victor Gollancz (Harold Cabinet and after 1945 to continue as the most influential figure
Laski by Kingsley Martin), Messrs. Allen & Unwin (The Miners, the next to the Prime Minister in the Labour Administration which
Tears of Struggle by R. Page Arnot). governed Great Britain down to 1951.
The foundation of Bevin's ministerial career was the position
which he created for himself in the trade union movement between
NOTE
1910 and 1940. But this was something more than a protracted
The author has followed throughout the unmannerly but con apprenticeship to political office. It was a record of achievement in
venient usage of dropping all prefixes and titles. He offers his its own right as the outstanding trade-union leader yet produced by
apologies to all those named who may be offended by this practice. this, or perhaps by any other, country. Bevin in fact had two careers
in each of which he rose to the front rank, and to each of which his
biographer must attempt to do equal justice.
To do this means deserting the well-worn track of most political
biographies-local or party politics; the back-benches of the House
of Commons; minor office; alternate periods of government and
opposition- and entering the much less familiar world of the trade
unions. While Bevin came to play a big role in the Labour Party in
the 1930s, he acquired his experience in politics and the exercise of
power, not in the House of Commons or even local government, but
in the National Transport Workers' Federation, the Transport and
General Workers' Union, the T.U.C. and its General Council. (It
was none the less politics because it was conducted outside Parliament
and the party system.)
If the reader will bear with this unfamiliarity, he will find that
Xl
Preface Preface
Bevin's career sheds light on a side of the Labour Movement and of never have been written at all; Lord Attlee; Mr. Omer Becu;
British politics which has been less explored than it deserves to be. Mr. A. ]. Chandler; Mr. Harold Clay; Mr. A. Creech Jones;
The history of the Labour movement has been largely written from Mr. Frank Cousins; Mr. W. Coysh; Miss Alison David; the Vicar
the point of view of the Left, or at least of its political wing. The of Winsford, the Reverend P. D. Fox; Captain L. H. Green; Mrs.
trade unions are continually referred to in such accounts, but not M.A. Hamilton; Mr. Archie Henderson; Mr. Kenneth Hudson;
P.
much effort is made to understand their point of view. No one ever Sir Godfrey Ince; Mr. A. Kinna; Sir Frederick Leggett; Sir Alex
put that point ofv iew with more force than Ernest Bevin and a study ander McCall; Miss McCullough; Mr. Christopher Mayhew; Mr.
of his role in politics up to 1940 may help to make it more in F. ]. Maynard; Mr. Morgan Phillips; Mr. H. R. Priday; Miss
telligible. Sheppard; Mr. Frank Stillwell; Mr. W. Surrey Dane; Mr. ]. ].
But the political influence of the trade unions cannot be treated in Taylor; Sir Vincent Tewson; Mr. Harry Tomkins; Lord Uvedale;
isolation from their main activity in the industrial field and a Sir Norman Vernon; and Mr. George Woodcock. I am much
biography of Ernest Bevin which devoted more space to his activities indebted for their assistance to the Librarian and staff of the Bristol
in the Labour Party or the National Council of Labour than to the Public Library, of Nuffield College Oxford, and of the T.U.C.
part he played in the dock, the road transport, the milling and the The preface to the second volume will afford me the opportunity
shipping industries would be badly out of focus. The rise of the trade to express my thanks to those who have already been of assistance in
union movement is, in fact, one of the distinctive features of collecting material for Mr. Bevin's later career. I must, however, make
twentieth-century British society, and I have tried to take advantage it clear that in expressing my appreciation, I do not wish to involve
of the opportunity which Bevin's career affords to relate this to the any of those named in the responsibility for what I have said, which
general history of the period up to l 940. remains mine alone. The· manuscript was completed well before the
election of l 959 and nothing in it was written with the post-election
I was invited to write Mr. Bevin's biography by his executor, the late situation of the Labour Party in mind.
Arthur Deakin, with the approval of Dame Florence Bevin. Although The Leverhulme Trust was good enough to provide me with a
I met Mr. Bevin and heard him speak, this work makes no pretence grant towards the expenses of my research, for which I am very
to be a personal memoir. This was clearly understood by Mr. grateful. I should also like to thank those who have helped to reduce
Deakin in inviting me. What he asked me to provide was an in the chaos of my manuscript to a well-typed order, Mrs. Lawson,
dependent record of Bevin's career written by an historian sympa Mrs. Websper, Miss S. Buttar and Mrs. M. Faulkner. My friend,
thetic to, but not a member of, the Labour Movement, or of any Mr. W. F. Knapp, greatly helped me by undertaking to read the
political party. Mr. Deakin placed at my disposal the papers which proofs.
Ernest Bevin had left behind and helped me to obtain access to the This volume has been written very largely from original sources.
other sources on which I have drawn. I gladly accepted his invita I believe it to be important for an historian to carry out his own
tion, on one condition, that there should be no question of a com researches and I have not employed a research assistant to read
mission to write an 'official' life and that I should be under no through any of the material for me. I hope that this, together with
obligation to submit the manuscript to anyone for approval. the claims of a full-time job at Oxford, will explain and excuse the
In undertaking this task, I have received great kindness and much length of the time I have taken to carry out a task which is still far
help from a large number of people who knew and admired Ernest from complete. This preoccupation has borne hard upon my family
Bevin. I wish to express my particular indebtedness to Dame at times and hardest upon my wife, to whom I owe my greatest
Florence Bevin and Mrs. Wynne, Mr. Bevin's daughter; Mr. Albert debt of all and to whom I dedicate this book in affection as well as
Bevin, his elder brother; Miss Ivy Saunders, his secretary at gratitude.
Transport House, without whose invaluable aid this volume could St. Catherine's Society, Oxford, 1955-1959 ALAN BULLOCK
xii xiii
,.
CHAPTER I
Winsford to Bristol
1881 - 1910
I
THE ANCIENT FOREST of Exmoor lies in the extreme west of
Somerset. Bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, it is
separated from the Brendon Hills to the east by the valley of the
River Exe. In tht; second half of the nineteenth century it was still
an undisturbed, remote part of the West Country. The main road
and the railway to Exeter and Plymouth ran far to the south; only a
single-track branch-line with an occasional train to Barnstaple
skirted the moor. The traveller corning from the east might follow
the high road up the wooded and winding valley of the Exe as far as
Exton, but there the high road bore off north towards Dunster and
the coast, leaving. him to cross the bridge and push on up the Exe to
Winsford, a village of not more than five hundred souls under the
eastern edge of the moor. The surrounding hills and the close-set'
woods along the river valley combined to shut Winsford off from the
outer world; its only link was the carrier from Dulverton calling once
a week.
It was here that Ernest Bevin was born on 7th March 1881. He
himself always gave the date of his birth as gth March, but the date
which his mother registered at Dulverton a month later was the 7th.
Forty years before, his mother had been baptised in Winsford
Church. The entry in the church register reads: "1841, March
21st. Diana, daughter of Thomas and Mary Tidboald, Winsford,
Labourer". By 1864, when she married William Bevin in the same
church, the spelling of the name had been changed to Tudball. The
family into which she married, like her own, was a Winsford family.
William Bevin was eleven years older than his bride; he worked as an
The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin Winsford to Bristol 1881-191 o
agricultural labourer on the Acland estate and they set up home in a Britain's imperial expansion, or the controversial issues of contem-
ry politics Gladstone and Ireland, Gordon and the Sudan,
tied cottage in the near-by hamlet of Howetown. Here their first ra
po ' f ill l"fi ·
child, Mary Jane, was born the following year. produced more than a faint echo in the closed world o v age i e m
At some date during the 1870s William Bevin took his wife and which he was reared. . .
Far more important was the slow undramatic course of social
growing family across the Bristol Channel to South Wales in search
of work. His wife later returned to Winsford but without her change. In the late 1870s began the decline in ~ritish agr~culture
husband and from 1877 she described herself in various documents which soon expressed itself for the labouring class ma sharp mcrease
ofrural unemployment. (The word 'unemployed' was first used as a .
she signed as a widow. After her only daughter, Mary Jane, Diana
Bevin had six sons of whom Ernest Bevin was the last. Who his noun in 1882.) Between the censuses of 1871 and 1901, the number
father was remains unknown: when she registered the child's birth, of agricultural labourers in England and Wales fell by over a third at
his mother left the space for the father's name blank and this is con a time when the general population increased by close on a half. The
firmed by the baptismal register in Winsford Church. drift to the towns was accelerated, carrying with it every one ofDiana
Mercy Bevin, as she was commonly known, needed all her courage Bevin's six sons, all of whom in early life went to find jobs in Bristol.
to face the task of bringing up a large family by herself. Shortly after The old self-sufficient life of the English countryside as it was
the birth of her youngest child, Ernest, she moved from the house described by Thomas Hardy in his Wessex novels, was beginning to
where she had been lodging to a cottage on the edge of the village. break up. Yet the lines of class division were still firmly drawn; the
The older boys were sent out to earn their own living and Mary Jane gentry and the clergy belonged to one world, the la.boure~ to ~no the r.
married a railwayman, George Pope, leaving Winsford for Morchard This line of division was reinforced by a second with which it partly
Bishop in Devon. "I'm sure," says one witness who grew up with coincided, that between church and chapel, which John Morley
Ernest Bevin, "there's no one in this wide world was ever poorer than described as the most profound cleavage in English social life. Born
he and his mother." To keep herself and her children, she went out into the labouring class, from the age of three to close on the age of
to work as a domestic help in neighbouring houses and farms. On thirty Ernest Bevin was bred in the Nonconformist tradition as a
occasion she acted as a midwife or helped in the kitchen at 'The Sunday-school scholar, teacher and local preacher. His mot?er to~k
Royal Oak'. At other times she drew a few shillings from the parish care to see that her children got such schooling as was available m
relief. Somehow or other she contrived to hold on to her cottage and Winsford. This meant the Church School. But on Sundays, he and
provide enough to feed her children, but poverty and need coloured his two elder brothers were sent to the Wesleyan Sunday School, and
her youngest child's experience from his earliest days. the earliest known photograph of Ernest Bevin shows him as a rou~d­
faced little boy of three with a wide-brimmed straw hat and sailor
suit at the Sunday-school treat of 1884.
2 Until the boy's eighth birthday his mother succeeded in keeping a
home together, although it was increasingly difficult to ~ak~ ends
He was born twenty years before the end of the Victorian age, at a meet and she no longer enjoyed good health. At the begmmng of
time when Britain was still the wealthiest and most powerful nation 1889 she was forced to take to her bed. The spring brought no relief
in the world. He grew up in the heyday ofimperialism. The British (she was suffering from a fibrous growth), and on 1st May 1889, at
occupied Egypt in 1882, the year after he was born; Burma was the age of forty-eight, she died, with her mother, Mary Tudball, and
annexed in 1885, and the partition of Africa completed in the course her children by her bedside. .
of the next few years. Although it is tempting to draw the contrast The blow was bitterest to the youngest child. He never forgot his
between Britain's position in Bevin's childhood and sixty years later mother, the one human being who was close to him in childhood; he
when he became Foreign Secretary, it would be idle to suppose that never forgot the affection she showed him and which he fully
2 3
The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin Winsford to Bristol 1881 - 191 o
returned. Unhappy and lost, he came back from the funeral to his His sister had found him a place at the Hayward Boys' School in
mother's cottage where for the last time Diana Bevin's seven Crediton, an old, placid Devonshire market town with a long main
children met as a family. The home was broken up, the furniture street running up the hill past its fine red-sandstone church. Credit on
sold and the remaining boys, Albert and Fred, were sent out to service is just over five miles from Copplestone and Ernest made the
on farms. Ernest was too young to earn his own living yet. His half journey by train with a pass which his brother-in-law and guardian,
sister, Mary, and her husband George Pope, the railwayman, George Pope, was able to secure as a railway-worker. He entered the
offered to take him into their home at Morchard Bishop, and thither school on 2nd September 1890. By the end of his first school year,
he set out with them in that early summer of 1889. July 1891, he had reached Standard IV and was entitled to claim his
Labour Certificate. In fact, he stayed on at the school for the best
part of another year and did not leave until 25th March 1892.1 By
3 then he had a job as a farm-boy at Chaffcombe, a farm close to
Copplestone, where he lived in for a wage of sixpence a week (paid in
Thirty miles away from Winsford, Morchard Bishop lay in the a lump sum of six shillings and sixpence on quarter-days) and
rolling uplands north of Exeter with their fertile red soil and sub learned to carry out a variety of chores from stone-picking to
stantial farms. For a few months in the summer of 1889, Ernest went driving cattle and cutting up the mangels and turnips for their
to Morchard Bishop Church School. Then in October of that year fodder. In the evenings he was pressed into service to read out items
George Pope and his wife moved to the neighbouring village of of news and leading articles from the Bristol papers while the family
Copplestone. The house, known by the incongruous name of sat round the fire in the farm-kitchen.
Tiddly-Winks (since re-named Lee Mount), is a yellow-washed During the winter of 1892-3, he moved to another farm, Beers, on
thatched cottage built above the cutting through which runs the the Okehampton Road. He had a room in an outbuilding over
railway line from Exeter to Barnstaple. Long afterwards the local looking the farmyard, reached by narrow winding stairs from the
postman remembered "on my rounds early on a winter's morning yard itself. According to local tradition, he left a little over a year
seeing that young boy getting water for the house or cleaning later after a quarrel with his employer, William May. Whatever the
potatoes in the shute. There were two little streams which came truth in this, there is no doubt that farm work had no attractions for
down across a steep field opposite the house and broke through the Ernest. When a letter arrived from his brother Jack urging him to
hedge to the roadside. They didn't have pumps then. The water come to Bristol, he jumped at the chance and in the spring of 1894
was always icy-cold and I'd see the boy getting the water and his (the year Gladstone resigned for the last time) he set out to seek his
ha~ds all covered with broken chilblains".1 fortune in the city.
Half a mile away, on the other side of the cutting, stands the
Ebenezer Chapel, opened the year before, the Methodist Chapel to
4
which Ernest went every Sunday. On weekday mornings the boy
walked the two miles down the valley through the deep Devonshire
lanes to school at Colebrook, a handful of houses built on the hillside· Bevin was always reticent about his childhood and irritated by
under the grey stone tower ofits church. I ts Board School, which had attempts to trick it out as the first stage in a sensational rise from
to serve the surrounding district, was opened in 1874, and consisted labourer's cottage to Foreign Office. It was one of his most strongly·
of two lofty classrooms divided by a partition. Ernest spent less than held beliefs that there was nothing odd in a man who began life as a
a year there and an old log-book records briefly: "August 8, 1890, labourer possessing the ability to run a department of State and sit in
E. Bevin has left".
1 I am indebted for this information about Bevin's schooldays to Mr. D. Cook,
t W. C. Milton, quoted in Picture Post, 30th Nov. 1946. of the Devon Education Authority.
4 5
The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin Win.iford to Bristol 1881-1910
the Cabinet. He had too much sense of his own dignity and of the Burke to Parliament and dominated the West Indian and North
dignity of the class from which he sprang to be either flattered or American trade, Bristol was still the undisputed capital of the West
amused by a patronising curiosity about his 'humble' origins. Country. Around the city docks, with their outliers at Avonmouth
In fact, despite a crop of anecdotes assiduously collected when he and Portishead, had grown up a busy industrial and commercial
became a Minister of the Crown, there is nothing in his early years to town with a population of 300,000 and a variety of trades from wines
distinguish him from those with whom he grew up. It is highly and tobacco to the manufacture of paper and soap.
unlikely that anyone who knew him as a boy in Winsford or even as a His eldest brother Jack who had brought him to Bristol was then
youth in Bristol believed that he would ever become anything more working in a butcher's shop in Clifton and offered him a home out on
than a manual labourer or at most a shop assistant. the northern side of the city i:ri Bishopston. The Priory Restaurant,
None the less, it is a serious mistake to underestimate the influence where another brother, Albert Bevin, was learning the trade of
of these formative years on any man, particularly a man whose pastrycook and where Ernest now began work in the bakehouse,
character and career show as much consistency as Ernest Bevin's. stood on St. Augustine's Parade, in the centre of the city. For a wage
Despite the affection of his mother, which he remembered with of six shillings a week and his meals, he worked twelve hours a day
gratitude all his life, it had been a hard childhood, with no father, six days a week. They were long hours but not exceptional and he
with his mother dying and his home broken up when he was eight. was not treated at all unkindly.
From his earliest years he had known need and insecurity; from the One of his first jobs was to push a barrow loaded with pies and
age ofe leven he was pushed out into the world to earn his own living. pastries to the refreshment rooms at Temple Meads station. This
Neither the boy then nor the man later regarded this as exceptional: gave him time to stare and absorb the bustle of activity in the
it was the common lot of the labouring class into which he had been streets and around the docks: the heavily-laden drays rattling over
born. Forced to look after himself, he learned to rely on himself; he the cobblestones, the carters shouting to their horses, the endless
was laying the foundation of that massive confidence and self loading and unloading at the warehouses.
sufficiency which never failed him. When he tired of the long hours in the bakehouse, he found a
His formal education was limited to the rudiments of reading, better job for himself out of doors at ten shillings a week as a van
writing and arithmetic. Apprenticed to no trade, his only prospect boy on one of the mineral-water wagons' of Brooke and Prudencio's.
was to keep himself by manual labour, his only resource the native The sequence of his employment is difficult to follow, but at some
intelligence and strength of character with which he had been time in this period he worked atJa ckson's butter shop in High Street,
endowed. These qualities matured slowly. As a child he did not go later returning to the Priory Restaurant where, dressed in a page
through the forcing-house of town life; he was born and bred not in boy's uniform, he helped to wait at table.
the slums of an industrial city but in the country, and he retained From the Priory at the end of 1897 he went to a job as conductor
throughout his life many of a countryman's characteristics. on the horse trams, a useful apprenticeship for the man who was
later to bring the bus and tramwaymen into the biggest of all
transport unions. Here we are on firm ground. The Bristol Tram
5 ways Company's records show him to have left the Priory just before
Christmas 1897. After three days' trainiag he began work clipping
It is not difficult to imagine the mixed feelings of bewilderment and tickets (twelve passengers outside and eighteen in). on the Horfield
excitement with which this country lad of thirteen climbed out of the route which ran up past his home in Bishopston. His wages were
train at Temple Meads station one day in 1894 and was plunged for now twelve shillings a week and he kept the job until March 1 goo
the first time into the crowded streets of a big town. The second city when he left of his own accord just before his nineteenth birthday.
and port of the kingdom in the eighteenth century, when it sent In 1900 Jack Bevin gave up his house and Ernest had to find
6 7