BOOKS

Creating Things

By ROY JENKINS

THERE have been sixteen Foreign Secretaries during this century, but only two of them imprinted their personalities on their officials with sufficient force to become Foreign Office legends. The first was Curzon and the second was Bevin. Achievement of this legendary status is not necessarily equivalent to being a great Foreign Secretary, of course. Curzon was in many ways a weak man who failed signally to defend his own responsibilities against the depredations of Lloyd "_ eorge. And even had this not been so, it is highly doubtful whether he would have decisively de- flected British foreign policy to an extent com- parable with, say, Lansdowne, who never im- pressed his personality upon anybody. Sevin did not suffer from Curzon's weaknesses. He may have had some of his vanity, but he did n. ot have his anxious ambition, and his tenacity als enormously greater. He certainly did not allow ow the power of decision-making to flow across b Number Street from the Foreign Office to 'Number 10, and it fell to him to lay down a line ,ef Policy which dominated the official lives of at least three of his successors. In addition, he brought an entirely new background and exper- ience into British diplomacy. This may have been the biggest element in his success with his subor- dinates. Perhaps the best way to impress civil servants is to be as unlike them as possible. Bevin abundantly met this qualification. It would have . en impossible to imagine him in any position In the Foreign Office other than that of Secre- tary of State.

Volume One of Mr. Alan Bullock's new life of Sevin* is concerned with the origins and earlier stages of his career, rather than its fulfilment. It takes us to 1940, to Bevin's entry into politics and the War Cabinet, but not to his work as Minister of Labour. It is a picture of him as a trade union leader, of the development of his thought and Personality in this role, and of the political and Industrial history of the inter-war years as seen th, rough his eyes. It is a long book-654 rather e"3selY printed pages, which means that when it is supplemented by its companion, few will be able t„c' get through this authoritative account of idevin's life without devoting about fifty hours of reading time to it. Is this too much? When I first heard of the project of writing Bevin's life In two ample volumes I certainly thought it was misconceived. Apart from the movement of fashion away from the multi-volume life it was difficult to see how a man who was always so ill at ease with a pen in his hand could have left enough personal material to justify such a plan. Surely the book would either have to be padded out with the rules of the Transport and General Workers' Union and the minutes of the National Council of Labdur, or it would range so wide as to be really a potted impersonal history of the Years through which Bevin lived.

* TliE LIFT AND TIMES OF ERNEST BEVIN Volume I. 1881-1940.- By Alan Bullock. (Heinemann, 50s.)

• When we went in, Sir Horace Wilson came to the door of the Cabinet Room. He said 'You want to see the Prime Minister?' Thomas said 'Yes: Wilson then said, 'Well, Mr. Pugh and Mr. Thomas, what do you want to see the Prime Minister for?' They replied, 'We want to see • him on the position.' The reply to this was, 'You know the Prime Minister will not see you before the strike is called off. I said at the back, 'For Christ's sake let's call it on again if this is the position.' Thomas then said, 'We have come to call the strike off,' and we then went in and sat down.

These fears were ill-founded. Mr. Bullock has been highly successful in using sources of an unusual but productive type. Bevin wrote few personal letters of much note, and never outlined a problem on paper simply for the purpose of clearing his own mind. But he wrote regular articles for the journal of the Transport and General Workers' Union, and regular quarterly reports for its executive committee. The articles were rarely given the wider publicity which is now the common lot of controversial contributions to Left-wing journals, and the reports were naturally private. These facts, coupled with Bevin's proprie- tory attitude, not only to his executive committee, but to the whole membership of his union, give this material a surprising quality of interest and intimacy. Often, too, Bevin gives the unexpected impression of being more concerned to describe what happened than to argue a case. The following account of the reception of TUC representatives when they went to Downing Street to call off the General Strike is a fair example:

Mr. Bullock has not therefore been badly off for material. And he has woven it into a narrative which is leisurely but for the most part surpris- ingly compelling. This does not mean that there are not occasional longue urs—the amalgamations which led to the setting up of the T&GWU are described with a detail which would be more appropriate to a heavily subsidised commemora- tive history of a large company than to a political biography intended for general reading. Nor does Mr. Bullock add much in the way of lightness of touch or elegance of style. He begins as though he were writing a parody of Hardy : The traveller coming 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 500 souls under the eastern edge of the moor.

But he soon gives this up and settles down to a direct and workmanlike presentation of his in- formation. And this is perhaps.all that we should ask. After all, Bevin himself was neither a light man (although he could sometimes be extremely funny) nor an elegant one, and there is much to be said for a biographer who reflects some of his subject's attributes.

Mr. Bullock's illustrations are excellent. Those

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dealing with the General Strike are particularly

7 well chosen : the page which at the top shows Birkenhead and Neville Chamberlain advancing on 10 Downing Street, and at the bottom an appre- hensive Ramsay MacDonald—equally doubtful of the motor-car and of his companions—being driven away from TUC headquarters, tells us more about 1926 than any thirty pages of nar- rative.

What impression of the pre-ministerial Bevin are we left with? First there was his constant desire to achieve practical solutions. He was not natur- ally a moderate man—he was too opinionated for that—but he was always impatient of those who thought more of gestures than of results. 'I like to create things' was one of his favourite remarks, and it was an urge which expressed itself both in the physical existence of Transport House and in the organisational shape of the T&GWU and the TUC. In the same way his principal role in the 1926 strike was to introduce at least a semblance of command into the chaotic arrangements at TUC headquarters, and simultaneously to use his influence in favour of making the toughest bargain compatible with the realities of the situa- tion. He was equally hostile to the soft accom- modations of J. H. Thomas and to the emotional intransigence of A. J. Cook. When he saw an opportunity for effective industrial action—as in the London tram strike of 1924—he was quick to take it, and careless of its effect both on public opinion and on the new Labour Government, then in its nervous first few weeks of life. The reputa- tion of the T&GWU as an industrially 'moderate' union developed under Deakin, not under Bevin.

Bevin's lack of lucidity, which increased as he grew older, should not be allowed to obscure the acuteness of his intelligence. He would some- times play with an idea in a rather clumsy way, like an elephant juggling with a ball. But they were usually big ideas, and if he fully applied his mind to them he had an unusual capacity for seeing them straight. Confronted with the intri- cacies of monetary policy as a member of the 1931 Macmillan Committee he was almost in- credibly clear-headed. He and Keynes stood out as the two members of the Committee who knew what they were about, and there were even occa- sions when, without the beautiful precision of the other's mind, he was more penetrating than Keynes.

Still more outstanding, however, were Bevin's qualities of tenacity and ruthlessness. Once his mind was made up nothing diverted him from his purpose. He crushed men and arguments with an equal composure. From Tillett to Lansbury those who got in his way were pushed aside with a relentless determination which never wavered. He was egotistical but he was not selfish. He had a passionate loyalty to majority decisions pro- perly arrived at, and an implacable hostility to those who tried to thwart them_ 'Not while I'm alive, he ain't,' was his reply to someone who had suggested charitably that Mr. Aneurin Bevan was his own worst enemy. Bevin believed that such loyalty was as necessary to the working class movement in the Twenties and Thirties as military discipline was to a newly recruited army. But he rarely had to suffer the inconvenience of accepting its restraints. He was a natural majority man. In time, indeed, he almost came to think of himself as automatically embodying the majority view. Fortified by a conviction, not only of his own rightness, but also of his own status as a representative figure, there was almost no opposition which he could not overcome; and this, in the last resort, is what made him a great man.