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At 14, this boy of easy, brilliant talents went into the pits like his father and grandfather before him. That he became a Marxist is not surprising. It was hard not to have hard feelings about the Tredegar Iron & Coal Co. One early strike eloquently led by young Nye was called because the company had docked a miner a day's pay: the idle fellow had taken off part of the working day to convey home the body of a comrade killed working down the pit. So the world was black and white for young Nye Bevan as he became the miners' voice, first in the lodge, then in the local council, then finally in the House of Commons.
Bankrupt Passion. There is no denying the strength and passion of Sevan's rages against the Establishment. In the depths of the Depression of the early —'30s, he saw millions voted to bolster tottering banks and pennies cheese-pared from the dole of the unemployed poor. "Christ drove the moneychangers out of the temple," he snarled at the Tories, "but you inscribe their title deeds on the altar cloth." The trouble was that his fellow Laborites were not really Socialists. When capitalism, in Depression-time phrase, "went bankrupt," Ramsey Macdonald's Socialist government got cold feet, did what the Bank of England told them to do, and deflated the economy—and themselves.
Bevan jeered at his party as a "Salvation Army which took to its heels on the day of judgment." What he felt for many of them, especially the office-hungry respectable bureaucrats of the trades unions, was nothing but a fine, aristocratic disdain. He raged not only against Baldwin and Chamberlain ("that dusty soul") but also against men who should have been his own comrades, like Trades Union Chief Sir Walter Citrine. He "suffers from files," Bevan said contemptuously.
Bevan by temperament was an artist rather than a politician, and he sought his friends not among the worthy pedants of social reform in the "slouching, sluggish" Labor Party leadership but among artists like Jacob Epstein, writers like H. G. Wells, or even with an aristocrat turned columnist like Lord Castlerosse. Bevan behaved as if his own talent and exuberance gave him a spectator's seat rather than an underdog's role in the old British game of class soccer. After a fine meal with good wine he would quip: "You can always live like a millionaire for five minutes." This is the tone of the bohemian rather than the social reformer. And when he set up house with pretty Socialist Jennie Lee, the Bevan cottage was exactly the sort of modest weekend retreat inhabited by a thousand middle-class intellectuals.
No Seduction. Though his enemies gibed at him as "Playboy of the West End World," Foot claims that Bevan was not "seduced by the aristocratic embrace." Indeed, he had one quality rare in a politician of any party: he did not personally hunger for power or hanker for the managerial role in human affairs. Criticism was his long suit. Intellectual disdain kept his far-left course from Communist involvement. After a visit to Russia, he quipped, "We were slaves to the past; they were slaves o the future." And when war came, he demanded that the "undertaker" Chamberlain go, and called for his Tory enemy Churchill to take power.