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The strikers could have done with the town what they pleased. But Nye Bevan was no bullyboy. He told the strike committee : "There must be no violence. This is to be passive resistance, but, my God, such resistance that there is no other course but for us to win. If you run into difficulties—with the police perhaps—you will outwit them. You will never strike them. It is brains that will win this battle for us." But he did not win that battle. When Britain's Tory government broke the General Strike, Nye Bevan viewed that as just another reason to be sore.
"Lower Than Vermin." At 31, Bevan was elected to Parliament from Ebbw (pronounced Ebba) Vale. He attacked the grand old man of British Liberalism, his fellow Welshman, David Lloyd George. A British journalist described the occasion: "Bevan's thought seems to take possession of him . . . He seems to be all gestures, involuntarily turning his whole muscular machine into a means of expression . . . He has the speed, the impetuosity, even the force of the wind . . ." Said one Labor M.P.: "While Bevan was speaking, I think Lloyd George saw a ghost. That ghost was the ghost of his own youth."
Bevan was an immediate parliamentary and social success. Yet he retained a deep, belligerent class consciousness, and a proletarian's inverted snobbery. In 1934, he married Jennie Lee, a girl from the Scottish mining country, who had been elected to Parliament at 24 and was studying for the bar. There was only one obstacle to the romance: Nye found out that Jennie's father was a "deputy" (foreman), a job which in Wales ranked a man with the hated managerial class. A duke, suddenly discovering that his fiancee's father was an ordinary workingman, could not have been more dismayed than Bevan. Jennie had to explain to Nye that in Scotland, the deputies were classed with the miners, and that her father was thus a legitimate member of the proletariat. Nye and Jennie were married at a registry office; there was no wedding ring for the bride.
With a village showoff's swagger and a gush of bile, Nye Bevan tackled Winston Churchill at the height of his popularity. So irresponsible were some of Bevan's attacks on Churchill's war leadership that even his own Laborite supporters were appalled. An epic battle of invective broke out between the two men. Cried Bevan: "The Prime Minister's continuance in office is a major national disaster . . ." He complained that Churchill was "parading around in a ridiculous uniform," that he was "suffering from petrified adolescence." Cried Churchill: "Merchant of disloyalty!" Replied Bevan: "Better than being a wholesaler of disaster!" Churchill rumbled: "Bevan [will] always be as great a curse to this country in time of peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war." Churchill, who is not without class consciousness himself, once called Bevan "this gamin from some Welsh gutter."
In a famous speech at Manchester last summer, Bevan matched Churchill's billingsgate: "No amount of cajolery, no amount of ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep, burning hatred for the Tory party . . . They are lower than vermin . . ."