Aneurin Bevan(1897–1960)

Aneurin Bevan was born at 32 Charles Street, Tredegar in the Sirhowy Valley of Monmouthshire on the fifteenth of November 1897, sixth of the ten children of David Bevan, a hewer at the Pochin colliery and a Baptist Sunday-school superintendent, and Phoebe Prothero, daughter of a Tredegar blacksmith. He left Sirhowy Elementary School at thirteen with a poor reading record and a severe stammer, was bound apprentice in his fourteenth year to the haulier section at the Ty-Tryst colliery, and read the Marxism, the syndicalism and the Christian socialism of the early-twentieth-century South Wales coalfield in the evenings at the Tredegar Workmen's Institute Library. He took a scholarship to the Central Labour College in London 1919 to 1921, returned to Tredegar as a checkweighman and union official, and was elected to the Tredegar Urban District Council in 1922 and to Monmouthshire County Council in 1928.

He was elected Labour MP for Ebbw Vale at the May 1929 general election in his thirty-second year and held the seat for the next thirty-one years. He sat through the first Labour government of 1929 to 1931, the National Government decade of the 1930s, and the long wartime coalition, building across that decade-and-a-half a reputation as the most powerful platform orator on the Labour benches and the principal parliamentary champion of the South Wales mining communities. He was the leading parliamentary opponent through the early war years of Winston Churchill's wartime conduct of the home front and the press censorship; the long Bevan-Churchill exchanges at the Commons despatch box through 1940 to 1945 are central documents of British wartime parliamentary scrutiny.

At the July 1945 general election Labour took its first majority government in British history under Clement Attlee; Bevan was appointed Minister of Health and Minister of Housing on the twenty-sixth of July 1945 in his forty-seventh year. He set out from the first day to do the central thing he had come into Parliament to do, the establishment of a universal, comprehensive, tax-funded health service free at the point of use to every resident of the United Kingdom regardless of means. The National Health Service Act of 1946, drafted at the Ministry of Health through 1945 and 1946 and steered by him through the Commons, nationalised the voluntary and municipal hospitals (some two thousand seven hundred hospitals under unified state ownership), brought every doctor, dentist, nurse, midwife, ophthalmic surgeon and pharmacist into a single national service, and provided every form of medical care to every patient free of charge.

The NHS came into operation across the United Kingdom on the fifth of July 1948, the largest single act of social provision in British history. He continued as Minister of Health through to January 1951, took the Ministry of Labour for three months, and resigned from the Cabinet in April 1951 in protest at the imposition of charges for NHS spectacles and dental treatment. He was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party 1959 to 1960, lost the leadership election to Hugh Gaitskell in December 1955, and died at Asheridge Farm near Chesham in Buckinghamshire on the sixth of July 1960 in his sixty-third year. The NHS has continued without interruption since its foundation, employs over one and a half million people in its English component alone, treats roughly a million patients every thirty-six hours, and is by general agreement the central single institution of the modern British state.