Bevan · 1948
Tredegar to the NHS
On the morning of the fifth of July 1948, at Park Hospital in Davyhulme on the western edge of Manchester, Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health, formally opened the National Health Service to its first patient: a thirteen-year-old girl from Salford called Sylvia Diggory, on the children's ward, with a kidney complaint. From that morning every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom had a right to medical care free at the point of use, paid for by general taxation, on a single national footing for the first time in any major industrial country in the world. Bevan was fifty years old. He had been Minister of Health for two years and ten months, in the cabinet of Clement Attlee elected in July 1945 with the platform that the country would not return to the conditions of the 1930s. The Bill establishing the NHS had been opposed by the British Medical Association, the Royal Colleges, the Conservative party, the friendly societies, the voluntary hospital movement, and parts of his own cabinet. It had become law in November 1946 and had taken twenty months to bring into operation. The model in his head, by his own statement to the House in 1946, was the Tredegar Workmen's Medical Aid Society, which had supplied medical care to the population of the Sirhowy Valley on a subscription per head since the 1890s, and which his own family had used. He said, in the speech in the Chamber on the second reading: *all I am doing is extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we have had in Tredegar for a generation. We are going to Tredegarise you.*
It is twenty past seven on the morning of the fifth of July 1948, in the lobby of Park Hospital, Davyhulme, on the western edge of Manchester, with the rain coming down on the gravel drive and the press photographers in the porch under raincoats. He is fifty years old. He is Aneurin Bevan, Member of Parliament for Ebbw Vale, Minister of Health and Housing in His Majesty's Government, born at 32 Charles Street, Tredegar, on the fifteenth of November 1897, the son of David Bevan, coalminer at the Tytryst Colliery, and Phoebe Prothero. He is in a charcoal three-piece suit with a dark tie. He is, this morning, paler than usual; he has slept four hours.
He has, in the inside pocket of his coat, a folded paper. The paper is the receipt for his father's last subscription to the Tredegar Workmen's Medical Aid Society, dated June 1925, signed by the secretary William Davies, for the sum of three pence a week, in respect of the family of David Bevan of 32 Charles Street, Tredegar. His father had been ill that summer; the Society had paid for the doctor; his father had died of pneumoconiosis at home, in his bed, at the age of fifty-four. Bevan had been twenty-six.
He thinks: the Tredegar Society had four thousand members at its height. The whole working population of Tredegar in 1925. Three pence a week, which was forty per cent of the family's medical risk for forty per cent of the population's spare margin.
He thinks: if Tredegar could do it for four thousand at three pence a week with a colliery on its back, the country can do it for forty-six million at general tax with a treasury behind it.
He thinks: the doctors will accept it because they have, on the gold I stuffed in their mouths, no remaining principled objection. The committee men of the BMA will say I have bought them. The committee men of the BMA will be telling the truth. They held out for the consultant fees and they got the consultant fees.
He thinks: the press will write that this is socialism. The press will be right. It is the most successful piece of socialism the British state has ever attempted, and it is going to last because it is being introduced for everybody on the same day.
He thinks: Sylvia Diggory is on Ward 1. The matron is in the entrance. The presentation is at half past seven. There will be a bouquet of flowers. The press will photograph the bouquet. The country will see, on the front page of the Daily Herald in the morning, the bouquet, and the date, and the bed.
He thinks: I have made it. We have made it. Attlee and Cripps and the rest. The country has made it. We have brought a thing into being from a Tredegar receipt at three pence a week to a forty-six-million-population universal service. The country has voted for it. The country has not yet used it. The country will use it from this morning. The country will not give it up.
He goes through the swing doors into the corridor of the children's ward. The matron, Mrs Jones, is in starched white, with the staff nurse beside her. Sylvia Diggory, age thirteen, is in the third bed on the left, sitting up against three pillows in a hospital nightie, her hair tied back, a bunch of carnations on the bedside locker. The Manchester press photographer takes a photograph of Bevan handing her a second bouquet. He sits on the edge of the bed for a moment and asks her how she feels. She says, by the testimony she gave at sixteen to the Manchester Guardian: I am much better today, thank you, sir, and I am very pleased to be the first. He says: and so am I, my dear, and so am I.
He stayed in the cabinet until April 1951, when he resigned, with Harold Wilson and John Freeman, over the introduction of prescription charges in Hugh Gaitskell's defence-spending budget. The principle on which he resigned (that medical care free at the point of use was a foundational principle, not a budget item) became, with the passage of seventy-five years, the political ground rule of the institution. By 2025 the NHS was the largest employer in the United Kingdom, the fifth-largest employer in the world after the US Department of Defense, the Chinese armed forces, Walmart and McDonald's, and the most-loved institution in British civic life by every poll that has been done since the millennium. Aneurin Bevan died of stomach cancer at his home, Asheridge Farm in Buckinghamshire, on the sixth of July 1960, twelve years and a day after the morning at Park Hospital, aged sixty-two. He is buried at Tredegar in the Sirhowy Valley, on the hillside above the town. The valley itself, by 1990, had no working coal-pits and no Workmen's Medical Aid Society. The receipt his father had signed in 1925 went to the National Library of Wales in 1985, with the rest of the Bevan papers. The dictum of the second reading of the Bill is on a brass plaque on the wall of the entrance corridor of Park Hospital, now Trafford General. We are going to Tredegarise you.