Vol. 6 No. 2 · 2 February 1984
pages 8-9 | 2587 words
Capability Bevin
George Walden
- Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary 1945-1951 by Alan Bullock
Heinemann, 896 pp, £30.00, November 1983, ISBN 0 434 09452 8
One of the more dismal scenes in English literature comes in Gissing’s Henry Rycroft (itself a pretty depressing book), where a labourer on a spree is driven out of a restaurant because he is intimidated by the formalities which go with the food. He ends by wrapping the lot in a newspaper and bolting.
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Letters
Vol. 6 No. 6 · 5 April 1984
From Reginald Whitaker
SIR: Mr George Walden’s rather fawning apologia for Ernest Bevin, for which Professor Bullock’s biography served as an excuse (LRB, Vol. 6, No 2), makes a number of dubious assertions. One in particular should not pass unchallenged. Mr Walden makes much of an alleged lack of prejudice against Bevin’s working-class origins: ‘Nobody dreamt of disapproving of him, and the idea of patronising a man like Bevin did not arise.’ He cannot resist adding, ‘Only the Russians, with their old-world, Marxist preconceptions, found him not quite the thing: “Eden is a gentleman, Bevin is not,” said the thoroughly ungentlemanly Molotov.’ A nice point scored against that ‘unappetising’, ‘exceedingly unpleasant customer’, Molotov? Before Mr Walden savours his witticism for too long, one must point out that similar views were shared by those very new-world, un-Marxist allies in Washington. After the Potsdam conference, President Truman returned to the the White House, where he told aides that ‘Stalin and Molotov may be rough men but they know the common courtesies; Bevin was entirely lacking in all of them, a boor’ (cited in Daniel Yergin, Sheltered Peace, page 434). One wonders what the Old Boys of the Foreign Office actually said about Bevin in the privacy of their clubs. But they could scarcely sneer at his foreign policy, which was theirs. That, presumably, is what Mr Walden, former diplomat and current Conservative MP, means when he writes that ‘Bevin was working for Britain.’
Reginald Whitaker
Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa
