Bevin As He Was
OW very vividly the actual voices of the dead can bring them before us again may be illustrated by the BBC portrait of Ernest Bevin (1YC). Done with all the BBC flair for documentaries, this impression of the personality of Britain’s war-time Foreign Secretary had a real tang-partly because of the snatches fram Bevin’s own robust speeches and partly because of the frankness with which the man’s faults as well as his virtues were set out.
Communists, Tories, Labour M.P.’s, Mrs Bevin, Clem Attlee and other colleagues, intimates and adversaries, by their recollections, built up the portrait of a quite formidable personality, a_ selfmade man of immense courage, energy and rough common-sense, which was much more telling than masses of cold print could be. Christopher Mayhew, who had worked under Bevin, was a sympathetic commentator, not blind to Bevin’s limitations, but clearly devoted to him and inderstandably respecting the doggedness of the Labour leader, especially in his last days of illness. To my mind, the most sympathy for Bevin was created, unconsciously, by the mincing, prissy voice of his former male secretary, petulantly complaining of the man’s sensitiveness and suspiciousness. "One of the bravest and warmest-hearted Foreign Secretaries Britain has ever had," was Mayhew’s fitting epitaph, for his programme had convinced us fully
or at ieast , that.
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19580801.2.32.1.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 989, 1 August 1958, Page 20
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223Bevin As He Was New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 989, 1 August 1958, Page 20
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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