About Ernest Bevin
Ernest Bevin (9 March 1881 – 14 April 1951) was a British statesman, trade union leader and Labour Party politician. He co-founded and served as General Secretary of the powerful Transport and General Workers' Union from 1922 to 1940 and served as Minister of Labour and National Service in the wartime coalition government. He succeeded in maximising the British labour supply for both the armed services and domestic industrial production with a minimum of strikes and disruption. His most important role came as Foreign Secretary in the post-war Labour government, 1945–1951. He secured Marshall Aid, strongly opposed communism and was the main drive behind the creation of NATO. Bevin was also instrumental to the founding of the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret propaganda wing of the British Foreign Office, which specialised in disinformation, anti-communism and pro-colonial propaganda. Bevin played an important role in the end of the Mandate of Palestine and was strongly opposed to the establishment of the State of Israel. His biographer Alan Bullock said that Bevin "stands as the last of the line of foreign secretaries in the tradition created by Castlereagh, Canning and Palmerston in the first half of the 19th century". == Early life == Bevin was born in the village of Winsford in Somerset, England, the seventh child of Diana Bevin, who since 1877 had described herself as a widow. Bevin never knew who his father was, but it is now thought to have been William Pearse (1816/17–1891). After his mother's death in 1889, the young Bevin lived with his half-sister's family and moved to Copplestone in Devon.
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