[2] 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".

He spoke with such a strong West Country accent that on one occasion, listeners at Cabinet had difficulty in deciding whether he was talking about "Hugh and Nye (Gaitskell and Bevan)" or "you and I".

[citation needed] Bevin had no great faith in parliamentary politics but had nevertheless been a member of the Labour Party from the time of its formation, and he unsuccessfully fought Bristol Central at the 1918 general election.

During the late 1930s, for instance, Bevin helped to instigate a successful campaign by the Trades Union Congress to extend paid holidays to a wider proportion of the workforce.

[11] During the 1930s, with the Labour Party split and weakened, Bevin co-operated with the Conservative-dominated National Government on practical issues, but during that period, he became increasingly involved in foreign policy.

It was held at Lapstone, Sydney, Australia in 1938 organised by Chatham House and the Australian Institute of International Affairs with delegations from all the then existing Commonwealth countries.

[19] The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939 gave Bevin complete control over the labour force and the allocation of manpower, and he was determined to use the unprecedented authority not just to help win the war but also to strengthen the bargaining position of trade unions in the postwar future.

The industrial settlement he introduced remained largely unaltered by successive postwar administrations until the reforms of Margaret Thatcher's government in the early 1980s.

[18] An alternative view is offered by Charmley, who writes that Bevin read and wrote with some difficulty and that examination of Foreign Office documents shows little sign of the frequent annotations made by Anthony Eden.

[23] However, Charmley dismisses the concerns of contemporaries such as Charles Webster and Lord Cecil of Chelwood that Bevin, a man of very strong personality, was "in the hands of his officials".

"[26][27] In 1945, Britain was virtually bankrupt as a result of the war but was still maintaining a huge air force and conscript army in an attempt to remain a global power.

[28] The cost of rebuilding necessitated austerity at home to maximise export earnings while Britain's colonies and other client states were required to keep their reserves in pounds as "sterling balances".

NATO was primarily aimed as a defensive measure against Soviet expansion, but it also helped bring its members closer together, enabled them to modernise their forces along parallel lines and encouraged arms purchases from Britain.

[31] Bevin was also instrumental in the creation of the Council of Europe, with the signature of its Statute on 5 May 1949, at St James's Palace, London, by the Foreign Ministers of Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Broadly speaking, they remained Britain's foreign policy until the late 1950s, when the humiliation of the 1956 Suez Crisis and the economic revival of Continental Europe, much of which was now united as the "Common Market", caused a reappraisal.

However, Britain still maintained a network of client states in the Middle East (Egypt until 1952, Iraq and Jordan until 1959) and major bases in such places as Cyprus and Suez (until 1956) and expected to remain in control of parts of Africa for many more years.

Bevin wrote that, "We have the material resources in the Colonial Empire, if we develop them, and by giving a spiritual lead now, we should be able to carry out our task in a way which will show clearly that we are not subservient to the United States of America or to the Soviet Union."

After the war, Britain helped France and the Netherlands recover their Far Eastern colonies in the French Indochina and Dutch East Indies in the hope that could lead towards the formation of a third superpower bloc.

In May 1950 Bevin told the London meeting of foreign ministers that "the United States authorities had recently seemed disposed to press us to adopt a greater measure of economic integration with Europe than we thought wise."

as wags had it), was a source of frustration to some backbench Labour MPs, who early in the 1945 Parliament formed a "Keep Left" group to push for a more left-wing foreign policy.

Those ministers who would have opposed the bomb on grounds of cost, Hugh Dalton and Sir Stafford Cripps, were excluded from the meeting in January 1947 at which the final decision was taken.

"[44] However, Bevin's actions were backed by Attlee, who opposed the establishment of a Jewish state on the grounds it would jeopardise Britain's position as the dominant power in the Middle East.

[45] Bevin failed to secure the stated British objectives in that area of foreign policy, which included a peaceful settlement of the situation and the avoidance of involuntary population transfers.

[47][48] One remark which caused particular anger was made when U.S. President Harry Truman was pressing Britain to immediately admit 100,000 Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust who wanted to immigrate to Palestine.

According to the historian Howard Sachar, his political foe, Richard Crossman, a pro-Zionist member of the postwar Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, characterised his outlook during the dying days of the Mandate as "corresponding roughly with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a tsarist fabrication written to inflame antisemitic prejudice.

Of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine which resulted, Bevin commented: "The majority proposal is so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how, in Sir Alexander Cadogan's words, 'we could reconcile it with our conscience.

Britain's final withdrawal from Palestine was marked by the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the start of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when five Arab states intervened in the intercommunal fighting.

[56] Bevin was infuriated by attacks on British troops carried out by the more extreme of the Jewish militant groups, the Irgun and Lehi, commonly known as the Stern Gang.

[57][58][59] Bevin negotiated the Portsmouth Treaty with Iraq (signed on 15 January 1948), which, according to Iraqi Foreign Minister Muhammad Fadhel al-Jamali, was accompanied by a British undertaking to withdraw from Palestine in such a fashion as to provide for swift Arab occupation of all its territory.

"James Chuter Ede, Home Secretary throughout the time that Bevin was at the Foreign Office (and for a few months after his death), had worked with Churchill, Attlee, Keynes and many other significant figures.