Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  What did begin to threaten Jennie’s by 1932 was a change in the attitude (to a divorce) of Frank’s wife. She had finally, and reluctantly, yielded to her husband’s desperate desire that his relationship with Jennie should be put on a more regular basis and that they should separate. She still wasn’t ready for a proper divorce, but she agreed that some sort of settlement should be made soon. By the next year, the details of that settlement were being worked out, and Dorothy had acknowledged the inevitable. On the twenty-first anniversary of her marriage to Frank, 2 November 1933, they had dinner together after the theatre, Dorothy struggling hard to be civilised and conceal her bitterness. She could see that Frank was very, very tired and felt sorry for him in spite of her own anguish and need for comfort. He saw her off on her train at Baker Street before he went home, and then the next morning, Jennie’s twenty-ninth birthday, he rushed round to her flat to wish her happy birthday. It was a Friday and they longed to spend a weekend together, but Frank was committed to going north to speak at various political meetings. He fitted in a day with his old friend Charles Trevelyan, who lived near Morpeth. There, walking in the woods on the Sunday afternoon, he collapsed while climbing a stile. He died with brutal suddenness of a brain haemorrhage, before help could be summoned.

  For Jennie, it was an appalling shock. Frank was a fit, healthy man in the prime of life and, in spite of his tiredness, there had been no signs whatsoever of anything being physically wrong. Trevelyan hoped to get to Jennie before the news could reach her and break it to her himself, but he was too late. She heard the news from a journalist, by telephone, which added to her trauma. She was alone in her flat, and lay all night trying to comprehend what had happened. She didn’t sleep and she didn’t weep – it was all, as she later wrote to Suse, ‘too fantastically unbelievable’. Very early next morning, when Trevelyan arrived, reality broke through. Then, she wept passionately, but even this open grief did not last long. She knew she had to steady herself quickly or go under completely and there was only one way to do that: work. That was all life held for her now: work, the work she and Frank had cared so much about. With considerable courage, she forced herself to go to Newcastle to attend two political meetings. She did not go to the funeral but she did write to Dorothy, the widow who could at least grieve publicly and openly.

  Dorothy19 wrote back, a letter quite startling in its compassion and generosity, saying she fully understood the agony Jennie was going through, and blaming herself for her love not being ‘big enough’ to let Frank go so that he and Jennie could have been together. She saw clearly that Jennie had given him ‘youth and inspiration’ and that she herself had been ‘middle-aged and nervy and often on edge and too much preoccupied with the children’ which had contributed to what happened. She was devastatingly honest, admitting that though, of course, she would never have wanted Frank dead, his death, his parting from her through death, was in some awful way easier to bear than losing him entirely to Jennie. She ended by inviting Jennie to go to Frank’s flat and take away anything of hers, and hoped that in the future they could perhaps be friends.

  But the future was a place Jennie did not want to be. Without Frank, she felt vulnerable and hopeless. Nothing seemed to have any point any more, not even work. She thought of suicide only to lecture herself on cowardice. Life was ‘just hell’. Her mood was black and she felt it affecting everyone around her and tainting everything she did.

  But Aneurin Bevan refused to let it affect him. He was kind, considerate, ever ready to squire her about and was in general what Jennie called ‘a good pal’. For her, that was enough. For him, very quickly, it was not. He wanted a pal who was also a lover and, given the situation he and Jennie found themselves in, with both of them in the public eye and their ambitions still intact, that meant making her his wife. From marriage being no part of his life-plan it became essential. The struggle was to get Jennie to agree to marry him.

  II

  JENNIE HAD FAR more in common with Nye Bevan than she had had with Frank Wise so far as background and personality went. Jennie’s comment that they could have been brother and sister, and Nye’s response that if so it would have been with a tendency to incest, were fair enough. Both were from mining families (and of course Nye himself had been a miner), both had been brought up in mining communities, and both had had their political vision influenced, if not entirely created, by the hardship and poverty they had seen around them. But there the similarity ended. Jennie always knew she, in comparison with Nye, had had it easy. Nye was one of ten children, eight of whom survived infancy, with all that meant in terms of resources; he’d left school at the age of twelve to go down the mine, and after that educated himself; it was through his own efforts that at twenty-two he finally got a scholarship to the Central Labour College in London.

  His father, like Jennie’s father, was a loyal union man and treasurer of his local lodge, but he was neither a political activist like James Lee, nor the dominant partner in his marriage. Phoebe Bevan was the more forceful. Nye got his physique from her and also his determination. Nye, after he came back to Tredegar when he finished college, was unemployed and for a while suffered the humiliation of being virtually supported by one of his sisters, Arianwen, who had a good job as a typist. It wasn’t until 1929, when he was thirty-two, that he escaped to London again and could support himself once he was elected as MP for Ebbw Vale. There, in the House of Commons, he saw and met Jennie Lee who, at the beginning of that parliament, made a far greater impact than he did. Everyone marvelled at this golden girl who had risen so rapidly through the party ranks and now prepared to dazzle Westminster.

  It was a while before Nye attained anything like the same prominence, but when he did he eclipsed Jennie as a speaker. Whereas in the Commons the fire and passion which had made her hustings speeches rousing were diluted, Nye’s were increased. He was aggressive and fearless, quite impossible to intimidate. His style of speaking displayed all the skill of an experienced actor and yet his sincerity was evident. Outside the House his growing reputation as a bon viveur (today he’d have been labelled a champagne socialist) confused people – here was a die-hard socialist, ever scathing about the privileged, idle lives of his Tory opponents, wining and dining with the best of them and enjoying great success with women. He made friends across party boundaries, seeing nothing wrong with associating in his leisure life with those he attacked in his political life. There was something wild about him as well as something solid, and this appealed greatly to Jennie – he reflected what she felt about herself. But whether she was as physically and emotionally attracted to him as she was to Frank was at first doubtful. Nye’s attraction for her all lay in his powerful personality and intellect, and even then it was more a relationship of equals rather than recognition of a superior mind, which, so far as Jennie was concerned, was what she felt she looked for in a man. Nye, though seven years older, was by no means the potent older man she had once told Suse she was looking for.

  But he was good fun and she relished their clashes of opinion. Nye scorned her devotion to the ILP – he himself would have nothing to do with any of those parties within the main Labour Party – and Jennie had reported with some sense of embarrassment how he had told her to get into a nunnery and be done with it if she was virtuously going to stick with her principles and remain with the ILP. He accused her of being nothing but ‘a Salvation Army lassie’, more interested in being a social worker than a real politician determined to bring about change. But she admired his vigorous denunciation of her stand, and thought he was the only one of the younger MPs who could be depended on to think for himself and be at all times what she called ‘anti-inertia’. After Frank died, Nye became more attentive than ever, and she was grateful to him for being so solicitous. But the truth was, Nye was not Frank, and her grief for Frank did not seem to lessen.

  All the same, Nye’s company did help her to rise above her wretchedness and get through the days – so much so that she made no objection when
he suggested he should move in and be there during the nights too, when it was hardest of all for her to be brave. A little before Christmas 1933, six weeks after Frank’s death, Nye did move in to her Guilford Street flat. She knew, though, that this would only be a temporary arrangement – she was going off to America on another lecture tour in January, so there was no question of Nye’s becoming permanently installed. She told him that when she returned she was going to rent a country cottage near London. Nye replied he would share it with her. Jennie demurred. Living together in such an obvious way would give rise to gossip, and that sort of gossip would damage both their careers. Precisely, said Nye, and that was why they must marry. Marriage, from being an impediment, had become a practical necessity. It still need not mean anything – it was a mere piece of paper, a sop to convention enabling them both to continue in their work without fear of scandal.

  Nye’s arguments were all logical and rational, and it was the right way to appeal to Jennie, but they could not conceal what was really driving him: he was genuinely in love with Jennie. Marriage, for all his previous determination to avoid it, signified more than a legal arrangement. He had no desire to make her, within marriage, the kind of wife she had always dreaded becoming, so she need have no fear of being required to become a domestic drudge. It cannot have escaped his notice after even the most brief experience of living with Jennie that she was utterly hopeless as a housewife and cook. There would be none of that sort of marital comfort. Nor can he have deluded himself into thinking Jennie, as a wife, would be sexually faithful. She hadn’t, in this respect, always been faithful to Frank, whom she had loved so passionately. She’d always made it plain that she didn’t believe in monogamy. But Nye’s love for her was so great that he had absolute confidence their marriage would work. It would just be an unusual marriage, that was all, one in which Jennie would redefine the role of wife. And he would be proud to have the sort of wife she would make instead of some submissive little hausfrau.

  He was persuasive, and he was strong. More than anything, strength was what Jennie needed at that time. Masterful men were not creatures before whom she had ever bowed – she was masterful herself and used to defying them – but there was undoubtedly, in her then vulnerable state, something comforting in Nye trying to take charge and tell her what to do for her own sake as well as his. Frank had always made her feel secure – she once told him she felt he had thrown ‘a warm cloak’ round her – and so indeed had her parents, and now here was Nye, attempting to do the same. She doubted if he could succeed in giving her that feeling of being utterly protected, but suddenly it seemed worth a try. He seemed to understand that Frank had been the love of her life, and to accept this. But there was the future to face, and he would help her face it.

  Nye took her for a splendid dinner at the Café Royal in May 1934 and finally persuaded her to marry him. He then went off to America, and when he returned in September, announced their engagement. On 25 October, they were duly married at Holborn Register Office, to the intense interest of the press. Two friends were witnesses, and the only family member, from either side, was uninvited: Billy, Nye’s brother. Jennie said he was ‘dressed to kill and in an awkward mood’.1 None of the Bevan family approved of Jennie and, unlike Fanny Stevenson, she had done nothing whatsoever to endear herself to them. She was furious with Billy for coming, of his own volition, to represent the family and when, at the wedding lunch at The Ivy afterwards, he demanded beer instead of champagne, she said she wanted to strangle him. Meanwhile, the reporters and photographers were noting all the unconventionalities: Jennie didn’t wear a hat, or gloves; she didn’t accept a ring; and she let it be known from the very beginning that she would never allow anyone to call her Mrs Bevan. She was Miss Jennie Lee, married or not. Nye beamed approval.

  The honeymoon was delayed until January. They went to Spain, to Torremolinos, where Jennie saw Nye at his most flamboyant. He was utterly at home there, wearing a magnificent Spanish cloak, a sombrero and a scarlet facha round his solid waist. They both loved the sun and the way of life, the antithesis of what they had known as children. It was a carefree time, probably the most carefree they were ever to have, and Jennie came back to London feeling more cheerful than she had done since Frank died. This was fortunate, since a difficult time politically was ahead for both of them. The Labour Party was beginning to concentrate more on its policies towards Europe, and what its reaction should be to what was happening there, than on domestic issues. Jennie, who was not an MP, was heavily involved in work for the International Women’s Committee against war and fascism; Nye, who was an MP and whose constituency included a large number of unemployed men, was heavily involved in supporting hunger marches. Both of them were active and busy, Jennie as a journalist, Nye as a speaker at rallies as well as an MP. Rarely were a husband and wife more united in their aims and in the direction of all their efforts. For both of them work, political work came first, and this made of their marriage a partnership of equals of an extraordinary kind.

  Yet there were problems, and these were in turn caused by their being equals, by Jennie’s absolute refusal to take on what were assumed to be the roles of the wife. She’d said she wouldn’t and she didn’t. But a household had to be run, both of them had to be looked after. Nye could manage very well without too much cosseting – it was Jennie who couldn’t. Right from the beginning of living on her own in London she had had to have a cleaner, the redoubtable Annie, 6 feet (1.8 m) tall and muscular, who polished floors superbly and generally made Jennie as comfortable as her mother always had done. Now more was needed. To Jennie, the solution was clear: as soon as they found a house, her mother should come (with her father) to look after them. Everyone would then be happy. She could see no obstacle to this neat plan. Nye adored her mother from the moment he met her (soon joking that he had had to marry the girl to get the mother) and she adored him. James Lee was not quite so bowled over initially, but that didn’t worry Jennie. But first a house had to be found and that took until the summer of 1936, when they bought Lane End Cottage, near Reading, about 50 miles (80 km) from London.

  Both of them were wildly excited with their first home, and now Jennie revealed a side of herself which did, at last, fit in with traditional notions of a wife’s function. She might have no interest in housework but she knew how to create a home, and she approached the task eagerly with both great energy and taste. Jennie directed all the renovations and supervised all the decoration. Once the structural changes had been made, and the interior decorated, she spent days scouring antique shops and sales to find the right furniture. The end result was charming and admired by all who visited. Jennie, the Home-maker, was a new creature, a positive triumph as a wife.

  Everything was now ready for her parents to come down from Scotland and for her mother to start looking after her and Nye. Jennie didn’t see it as ‘employing’ her mother or as using her as an unpaid servant. She designed a two-bedroom cottage for her parents, which was built in the garden, so that they would feel independent, and then her father was persuaded to give up his job and accompany his wife to Lane End Cottage to live there permanently. Jennie regarded herself as having done her mother a favour because ‘shopping and cooking and gardening all day long never seemed to tire or bore her’. She was by then fifty-six, but as energetic as ever and delighted to be useful to her daughter and the son-in-law she was so comfortable with. Not surprisingly, the general view of the Bevan family was that Jennie was not the sort of wife they would have wanted for Nye – fancy needing her own mother to run her household.

  As usual, Jennie couldn’t care less what they thought. Neither before nor after marrying Nye did she attempt to woo his family, never seeing it as any wife’s duty to embrace her husband’s relatives with affection. Nye had taken her to Wales, to show her all the places he loved, and she had of course been introduced to all his family, but she had no interest in really getting to know them. She went with Nye once to his constituency, Ebbw Vale, and that was
it – it was his job to look after it, not hers, and she had no intention of adopting a supportive role as so many wives did. She had important work of her own to do, though since she still hadn’t got back to parliament (she failed to win the North Lanark seat in 1935) this was still journalism and not the work she longed to be doing. She went to America again, to lecture, perfectly happy to leave Nye in her mother’s excellent care. Interestingly, she did seem to agree it was her responsibility as a wife to see that her husband was looked after even if she was certainly not going to do it herself. Nye exhausted himself and she did worry about him. Weekends at Lane End Cottage were precious, used as they were for Nye to relax. They listened to music together and read poetry. This helped Nye’s mood more than it helped hers – she felt frustrated, longing as she did to find a parliamentary seat again. She sensed that she was marking time and occasionally coming dangerously close to pretending she was the wife she did not want to be, the little woman waiting at home to soothe her hard-working husband.

  The war changed everything. Within nine months of its declaration in September 1939, Churchill had become Prime Minister and Labour had been brought into a coalition government for its duration. Max Beaverbrook became Minister for Air Production, and it was he who offered Jennie a job. She leapt at the chance to be busy and active and toured the country persuading the workers in the aircraft factories to work even harder and to carry on through the air-raids. Now she needed periods of rest at Lane End Cottage just as much as Nye. But she wished she could be at Nye’s side, in the centre of all the ongoing drama, and suddenly she was given her chance. Cecil King offered her a contract to write a column as the Daily Mirror’s political correspondent, which she accepted (resigning from the job Beaverbrook had given her). Now she was in the Press Gallery of the Commons, and if not at Nye’s side, or on a par with him, involved properly, and quite importantly, in what was going on. But only four months into the new job, she was sacked (Churchill had begun to complain about the Mirror’s line and King was afraid his paper would be suppressed), and was again frustrated and impotent. This Nye could not bear. Jennie as a wife working at full pressure was an inspiration; Jennie as a wife thrashing around looking for some meaningful contribution to make was a worry. If their marriage was to go on being one of equals, Jennie had either to get back into parliament or find some work of a more satisfying kind than she’d found so far.