In 1942, at the end of almost two years during which she’d toured America again, raising support for the war and trying to bring America into it, and had also written a pamphlet in support of Russia (Russia, Our Ally), she stood as a candidate in the Bristol Central by-election, though as an Independent and not on behalf of the ILP. The war, or rather the ILP’s absolute opposition to it, gave Jennie the opportunity to leave the party she had stayed loyal to, against her own interests and against the advice of both Frank and Nye. In 1914, as a young girl, she had seen her parents campaigning against the First World War and had followed their lead, but in 1939 she agreed with Nye that the war against Hitler, the war against fascism, had to be fought. But standing as an Independent did her no favours. The label she ran under was Independent Labour, but with the Labour Party having decided to agree not to fight any by-election seat vacated by a Tory (so as not to rock the coalition government) Jennie got no support from its members. She canvassed energetically, as she did everything, holding daily meetings in all kinds of different venues, and all kinds of famous friends came to speak on her behalf. Everyone thought she would win since the Tory majority at the last general election had only been 1,500.
She lost. It was one of the most surprising by-election results of the war, with a swing to the Tories when everywhere else there were swings against them. Jennie blamed her old party, the ILP, who had run a candidate against her, but it was obvious that the main Labour Party’s attitude had had a great influence – she had needed their backing. If she wanted to get back into parliament, as she so desperately did, then she would have to seek re-entry to the Labour Party proper. Conveniently, it was by then possible for her to convince herself that the reasons why she had belonged to the ILP and not the main Labour Party no longer obtained, and also to make some token apology for criticising Labour policy in articles she had written. She promised ‘full and generous’ support in future for ‘the broad policy of the party’. She was readmitted and five months later was adopted by Cannock as its candidate in the coming General Election.
By then the war was over. For Jennie, it had been an easy, if frustrating, period. She’d toured America, done a lot of journalism and helped with propaganda. But for Nye, it had been hard, devoted as he had been to harrying the Prime Minister, whom most of the country hailed as a hero. He’d attracted great opprobrium and been criticised from every quarter, and yet he had held firm, pushing for the conduct of the war to be governed by the need to eliminate fascism and spearhead a socialist revolution. Jennie admired him tremendously. The more outrageously outspoken he became, the more he grew in stature in her eyes. Far from being a wife who counselled caution, she backed him completely and encouraged his daring excesses. No husband could have had more understanding and enthusiastic support from a wife. He was a confident man anyway, but given Jennie’s agreement with everything he said and did his confidence grew and grew – she made him feel he could do anything, and that he could endure any amount of hate mail and vilification. They were together in what they believed and what they wanted to achieve and the exhilaration of this unity of purpose added a whole new dimension to their marriage.
But it was not quite one of equals any more. Nye had outstripped Jennie in fame. He was the coming man for Labour while she had lost her place. Slowly, by infinitely subtle degrees, she was beginning to see that Nye, not she, had a great future. He could lead the Labour Party. He could become Prime Minister and put into operation all their idealistic plans. This prospect excited her, but not for any wifely longings to share the glory. She wanted to work with Nye, not stand on the sidelines, and to do that fully she had to win the Cannock seat. It was a good constituency for her to try to win. Cannock, in a coal-mining area, was already a Labour-held seat, and she had only one opponent, a Tory who was a Sussex accountant. It was a large constituency, though, and took some covering, but as ever, Jennie coped admirably with all the travelling and speaking. Now that the election was open, Nye could, and did, come to speak at her biggest meetings and between them they wooed the electorate triumphantly. He was dynamic, she was explosive – the combination was irresistible. And the two of them were in their element, relishing the fight, inspiring audiences with their vision of a future under Labour. Jennie duly won the seat with almost 50,000 votes to her rival’s 29,225. Nye, of course, held Ebbw Vale, and the Labour government came triumphantly into office.
For Jennie, the satisfaction (and the relief) was immense. Now at last she was, theoretically at least, on a par with her husband, an MP like him and with high expectations of being called upon to fulfil some useful function in government. There were twenty-one women in the new Labour intake, some of them already experienced parliamentarians (Ellen Wilkinson, Eleanor Rathbone), but Jennie had high hopes and feared none of them as rivals. She herself wasn’t new to parliament, as so many of the women were, and she was not only in excellent health but also had no children and a husband who far from perhaps resenting her time being taken up by parliamentary business would welcome her contribution. She was, or so she believed, not ambitious for her own advancement so much as for the implementation of Labour policies. She wanted to work with her fellow party members to get things done, particularly in housing, as quickly as possible to fulfil her election pledges. But it was Nye she expected to see given some important job, not herself. She knew she wasn’t completely trusted yet, and how could she expect to be when for so long she’d stayed loyal to the ILP and had been regarded by prominent Labour Party members as a troublesome rebel? She would have to earn her stripes first. What she wanted was to see Nye offered an important job; a minor one would be an insult and she was adamant that he should refuse. When he was given the immensely important dual Ministry of Health & Housing honour was more than satisfied. He would be the youngest Cabinet Minister in Attlee’s government and charged with working miracles.
His new prominence and the enormous responsibilities that came with it presented Jennie with another test as a wife. Nye would now be under great strain and need looking after more than ever. Luckily, towards the end of the war, Jennie had realised, sooner than Nye did, that it was not going to be practical to live at Lane End Cottage, however much they loved it. Going backwards and forwards 50 miles (80 km) each way when both of them would need to be in London all week would be gruelling, and the idea of having a small London flat as well as Lane End was not only a dismal prospect – neither of them wanted to go back to flat-dwelling, and the essential Ma Lee would not fit in – but financially difficult. They would have to move back into central London, into a house large enough to absorb her parents in such a way as to give them the same illusion of independence they had enjoyed at Lane End. Jennie had set herself to find such a place. Because of the war and the bombing, many people had left London and put their houses up for sale. So in 1944 Jennie had bought 23 Cliveden Place, a street running off Sloane Square in Chelsea. It was a Georgian terrace house with plenty of space within its four storeys to accommodate her parents. Once more, Jennie had had a house to renovate and plan and turn into a home and she had enjoyed every minute of organising the transformation, though not the last phase of the bombing: 1944’s v1 and v2 rocket-bombs. But by the time Nye was made a Cabinet Minister, everything was in place.
Now it was Jennie’s turn to entertain as befitted being the wife of a Cabinet Minister. Nye had never had any inhibitions about spending money on the good things in life – wine, food, books – and he had a highly developed aesthetic sense, appreciating beautiful furniture and paintings and artefacts, so Jennie had a free rein, within their financial means (not great) to do what she liked in Cliveden Place. What she liked was what Nye liked too: a slightly bohemian life-style, but comfortably so, colourful and spacious and lacking rigid formality. Excellent meals were provided for the friends and colleagues who came there (though none cooked by Jennie) and Ma Lee, once installed, was in her element. The social life in No. 23 was thought of as lavish by many people and not in keeping with the bel
iefs of the host and hostess, but neither Nye nor Jennie listened to such criticisms. Nye, in Jennie’s opinion, worked ferociously hard and deserved all the material comforts he could get. She was never going to be ashamed of providing an attractive and even luxuriously comfortable home for her husband.
Harder for her to manage was being entertained outside their home. Nye had official functions to attend and as his wife she was expected to accompany him. For a start, she never liked evening engagements – she was a lark, at her best in the morning and always sleepy in the evening. Nor was she good at hiding her boredom, and most of these functions were painfully boring. Not for Jennie the permanent charming smile as she sat at her husband’s side – she was far more likely to have a fixed scowl or to yawn. She hated the embassy dinner parties and what she called ‘the frozen cod’ type of entertainment when politeness was all. And she absolutely refused to retire with the ladies, as wives were still required to do in those circles. She couldn’t, and wouldn’t, obey this absurd convention, and Nye luckily didn’t expect her to. When she left a dinner on one such occasion, at the Yugoslavian Embassy, Nye followed her. He agreed that it was absurd for her to be banished with the other wives – ‘What am I supposed to do, talk about babies?’ – and cheerfully flouted convention with her.
Babies were another source of possible contention. Nye loved babies. He was brilliant with all children and it was naturally assumed by his family that he would have several of his own and would make a wonderful father. In 1945, Jennie was forty-one and childless. She and Nye had been married eleven years, more than long enough for family and friends to fear that there would never be a baby. Nye was to be denied children by a wife who had gone far enough in marrying at all and was not going to go even further against her own nature and become a mother. She said she had made this plain from the beginning: no children to get in the way of her work, to which she was dedicated. She had practised birth control successfully since her student days, but should there be any accidental pregnancy she had no doubts about what she would do. She would have an abortion, in Holland. Married to Nye, she never did need to resort to this so far as is known, but she did once become pregnant. Nye’s reaction is not recorded, but Jennie had a miscarriage, so there was no moral dilemma. Nye’s acceptance of his wife’s decision not to have children seems to have been without resentment – if Jennie didn’t want them then it was her right, as the woman who would have to bear them, to say no.
But he knew Jennie very well and because he did he knew how hard it was for her ever to change her mind. She would see it as weak, signifying some loss of control in herself. Perhaps because he knew this, he tried to make things easier for her by, she said, asking her very gently ‘with his unfailing love’ if maybe she should think about the whole question of children again before she was too old for having any to be an option. Jennie wavered. She thought maybe after all she would like one child – though Nye had always been adamant that he wanted a brood or none – and consulted a doctor who, in fact, advised her against trying in view of her age. The risk of some abnormality was too great. But there is evidence that Jennie did try at this period, though perhaps only in the sense of not being scrupulous about birth control. She thought herself pregnant once, and was excited about it, but it turned out to be a false alarm and after that there were no others. The marriage remained childless, and if there were regrets they were not openly expressed. Jennie certainly didn’t feel any sense of failure as a wife simply because she had not produced children – there were far more important functions for her to fulfil.
Protecting Nye became the greatest of them. As Minister of Health and Housing he was a target of abuse for the many enemies he made and some of them specialised in dirty tricks of a type still wearyingly familiar today. He had to be permanently on guard against being framed in what would look like compromising situations. A favourite trick of the tabloid press was to try to photograph him with a prostitute. He was in the habit of going for late-night walks, to clear his head before bed, and it was easy enough to hire a prostitute to accost him and make it look as though he were accosting her. After one such attempt, Nye came home in a fury, insisting that Jennie should in future accompany him – he needed his walks to relax and he was determined not to give them up. Jennie, always of course sleepy at that time and hating the thought of being dragged out into the cold, dark streets, nevertheless complied. She saw it as her duty to be a kind of bodyguard. In other ways, too, she tried to protect her husband, seeing him as far more vulnerable and sensitive than his image suggested. There was the hate mail, for example – it flooded in and was indescribably vitriolic and foul. Jennie made it her job to censor all their post and deal with its contents appropriately.
She worried most of all about his health. Nye looked incredibly strong but he wasn’t, and she constantly kept a close eye on his health, both physical and mental. Early in their marriage, Nye had had to have an operation on his back and ever after she monitored his back pain, writing to Suse that it ‘dragged at his strength’. Once he was a Cabinet Minister she saw him as ‘strained to the limits of his considerable physical and mental powers’2 and fretted over the way he drove himself, working twenty-hour days and more, and hardly ever taking so much as a day off unless she insisted. Once, she had been happy to leave her mother in charge of his comforts, but by the mid-1940s, at the time of the greatest stress for Nye, she felt she had to be there for him as much as possible. ‘He was’, she wrote, ‘so lost and woebegone when left to come home to a house with no me …3 he did not like to be on his own.’ She was essential to him, the only person to whom he could talk absolutely freely and who thought like him. Her influence in this respect was enormous and recognised as such by everyone. Many political colleagues did not approve of Jennie’s role. They thought she encouraged Nye to be reckless (she did) when she should have counselled caution, and that she never presented to him the other side of an argument but allowed him to think his (and hers) was the only one. She bolstered Nye’s ego in a way that was not so much supportive, in the manner of a good wife, but inflammatory.
Jennie would not have denied any of these charges. She was proud of them. People were quite right, she did push her husband to be bold and stick to his beliefs. But she was no longer, as some people thought, seeking power for herself. Nothing was for herself. By the time Nye was a Cabinet Minister and in the throes of a violent upheaval in the Health Service, the balance in the marriage had changed. They were nothing like equals now in ambition – Jennie’s was on hold, and she knew it.
III
BACK IN THE Commons after the Labour landslide of the 1945 General Election, Jennie soon felt herself, to her own surprise, to be ill at ease. Though she had never been an outstanding orator there, as she was on the hustings, she had never felt nervous or apprehensive, and now she did, especially if Nye was in the House, on the front bench listening to her. Nye himself hated these occasions and tried not to be there. His agitation on her behalf was all due to what Jennie later called ‘his old chauvinist pig showing through his rational self’.1 He was deeply protective of her and couldn’t bear the thought of his wife being jeered at and given a rough ride, or of having to witness her flounder and lose her way.
Jennie, by this stage of her marriage, saw this protectiveness as both a blessing and a handicap. She reflected that though before she had married Nye she had rejected the absurd notion that she needed protection – she could fight her own battles, thank you, and was famous for doing so – she found that marriage had indeed given her a protective cover which, she was obliged to realise, in retrospect, she had after all needed. She felt the benefit of it. It ‘shielded me from gossip’,2 and gave her a security quite different from that she had felt with her parents as a child or with Frank Wise as her lover. Nye’s devotion wrapped itself tightly round her and far from suffocating her made her feel strong, ready to face anything.
One of the downsides, however, was that right from the beginning of the 1945 parl
iament the suspicion began that with Nye Bevan so powerful his wife would receive unfair advancement – he was nicely placed to push her forward. When he appointed her to the Central Housing Advisory Committee, as soon as he took on the dual ministries of Housing and Health, this was seen as evidence that the husband would back the wife over others who were just as well qualified for the job – Jennie would benefit simply through being his wife and without making her own way. Naturally, this was anathema to her, but she knew the charge was not true. Nye appointed her because he thought she would do a good job. She applied herself diligently to the work of the committee, chaired by Nye himself, and presented its only report competently (on rural housing). In the Commons, she harried the Minister of Supply for refusing to grant early release from the forces to the building workers needed to put Nye’s ambitious housing programme into operation. But that only convinced people that she was merely a mouthpiece for her husband, his stooge, his blindly loyal wife.
Good Wives Page 27
