Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  It was galling for Jennie and made her furious, but it was the price she paid for being Nye’s wife, part of what enemies insisted on presenting as a double-act. One reporter (American) actually asked her if Nye wrote her speeches, so great was the conviction that he was speaking through her and using her to say things which as a Cabinet Minister he wasn’t free to say himself. She was closely watched in the Commons every time there was a division, how she voted being read as an indication of how Nye was thinking, especially if her vote went against official Cabinet policy. Whatever she said or did, she could not escape the unfairness of being judged hardly to have a mind or will of her own. But though she raged against the injustice of this false image, she nevertheless accepted the underlying premise that Nye was superior to her. He was. He was in a position she now knew she could never be in. It was no good speculating on whether as a single woman, MP for Cannock, she could have soared to his heights and been made a Cabinet Minister. A strong part of her still yearned to be at the forefront of the Labour Party’s efforts to transform the conditions in which the majority of people lived, but she was sensible and honest enough to acknowledge that, for whatever reason, that kind of promotion was lost to her. Nye was the man, Nye had the potential to become leader of the party in the future, Nye was a future prime minister who could put into effect their joint dreams.

  Nye was also ‘her’ man. If Jennie was suspected of being his mouthpiece, he in turn was suspected of being far too heavily influenced by her, and Jennie’s influence was feared. Everyone knew that in this marriage it was not a case of the husband leaving his work behind as he went through the front door of his home at night. On the contrary, he walked into a continuation of all the discussions and consultations he had been involved in during each day. Jennie was placed, as few wives ever are, to understand all the issues at stake and furthermore to have strong views on them. It was not a question of Nye’s not knowing his own mind and needing Jennie to know it for him – that idea was ridiculous – but rather of Jennie because she knew his mind so well effortlessly being able to match his thinking. She may have been, as so many alleged, disastrous as a mate for Nye, but from his point of view she was invaluable. Never once did he need to feel his wife was unaware of the problems he faced, or that it was beyond her to understand their complexities. Jennie understood perfectly and that was a huge relief for a man under enormous stress.

  The greatest period of stress was, of course, during Nye’s years as Minister of Health and Housing when he was fighting to establish the National Health Service. The worst year was 1947, when the pressures resisting this were at their most extreme and Nye was coming home, if he came at all, exhausted. Health, unlike Housing, was not Jennie’s field. She was on no committee to do with it and took no part in the many health debates. But that was not to say that she didn’t care as much as Nye about getting this great Bill through – she did, every bit as passionately – or that she in any way underestimated the difficulties he faced. She worried that he might have a nervous breakdown, writing to Suse during 1947 that he was being ‘eaten into’ and that no one but she could understand how near the edge he was. She had ‘to keep the balance for him’, her prime function by then, she thought. One of the ways she tried to do this was by controlling access to him in his scarce leisure time. Real friends, and family, yes (though she limited even their access), ‘but the great thing is to keep up one’s guard with strangers’. She acted as a guard-dog herself, and was greatly resented for doing so as well as heartily disliked.

  This dislike of her was in striking contrast to Nye’s own popularity. Almost everyone who knew him liked Nye, even his political enemies. He was ‘a character’ but the warmth of his personality offset his more aggressive side and his robust sense of humour endeared him to people. Jennie was ‘a character’ too, but she was too sharp, too arrogant, for her aggressive side ever to be overlooked. People feared her tongue and resented how she dealt with them, which was often rudely, without charm, and with none of Nye’s wit. She scored no points at all as a wife for easing her husband’s way socially. Even many of their joint friends found Jennie hard to take and at one time or another she fell out with most of them. Women especially were wary of her. She said she had always had good women friends but if so they are difficult to identify in any number – only Suse stood the test of time as a friend of Jennie’s and even she was pushed to the limit. Those who did like her fell more into the category of hero-worshipper than friend – women like Joan Loverock, first smitten in 1945 when she heard Jennie speak during the election campaign at Cannock, and who worked for her in that constituency for the rest of her life. Joan was awestruck by Jennie’s star quality – ‘with her black hair, beautiful clothes’3 and ‘a proud arrogant look’ she thought Jennie was like a film star. Other women fell under her spell and adored her so much they could put up with any amount of high-handedness but they were in the minority.

  Not that Jennie appeared either to notice or to care about her own general unpopularity. She had always despised those who tried to curry favour and to whom being liked was more important than speaking their mind. She was not going to alter her ways just because her husband was now so important, and it bothered her not a jot if people found her too abrasive. She acknowledged that ‘in some ways I am wholly unsuited to public life’ but that was just too bad. She had a job to do and she did it to the best of her ability. Nye came with her to open the 1,000th council house to be built in Cannock since the war, but otherwise each dealt with their own areas separately. They were not, said Jennie, a double-act like Oswald and Diana Mosley, ‘dragging round the country in double harness’.4 She was on her own there, looking after herself, though typically, just as she had her mother at home, she had Mollie Rowley, a Labour councillor, waiting on her hand and foot in Cannock. Mollie brought her breakfast in bed, picked up her clothes from the floor and generally spoiled her. Mollie saw only her good side.

  It was a side her in-laws still failed to see. Very early on, they seem to have hoped the marriage wouldn’t last, and when it did they were disappointed. In their opinion, Jennie was not a proper wife. Proper wives, good wives, looked after their husbands themselves without passing the job to their own mothers; proper wives nursed their husbands tenderly, while Jennie, though concerned about Nye’s health, hated sickness and was bad at coping with what it involved in the way of caring in a practical way; proper wives gave their husbands children; proper wives did not have careers; proper wives did not, ever, put their own wishes first; and in Wales proper wives slept with their husbands in double beds, whereas Jennie and Nye soon had not only separate beds but separate bedrooms. It was a puzzle to the Bevans that, though Jennie scored nil on any list of what a good and proper wife should do or be, Nye was utterly devoted to her – that, they could not deny. At first, they concluded he was sexually in thrall to her; they hoped that this attraction would wear out or else that Jennie would have affairs and Nye reject her. But the separate bedrooms situation, which they could not help being aware of, and the failure to link Jennie’s name with any sexual scandal, rather knocked that idea on the head. Proper wife or not, they were stuck with Jennie and had to accept it – but that did not mean they had to like her, and they never did.

  Jennie didn’t like them either. She was devoted to her own parents but this was because she saw herself as having been truly loved and cherished and brought up in the very best way possible. But she saw Nye’s experience as being quite different and therefore leading to a very different relationship. His young years, or so she alleged, had not been as happy as hers – ‘So much was denied him’, she reflected, ‘or made furtive, and furtiveness was a quality wholly alien to his nature.’5 It left the adult Nye with a strong sense of duty to his family but as far as Jennie was concerned duty should not bind him to them the way love bound her to her own family. If she had felt Nye’s family rivalled her in his affections, then she might have tried to form a better relationship with them, but she knew it was
no contest: Nye loved her far more and would always put her first. Secure in this knowledge, Jennie went on regarding the Bevans, as always, with indifference. When she stayed (not very often) in Tredegar, she treated their homes as she treated everyone’s, as hotels where she expected service; and when they stayed with her, she often excluded them from Nye’s company, claiming he needed privacy, even from them.

  The worst rows were with Arianwen, the sister who had once supported Nye when she worked as a secretary and he was unemployed. Arianwen disliked Jennie from the moment she saw her and never changed her opinion. In 1938, Nye had helped his mother buy a house in Tredegar. He and Jennie had been married only four years and didn’t have much money, so Nye’s contribution made quite a hole in their modest bank balance, and Jennie rather resented his generosity, so much so that she suggested a council house would do for his mother. This caused outrage in the family and luckily Nye overrode Jennie and went ahead with buying the rather imposing stone house in Queens Square. When his mother died, the house passed to Arianwen, who was by then married and had a son. It seemed sensible that when Nye visited his constituency he should use the Tredegar house and so it was decided, apparently amicably, that the house would be shared. The house had four bedrooms. Jennie insisted three should belong to her and Nye for their occasional use, which left one for the permanent use of Arianwen, husband and son. The son had to sleep downstairs. It was hardly a fair arrangement, but Arianwen was obliged to accept it. What she could not accept was Jennie’s idea of sharing which, in short, meant Arianwen should do all the cleaning. Jennie expected to arrive and find her rooms immaculate. When they were not, she complained. In Arianwen’s eyes she was not only a bad wife but the worst possible sister-in-law. What she failed to understand was that Jennie had no interest whatsoever in being that awful thing, a wife. She was Nye’s friend, his lover, his inspiration, but never his wife.

  Her attitude to Nye’s family was all the more puzzling when she needed the Bevans’ support, needed to close the joint Bevan/ Lee ranks to face a threat potentially damaging to Nye as a Cabinet Minister. Her brother Tommy was becoming more of a problem than ever during Nye’s period as Minister of Health and Housing. The tabloid press, then as now, ever on the look-out for scandal to do with prominent politicians, would have loved knowing about the black sheep of his wife’s family and Jennie was acutely aware of this. Tommy had not fared well in Australia. Far from making his fortune, he had not even obtained a steady job for himself, and after the war (during which he was slightly injured) he became an alcoholic. By that time, he had married and had three children (including a daughter named after Jennie). In 1947, his wife Rose wrote a pathetic letter to Jennie, describing Tommy’s drunken rages and how he had started to beat Jim, their fourteen-year-old son. She begged her not to tell her parents, but said she needed some sort of help, preferably the sharp removal of her husband to his native country.

  Jennie was appalled at the idea. How the journalists would love the sight of her bedraggled, drunken brother staggering in and out of 23 Cliveden Place, the house of the Minister of Health. Her contempt for Tommy was total – how could he, brought up as he had been with such love by such good parents, sink to this degrading level? It was beyond her comprehension. All the love she had felt for her brother evaporated and she wrote to him letters of such blistering scorn that he said he’d stopped reading them, so she need send him no more, though if she enclosed £10 he would stop pestering her. But worse than a drunken brother would be a criminal brother, and Tommy feared he was going to be done for embezzlement – ‘I look like bringing disgrace on my folks’,6 he wrote to his wife. In 1949, to Jennie’s horror, she heard that Tommy was on board ship on his way home. He was supposed to be off the drink but on the drugs (which had been used in his ‘cure’). Once back, he was soon on the booze once more, and borrowing shamelessly from his bewildered parents. Jennie was livid at his exploiting them, but she knew they would never close their door to him – he was their son, and would endlessly be forgiven. He was always promising to reform and always he defaulted. Jennie had none of the compassion her parents showed and refused to get involved with him. She wanted him to return to Australia as soon as possible. Back he duly sailed, to a wife who didn’t want him, only to decide he had made a mistake, and started looking for a way of working his passage home yet again. Jennie dreaded this happening, and wrote to him that if he couldn’t give their poor mother love and support then ‘at least be man enough not to lean on her … I am contemptuous of words offered in place of decent behaviour.’7

  Nye, of course, knew about Tommy, but Jennie tried to shield him from her very real worry that her brother would become a serious liability – he was her problem and she tried to deal with it as efficiently (and as ruthlessly) as possible. In 1949, the National Health Service Bill had gone through but the problems of implementing it were only just beginning. Nye was obliged to go on begging for more money and arguing his case in a Cabinet reluctant to give it. Increasingly, the necessity of bringing in prescription charges was mooted, to which he was violently opposed. Such charges would go against the whole spirit of the new NHS and it would cease to be the truly socialist measure of which he was so proud. Jennie, of course, encouraged him to stand up to those in the Cabinet who claimed that either prescription charges, or charges for false teeth and spectacles, would have to be made. She thought he should resign rather than back down on his promise that charges would not be brought in – resign, and go on to glory, she was sure, as a future leader of the party. But Nye didn’t resign. Instead, he accepted that at some future, undetermined date the proposed flat rate of one shilling (1/-) per prescription might be imposed, on condition that if it were, old age pensioners would be exempt, and on the understanding that the charge should be acknowledged as a necessary measure to stop exploitation of the new free health service and not to raise money. Personally, he hoped that, though the amending clause to the NHS Bill went through, sanctioning the right to impose the prescription charges if needed, it would never come into being. Jennie was reassured enough by his confidence to be able to vote for it.

  But everyone knew that the problem of financing the NHS would not disappear. The more the costs escalated, the greater would the strain be on Nye to resist bringing in other charges already discussed but not included in the amending clause. Jennie saw him becoming more and more exhausted and made it her business to get him right away from all the stress. In postwar England, not many people had the opportunity or the means (with travel allowances strictly limited) to visit all the European countries so freely accessible before the war, and of course much of Europe had been badly damaged by war, occupation and invasion, but Nye as Minister of Health and Housing could go on semi-official trips and turn them into holidays. This Jennie was all in favour of – the more Nye got away from London, the easier it would be for him to relax and the easier for her to distract him. Distraction, as well as rest, was what she felt he very much needed. Nye, she acknowledged, did need company, and so did she – they were not a couple who wanted to retreat and see nobody but each other on holiday. Both were convivial, delighting in having long, lively meals with like-minded friends who could tell, and appreciate, entertaining tales and understand the spirit in which they were told – she didn’t want Nye’s often outrageous-sounding remarks to be misunderstood. So Jennie tried, with considerable success, to vet anyone wanting to come close to Nye and filter out the risks.

  One holiday, a journey from Rome to Naples and then over to the Isle of Capri, was very successful – sun, at last. They were guests of the Italian Minister of Health and along the way they received official hospitality from local dignitaries. Best of all, everywhere they went they were invited to sample local vintages. It was, commented Jennie ‘quite a survival test’. Nye, who had a strong head, survived better than Jennie, but both enjoyed themselves hugely. They alternated between riding in the chauffeur-driven car provided and joining the Italian officials on the accompanying bus. J
ennie seems to have been better liked on these sort of trips than she was at home – her natural ebullience was more attractive to Europeans (and perhaps her sharpest retorts were not understood). She’d also liked to think of herself as easily assimilated in other countries ever since, on her first visit abroad, someone had told her she had ‘a face for travel’, meaning she could easily be taken for a Russian, an Italian, or a Spaniard, because of the shape of her face and her colouring – and this pleased her. She was quite good at foreign languages too, though never exactly fluent, and always tried to pick up some of the language of any country she visited.

  Nearly always, the official trips would be combined with private visits, giving Nye an opportunity really to relax. It was what Jennie liked to see – Nye thousands of miles away from those who were making his job difficult, if not impossible, sitting basking in the sun in the company of congenial people. Going back to London was hard, and there were those who resented the holiday they had had. Socialists were not supposed to swan off to Italy and enjoy the good things in life when those others whom they professed to care about were suffering at home. Jennie (and Nye) had no patience with this point of view. What did they want Nye to do, collapse, have a breakdown? To go on doing his job he absolutely had to have these breaks. In making sure that he did, Jennie had become an excellent wife, scheming and organising and, if necessary, bullying her way to finding escape for herself and Nye.