Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  She felt very strongly, and never more than during this period when he was Minister of Health and Housing, that no one really understood Nye as she did. There were aspects of his character hidden from all but her. He had a sensitive side rarely seen – nobody realised, she felt, how deeply Nye could feel things, how he could be moved to tears and needed so much comfort. She gave as an example his reaction to the death of a friend, when he took the glass he had toasted him with and threw it into the fire they were sitting beside. His grief was open and awful, and she thought his gesture, which would have seemed melodramatic and false in another man, was deeply moving in Nye. People knew he was sensuous, that he loved life, but they were not so aware of his more depressive side – they didn’t see him low and full of doubt and anxiety as she did, nor did he want them to. She and Nye, she said, had ‘the most private relationship any man or woman could have’8 and she was proud of it. Because of the confidence she had in this being so, she simply wasn’t interested in the image other people had of her, or the gossip that circulated to the effect that her marriage was not all it seemed. She herself, by 1945, had stopped having those ‘passing affairs’ she had been so tempted by (or so she said): ‘the days were over when he could not be sure of me.’9 If they were not over for Nye, she didn’t think it mattered. Whatever else she was, Jennie was not a jealous wife.

  Whether Nye was jealous is more debatable. He didn’t like his wife flaunting her sexuality (as he felt she did when she wore dresses showing too much cleavage) and though he believed her when, well into their marriage, she said there was nothing in various friendships she had with certain men, she realised he couldn’t help exercising that ‘tom-cat protectiveness’ which slightly annoyed her. By 1945 she was not sleeping around any more, but she reserved the right to do so if she wished, in keeping with her belief that sexual encounters meant nothing except a bit of momentary pleasure. There were rumours constantly afloat about both her and Nye, but she ignored them. If Nye was having sex with someone else, good luck to him but she didn’t need to know about it. Her tolerance of what other wives might consider a fatal weakness was generous, though it was perhaps never seriously put to the test – not all the attentions of the tabloid press ever unearthed any affairs of Nye’s after his marriage, which is not to say he didn’t have any, but which does support Jennie’s view that if he did no other woman was ever important to him. That was always her point: their marriage, their partnership, was much more than sex. Why wives fussed so much over sexual fidelity Jennie could never understand.

  There were far more important matters to worry about, especially with another General Election approaching in 1950. For two years before that Nye had been on the defensive (over the battle to delay the bringing in of NHS charges) and now he was on the attack over the question of nationalising steel. The proposal to do so had been included in Labour’s programme before the 1945 election but it had not been implemented. The genuine explanation was that there had been far too many other plans to put into operation, but nevertheless Nye (and Jennie) saw nationalisation of steel as the real indication that their party was serious about truly socialist measures. He threatened to resign in 1947 if a Nationalisation Bill was not prepared for the next session. He’d threatened to resign before, of course, and had been supported, even urged to do so, by Jennie; she loved seeing him as a rebel who stood up for his principles. In fact, yet again he did not resign, accepting a compromise in the form of another postponement. But the general opinion was that Nye was getting too big for his boots and challenging Attlee’s leadership. Jennie longed for him to do so, but Nye himself was not interested in what he called ‘palace revolutions’. He went on fighting his corner, trying to persuade the rest of the Cabinet to agree with him rather than try to get what he wanted by forming some kind of splinter group within the party. Steel, in the end, was won: a Nationalisation Bill was passed in the 1948–9 parliament.

  Then came the 1950 General Election. Nye had wanted it earlier, so that the socialist programme could receive the endorsement it needed from the country and be carried on with a new momentum. He was confident, as were all his colleagues, that Labour would be returned with a healthy majority. He was wrong. He and Jennie were both re-elected, but the overall Labour majority was a shockingly small six seats. Nye was blamed by many members of his own party for the poor result, to Jennie’s fury. The argument was that he had scared the middle classes with his speeches denigrating the Tories, especially his famous declaration in Manchester that they were ‘lower than vermin’. Jennie now had to support a husband who was not only loathed by the opposition and used by them as a bogeyman to frighten the electorate, but who was seen as dangerous by his own party. Nobody agreed with his reading the result as showing that the Labour Party had not gone far enough in its promise of socialist measures – on the contrary, his colleagues believed the electorate had been scared off. The nationalisation of steel had gone too far to cancel, but once that was through, the government simply marked time.

  This maddened Nye – rightly, in Jennie’s opinion. She didn’t attempt to soothe or placate him when he came home but, on the contrary, wanted to see his restlessness and sense of frustration result in his seizing the opportunity to challenge Attlee’s by now lack-lustre leadership. Nye would have none of it, but he did want promotion within the Cabinet. The post he wanted was Foreign Secretary, but he was offered Minister of Labour: a disappointment, but he was prepared to accept if he could be assured that he would be involved in deciding economic policy. Attlee duly promised and he became Minister of Labour. He was not exactly happy about this, and once he’d begun his new job even less so since the prime function of his department seemed to be imposing wage restraint, a negative sort of policy alien to Nye’s entire way of thinking. Furthermore, the old battle over health charges was starting again with Gaitskell as Chancellor of the Exchequer insisting the time had come to bring the previously agreed charges in. This made Nye furious. He disliked Gaitskell and despised him – he was ‘nothing, nothing, nothing’. Jennie, always a good hater, did not restrain him or to try to make him see that far from being ‘nothing’ Gaitskell was as dedicated to the fight against inequality as he was but wished to go about it in a different way. She reported that Nye came home ‘white with fury’ after his arguments in Cabinet with Gaitskell but this rage of his did not frighten her. She thought it a good sign, a sign that at last her husband was working himself up to push himself forward and no longer be hampered by misguided notions of party loyalty. When he walked out of a dinner where Gaitskell was present, loudly proclaiming he would not sit down with a man ‘whose aim was to destroy the NHS’, Jennie loved it. This time, she was sure that if Gaitskell did indeed finally impose NHS charges, Nye would resign.

  The running drama came to a head on Budget Day, 10 April 1951. Nye and Jennie stood together behind the Speaker’s chair, ready for a quick exit. The tension was palpable. For days before, people had been asking Jennie to stop Nye resigning, an action seen as incredibly damaging for an insecure government. Her response had been to turn on them with contempt – did they not realise that her husband was the only one brave enough to defend the socialist principles which their party was supposed to be founded on? To George Thomas, for example, she had shouted, ‘You yellow-livered cur … get away from me!’10 Nye was going to be a hero and her sole purpose she saw as stiffening his resolution at the crucial moment. It had now come. The moment Gaitskell announced the long-deferred charges, the very charges Nye had agreed might have to be made but which he had been confident never would be imposed, she and Nye left the chamber, Jennie the one who called out ‘Shame!’ But it took two weeks for Nye actually to resign, though the decision had been made then and there. A note survives from his wife urging him to do it at once and not to wait, as he had apparently considered, until after the party meeting. Meanwhile, others tried to effect a compromise yet again, with Gaitskell willing to accept that the new charges need not be permanent, which would give Nye
a loophole, a way of saving face. Nye didn’t want one and Jennie certainly didn’t want him to back down. There is no doubt at all that those close to them were right to say his wife was Nye’s ‘dark angel’.

  On 23 April, Nye finally made his resignation speech in the Commons. Not a good speech, it was full of an all too obvious bitterness. Only Jennie was excited and optimistic: her husband would now come into his own.

  IV

  THERE WERE MANY people, on both sides of the House, who thought Nye Bevan’s resignation amounted to a political tragedy. What would he do now? What would the Labour Party do without him as a minister? What would they do about him wreaking havoc (which is what everyone thought he would cause) on the back-benches? His future role was indistinct and the omens for his success ominous.

  For Jennie, the test was extreme. Since first she had met Nye in 1929 he had always been the rising star, clearly destined for great things. Their marriage in 1934 made her the wife of a most successful husband; now, seventeen years later, she was suddenly the wife of a man who was generally reckoned to have ruined his own career, for the moment at least. He was deeply troubled, an unhappy man, embittered and anxious, and he needed all the reassurance she could give him that he had done the right thing. Encouraging him, urging him on when he was a powerful minister was one thing, but supporting him now that he was displaced, was quite another. And Jennie knew that she was blamed for what others thought was Nye’s downfall – she had tipped him over the edge and now it was her job to pull him back up. She rose to this challenge superbly, but it was not easy. To be with a man endlessly tormented by his own political situation was exhausting – the hours and hours of self-analysis, the endless going over of motives, the recriminations – all drained her energies and left her feeling whipped herself.

  What made things worse was that her father was dying. He and her mother were still with them in Cliveden Place, with Nye very much part of their daily lives. Even now, when he was in such difficulties, it was Nye’s practice to go straight down to see his father-in-law in his sitting-room (a bed had been put in it for him once he became too weak to climb any stairs). Nye talked to him while Jennie absented herself, glad to do so. The strain of her father’s terminal illness, and her mother’s distress at his approaching death, put her into such a state of agitation that she could hardly cope with giving the kind of support needed. Instead, Nye provided it, able to talk to her father as she could not, steadily, without becoming engulfed in grief. And in the background, to increase the stress still further, was the ever-present problem of her brother Tommy whom she had tried to banish from her life, but who lurked there, still threatening scandal. Everything seemed to be on top of her and all the time she was expected to fulfil her function as MP for Cannock and bolster her husband’s confidence. It was in such circumstances, she reflected in a note she made, that women gave up their careers – husband and home had to come first in any serious clash. She pretended to address Nye in this note (though he never saw it) telling him that for all her strongly held, lifelong views on the right of women to truly independent careers she had come to the conclusion that ‘it is the woman’s part to give way’ if both husband and wife are in a position of ‘excessive strain’.1

  In fact, she did not give way in the sense of giving up her own career, but she certainly saw herself as consciously giving way so far as furthering her own ambitions went. In 1952, the year after Nye’s resignation and when her father had just died, she would have liked to stand for the National Executive Committee’s (NEC) constituency section, but she didn’t. If she had stood, she thought she would have had a good chance of being elected, and had she been elected she saw this as robbing Nye of a male ally he needed. It was for her an act of personal sacrifice and it was not made without resentment. She felt rebellious, hating what she saw as the necessity of keeping herself in the background. Nye was still the best hope for keeping the Labour movement truly socialist and she must do everything she could to get him once more into a position of power. At home, there had to be harmony and there was no place for her own ambition – any grumbles of discontent with her lot must be suppressed.

  Jennie was not, of course, good at suppression. Storming and raging were her forte, and the cost to her of trying almost to match her own mother in serenity was high, so high that she welcomed any temporary separation from Nye. His developing taste for foreign travel, a taste both of them had always had, but which had not been greatly indulged before the 1950s, suited her. She encouraged him to go without her to India, Burma and Pakistan in the spring of 1953 and felt immediately, and not at all guiltily, relieved to be without him. She wrote that she looked forward (when she knew he was going) to ‘a few quiet weeks … in which I could relax at home and see to … things … neglected during the political storms’.2 These ‘things’ were not those that other wives might consider to have been neglected – Jennie didn’t mean she was going to make new curtains or carry out any other domestic task. Her mother did all that. It was more the satisfaction of having no need to worry about Nye and therefore able to put herself first. This didn’t take any dramatic form, it just meant allowing the pressure she had been under to lift. She had time to think and take stock and look to the future in a way that had nothing to do with what Nye was going to do politically. She saw one thing clearly: they both needed to get away from London. The decision in 1945 to give up Lane End Cottage had been made for what were then very good reasons, but now, though they were both still MPs and those reasons were theoretically as strong as ever, since they needed to be near the House, other more urgent ones seemed more valid. Nye was restless and disillusioned, and she was exhausted and often depressed: they both needed escape and diversion, something to distract them from the tensions of all the political in-fighting. The answer, she decided, was to move back into the country.

  Nye had always wanted to have a home in the Welsh mountains, but wherever they went, it would have to be within tolerably easy reach of Central London, just as Lane End had been. Jennie asked various friends to keep a look-out for a suitably modest country property and one of them came up with the suggestion of a farm, Asheridge, 3 miles (4.8 km) from Chesham in the Chilterns. A farm was the last thing Jennie had in mind, especially one with 50 acres (20 hectares) and numerous buildings, but it was going cheap, £9,000 for the lot, and was within the financial limits she had in mind. Thinking it would be a day out anyway, she took Nye to see it at the first opportunity and he fell in love with it, or rather with the possibilities it offered, at once. They bought it.

  Nye was delighted at the prospect of becoming a farmer, promptly acquiring a small Jersey herd to graze the fifty acres and impatient to add pigs and poultry. The farmhouse was Jennie’s problem, but one she relished – it was a return to the kind of restoration and renovation she had supervised and enjoyed at Lane End. She and her mother saw to the transformation while Nye went off again, to China and Japan this time (as a member of a NEC delegation), and when he returned he hurled himself with the sort of enthusiasm he hadn’t shown for a long time into being a farmer. The exercise and fresh air were good for him and Jennie saw the psychological benefits clearly – Nye was back to being optimistic again, ready to consider standing for the party treasurership.

  But just as Jennie was hoping things were taking a turn for the better, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The shock was profound, so much so that when told the news by the doctor, she writes in her memoir that she ‘screamed hysterically’, and Nye had the greatest difficulty in calming her down. Her grandmothr had died of cancer and Jennie knew her mother would remember the agony of that death. She was determined to protect her from knowing what was wrong and when Nye had soothed her sufficiently, she went in to her mother, who was in bed, under the impression she had flu, and told her not that she had advanced cancer but that she had a treatable abscess. She and Nye had agreed that this was the best solution. Her mother would not want them to be worried. Her whole life had been spent protec
ting her daughter from worry and now Jennie saw it as her responsibility to do the same for her mother. So she acted as though her mother’s illness really was fairly trivial and Nye went along with the pretence. But this kind of dissimulation went entirely against Jennie’s nature – being forthright was her way, and to have to lie and pretend and be convincing, while so very distressed, exhausted her when she was already worn out emotionally with supporting Nye.

  There was also the matter of what would happen to her comfortable household, now that her mother would not be up to running it. They had always had extra help – cleaning ladies, kitchen help, and people to do the shopping – but Ma Lee had supervised and organised them all. Now there would have to be a proper housekeeper, and since her mother was not to know how ill she was, this person must pretend she was only helping and be careful not to seem to take over. The whole business was a nightmare and Jennie feared her smoothly functioning domestic life, so essential for Nye’s well-being, would disintegrate. Inevitably, it did, though never quite as disastrously as she had envisaged, largely thanks to Nye himself. Jennie didn’t suddenly turn to helping in the kitchen or taking over the provisioning, but Nye did. It was he who stood beside the daily help on occasions and provided the extra pair of hands needed to wash up, and he did it cheerfully, chatting easily with the different women employed in a way his wife could never manage. Jennie paid full tribute to his assistance, but she worried about what this extra strain was doing to his health. Home should be for resting and now, because of her mother’s illness, it wasn’t.

  It didn’t help that for much of the time Nye and herself were living in yet another place, and a comfortless one. Since neither she nor Nye could stand living in hotels, Jennie had rented what she herself described as ‘an appallingly furnished two-roomed flat that did not even have a bath’3 in Gosfield Street (behind Broadcasting House), where they could sleep after late-night sittings in the Commons. It represented, she wrote, ‘everything he loathed’ – it was dingy, ugly, cramped, dark and altogether more than his fastidious and aesthetically sophisticated nature could tolerate, but tolerate it he had to. She maintained she had been unable to find anywhere else near enough to Westminster and within their means. Tired and distracted, she had no energy to try to beautify the place or at least to buy some different furniture (which, since the flat was rented, she didn’t want to do anyway). But she felt considerable guilt about Gosfield Street, because she always acknowledged that home-making was part of her role. Asheridge was their real home but the time spent in London meant Gosfield Street should also have offered some homely comforts and it didn’t.