Cleaning up the dog excrement squished through the letterbox was not a task Aneurin Bevan’s secretary had initially signed up to. But as the Welsh socialist increasingly found himself in the public eye, it was an odorous inconvenience that frequently had to be dealt with.
As the son of a miner, minister of health under Clement Attlee and architect of the NHS, “Nye” Bevan was a man of principle; he was booted out of the Labour party for refusing to abide by party lines he didn’t agree with. “If you were going to ask a small child what a politician should be,” considers playwright Tim Price, “Nye was it. He got into politics because he wanted to make a difference and he didn’t compromise until he’d made it.”
