1881–1951 · British trade unionist, wartime Minister of Labour & post-war Foreign Secretary
The seventh child of Diana Bevin — a Somerset domestic servant and village midwife who called herself a widow after her husband walked out four years before Ernest was born — Bevin never knew who his father was. He left school at eleven, drove a lorry in Bristol, and built the Transport and General Workers’ Union into Britain’s most powerful labour organisation, serving as its General Secretary from 1922. Churchill made him Minister of Labour in 1940; Attlee made him Foreign Secretary in 1945. He is the figure most often named as the origin of the phrase ‘poverty of aspiration’ — a coinage New Labour revived in the 2000s — though no primary source for these exact words has ever been produced, and the credit may be as loose as the Adam Smith one it was meant to correct.