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Mary Pope had found her younger half-brother a place at Hayward Boys' School in Crediton four miles southeast of Copplestone. Ernest made the daily journey by train with a pass which his guardian, George Pope, was able to secure as a railway-worker. Bevin entered the school on 2 September 1890.
By the end of his first year at Hayward's, Ernest had reached Standard IV and was entitled to claim his Labour Certificate. In fact, he stayed on at the school for almost another year and didn't leave until 25 March 1892. He found a job as a farm-boy at Chaffcombe, close to Copplestone, where he lived in and worked ten hours a day for a wage of sixpence a week (paid in a lump sum of six shillings and sixpence every three months). On the farm he learned to carry out a variety of jobs from stone picking to driving cattle and cutting up mangles and turnips for their fodder.
As a child who had been to school, he was pressed into service in the evenings reading out items of news and leading articles from the Bristol papers while the family sat round the fire in the farm-kitchen.
During the winter of 1892-3, Ernest moved to another farm, Beers, up the hill just outside Copplestone village on the road west to Okehampton. The farm is still farmed as it was then by the May family. Bevin had a room in an outbuilding overlooking the farmyard, reached by narrow winding stairs from the yard itself. William May paid him a shilling a week in addition to his board. They say in Copplestone that Ernest left a little over a year later after a quarrel with his employer, farmer May.
When a letter arrived in Copplestone from Ernest's brother Jack urging him to come to Bristol, he jumped at the chance and in the spring of 1894 - the year Gladstone
resigned for the last time, death duties were introduced, parish councils established and Blackpool Tower opened - Bevin set off for the big city.
After holding a series of jobs, Ernest Bevin found regular work as a van driver delivering ginger beer in Bristol. In 1905 he became the unpaid secretary of the Bristol Right to Work Committee, and in 1910 he formed a carters' branch of the Dockers' Union in that city. By the end of World War I he was functioning as the union's assistant general secretary. In 1921 he amalgamated several unions into the Transport and General Workers' Union, of which he was general secretary until 1940 and which became the largest trade union in the world. From 1925 he was a member of the general council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and in 1937 was elected its chairman. He was prominent in organizing the general strike of May 3-12, 1926, and was also instrumental in settling it.
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