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From the hedgerows of Devon to the Foreign Office
The earliest known photograph of Ernest Bevin shows him as a little boy of three wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and sailor suit at a Sunday-school treat in 1884. He was born in Winsford, Somerset, on 7 March 1881. His mother, born Diana Tudball, had married William Bevin in 1864 but from 1877 Diana described herself in various documents as a widow. Who Ernest's father was remains unknown: when his mother registered his birth she left the father's name blank and this is confirmed by the baptismal register in Winsford Church.
Diana Bevin, or Mercy Bevin as she was commonly known, a staunch Nonconformist, sent her children to the church school in Winsford, and on Sundays to the Wesleyan Sunday School with his two elder brothers. On 1 May 1889, Mercy died at the age of forty-eight, with her mother and children at her bedside. Ernest was eight but never forgot his mother and the love she showed him. After the funeral, Ernest returned to his mother's cottage where for the last time Diana Bevin's seven children met as a family. The home was broken up, the furniture sold, and Ernest's older half-sister, Mary, and her husband George Pope, a railwayman, offered to take him into their home at Morchard Bishop. Ernest Bevin arrived in Devon in the early summer of 1889.
For a few months in the summer of 1889, Ernest attended Morchard Bishop Church School, and then in October George Pope and his wife moved to the neighbouring village of Copplestone. The house, then known as Tiddly-Winks but since renamed Lee Mount, was later occupied by my own great uncle, Bill Steer, Copplestone postman in the 1940s and 50s. The cottage is built above the cutting through which runs the railway line from Exeter to Barnstaple. It stood in the parish of Down St Mary until Copplestone became a civil parish in 1992.
Years after Bevin left Copplestone, an earlier postman remembered 'on my rounds early on a winter's morning seeing that young boy getting water for the house or cleaning potatoes on the shute. There were two little streams which came down across a steep field opposite the house and broke through the hedge to the roadside. They didn't have pumps then. The water was always icy cold and I'd see the boy getting water and his hands all covered with broken chilblains'.
A year before Ernest Bevin arrived in Copplestone, they had opened Ebenezer Chapel on the other side of the railway cutting half a mile to the south. Ernest went to the chapel every Sunday. On weekday mornings he walked two miles down the valley through the deep lanes to Colebrooke, where a few houses were clustered around the 14th-15th century church on a hillside above Coleford. Ernest attended Colebrooke's Board School which had been opened in 1874 to serve the surrounding district. The boy spent less than a year there and an old log-book briefly records: 'August 8, 1890, E.Bevin has left.'
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