Page 16 - Great Elizabethans

What do you know about the National Health Service? If you were born in Britain, you were probably born in a NHS hospital, with NHS midwives and doctors looking after you. When you have injections or visit a surgery if you’re ill, that’s usually part of the NHS too. Unlike in many other countries, you and your family don’t have to pay to see a doctor. And this is thanks to Aneurin Bevan, the Welsh politician who set up the NHS after the end of the Second World War.
LIFE IN THE VALLEYS
Aneurin, often called Nye for short, was born in
1897 in Tredegar, a mining town in South Wales. His
father was a miner and his mother was the daughter of
a blacksmith. Together, they had 10 children (Nye was the
sixth), but five of them didn’t live long enough to grow up. There
were strikes and unrest during his childhood, and poor people were
often treated badly by the wealthy owners of mines and other businesses. Nye felt this injustice strongly.
Aneurin had a terrible stutter as a child, and his cruel headmaster hated him,
but he was determined to overcome both of these things. He educated himself by reading books from
his local library and found that he could get the better of his stutter by shouting at the top of his voice! (He became well known
later on for his booming speeches.) He also recited poetry he’d learned by heart on the hills above Tredegar.
At 13, Nye left school and started work in the mine with his father and brother, but he didn’t stop learning – he carried
on taking out books from the library and filling his mind with new knowledge. In 1925, his father died from lung disease – something that often killed miners, who had to breathe in coal dust and harmful gases as they worked. Nye had grown
up surrounded by people whose harsh lives meant they were often ill. But in Tredegar, Nye had seen something else too. Many of the miners paid a small amount of their salary – 3 pence from every pound – into a fund so
that they and their families could see a doctor when they needed to. In other places, if you couldn’t pay, you often couldn’t see a doctor at all and many people died because they couldn’t afford treatment.