Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour minister of health and housing between 1945 and 1951, was responsible for the creation of the British National Health Service. Throughout his life he fought to make Britain an independent democratic socialist nation.

Aneurin Bevan, born in 1897 in Tredegar, Wales, grew up steeped in the traditions of Welsh miners' radicalism: self-help organizations, religious dissent, trade unionism, and socialism. Unprecedented industrial unrest marked Bevan's youth. Like others of his class, his formal education ended at age 14, when he started to work in the mines. He soon became an activist and, initially, a supporter of syndicalism. An opponent of World War I, he avoided service and immersed himself in socialist and labor politics, winning a miners' scholarship to the radical Central Labour College in London.

In 1920 Bevan returned to Tredegar and to intermittent unemployment. He entered politics in 1922 when he was elected to the Tredegar Urban District Council...