Town in Blaenau Gwent, Wales
Tredegar
The town where Aneurin Bevan grew up, and where a miners' health scheme became the model for the NHS, was built around an ironworks that took its name from a stately home elsewhere.
Key information
- County
- Blaenau Gwent
- Nation
- Wales
- Known for
- Aneurin Bevan, the Medical Aid Society that inspired the NHS, and the Tredegar Iron Company
- What locals are called
- Tredegarians
- Famous people
- Aneurin Bevan
About Tredegar
The town that borrowed a stately name
Tredegar began as an ironworks, not a village. In 1800 a group of ironmasters, including Samuel Homfray, set up the Tredegar Iron Company in the upper Sirhowy valley, and a town grew up around it almost overnight. The name came from elsewhere. It was borrowed from Tredegar House near Newport, the seat of the Morgan family, who owned the land. The Morgans were later made Lords Tredegar, which is why a mining town in the hills shares its name with a grand country house on the coast. Men came from across Wales and beyond to work the furnaces and, later, the coal pits. The town swelled with terraces climbing the valley sides, chapels on nearly every corner and a hard, close-knit community that still shapes the place.
The boy from Charles Street who built the NHS
Aneurin Bevan was born in Tredegar on 15 November 1897, one of a miner's large family. He left school at thirteen and went down the pit, and he spent hours in the town's Workmen's Institute library, reading everything he could get his hands on. He became a union activist, then a local councillor, and in 1929 the MP for Ebbw Vale. In 1945 he became Minister of Health in Clement Attlee's government, and on 5 July 1948 the National Health Service came into being under his watch. He never forgot where it began. Bevan always pointed to the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, which he knew first-hand from his youth, as a model for what the nation could do.
A health service before there was a Health Service
In Tredegar, workers paid a small amount from their wages into a shared fund. In return, everyone in the family could see a doctor, get medicines and receive hospital care without worrying about the bill. The Tredegar Workmen's Medical Aid Society, set up in the 1890s, was run by the members themselves, who hired doctors and ran the scheme through elected committees. Bevan served on its committee as a young man. The idea of pooling risk so that nobody faced illness alone was not invented in Tredegar, but the town gave it a working model that a future health minister understood from the inside.
The Circle, the clock and the big house in the park
The centre of Tredegar is the Circle, a broad round open space with a Victorian clock at its heart. It is the town's meeting place and has been for generations. A short walk away is Bedwellty House, a Georgian mansion built for the ironworks' management in the early nineteenth century. Its grounds became Bedwellty Park, opened to the public in the early 1900s. The park has formal gardens, a bandstand and plenty of mature trees, and it is where the town goes to walk, picnic and listen to brass bands. The former Tredegar Workmen's Hall and Institute, funded by local workers, housed the library Bevan used. The building has since been demolished.
Memorials on the mountain
On the mountain above the town, near Waun-y-Pound, stands a memorial to Aneurin Bevan. It was unveiled in 1972 by Michael Foot, Bevan's friend, biographer and fellow Labour politician, and marks a spot where Bevan loved to walk. The hills around Tredegar are open moorland and old tramroad routes, a good contrast to the dense streets below. The Sirhowy Tramroad, opened in the early 1800s, once carried iron and coal from Tredegar down to Newport and the sea. Today Tredegar is a town defined by its post-industrial hillsides, its strong political memory and a proud sense that it gave something to the whole country.