// BBC HEALTH NEWS — SALUTE
The debating club that helped shape NHS architect Aneurin Bevan's drive for power
Aneurin Bevan remained an MP until he died of cancer in 1960
In the winter of 1921, a group of men gathered in a café in a small working class town.
Almost all were colliers used to the hard life hacking coal from the rich seams of the south Wales valleys - the region that had powered the industrial revolution and underpinned the growth and wealth of the global British Empire.
But few of the benefits of that wealth had trickled down to the people who produced it.
These men met in Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, to debate how could they change that.
This was the launch of the Query Club, a semi-secret society that began examining socialist ideas and ended as a force which changed their town – and later, through their ideas, the whole country.
One of those young debaters was Aneurin Bevan, the man who would go on to found the NHS and revolutionise housing for ordinary people when he became minister for health and housing two decades later.
It was revealed recently that MI5 followed him from around this time for 20 years, considering Bevan a firebrand left-winger linked to prominent communists.
The Query Club members in the 1920s, with Aneurin Bevan in the back row, second from right
In the 1920s, Tredegar was a town like many in south Wales.