70 years ago, Britain's world famous National Health Service began treating patients.

This leaflet is coming through your letterbox one day soon.

It tells you what the new National Health Service is.

Within a few years, the service was providing cradle to grave treatment

and care for everyone across the United Kingdom.

The first year has revealed what we all expected.

A vast amount of silent good work.

The man who built the NHS, a Niren or Nye Bevan, is one of my all-time political heroes.

He went down the mines at the age of 13 as was, of course, the standard in the South Wales values at that time.

What Nye saw as a child and a young adult inspired his vision of a service providing free healthcare for all.

I never had grandparents and that's the difference it made because my grandparents

had died between the ages of 30 and 50 years of age.

I'm Michael Sheen and you're listening to Nye Bevan, the man who made the NHS on the BBC World Service.

Wherever you go in a Niren Bevan's native Wales, his legacy looms large.

I became a qualified nurse and a midwife back in the 70s.

And I'm absolutely passionate about the NHS and I'm so proud of the Nye Bevan.

If it hadn't been for him, I suppose we probably wouldn't have had the NHS at all.

He did the service, particularly the lower paid people or even the people who were out of work.

He was very brave to stand up and say it was needed.

A Niren Bevan was born in Trediga.

In the South Wales Valleys, his mother was a Methodist, his father a Baptist,

and a big supporter of the Liberal Party.

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