Richard Stafford Cripps, 1889-1952
Stafford Cripps was a man who ‘believed firmly’ and ‘did faithfully.’ He was one of the few to whom the opportunity was given to match his great qualities with the needs of a great hour—a critical hour in the history of Britain. It was written of him when he died that he had been ‘for twenty years one of the most remarkable individual forces in British politics’* ; but in his public life his culminating achievement—that which has had a lasting effect on the social and economic history of Britain and that by which his character can best be judged—was his conduct in the years after October 1947 when he became the first man to combine the offices of Minister of Economic Affairs and Chancellor of the Exchequer. All he did then was based on his intense feeling of the public need and his simple conviction that the nation could overcome its economic problems only by improvement in productive effort combined with restraint in expenditure. He expressed this conviction firmly and courageously in his policy, but above all, and this was his great personal achievement, he was able to impress the same conviction on the Trade Union leaders. He did more than any man to get across to the Trades Union Congress the realities of the national economic problems and to make Trade Unionists realize that the only sure way to improve earnings and standards of living was to increase the productivity of labour. * The Times 22 April 1952.