Death of a Paradox

One day in the 19303, the owner of a big Welsh coal company in Cardiff dropped in at the office of Britain's highest-paid corporation lawyer, to pay him for winning a big case for the company. The fee was 2,000 guineas ($10,000). Unblinkingly, the capitalist started to write a check, but the lawyer interrupted. "Don't bother to make it out to me," said Sir Stafford Cripps, "just make it payable to the Cardiff Labor Party."

Icy Hero. In Stafford Cripps, paradox was at home. He was a millionaire descended from a long line of rich country squires, but he was born with a silver Fabian slogan in his mouth. His aunt & uncle were Fabianism itself--Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He believed first in God ("Frame our judgments . . . upon the basis of what we most truly and honestly believe to be God's will"). Second, he believed in Socialism.

The Laborites who came up from the union ranks, like Ernest Bevin, or through local politics, like Clement Attlee, often feared and fought him; once they exiled him from the party for six years because the well-born intellectual continually leaned further left than his working-class colleagues. But they probably would never have carried their party to power without the tall (6 ft.), ascetic intellectual from the Cotswolds who ate nothing but nuts, raw fruits and vegetables (because of colitis picked up when he was an ambulance driver in World War I), preached from the pulpits of his beloved Anglican Church, and stoked the fires of British Socialism with a passion like dry ice.

"There, but for the grace of God," Churchill once grumbled after Cripps, "goes God." But during World War II Churchill found him indispensable, swallowed his irritation over Cripps's unshakable confidence that he knew what was right for everyone. Said Churchill after Socialism came to power: "It is a relief to know there is at least one first-class mind brooding in chilly solitude upon our affairs."

Mr. Austerity. By then, Stafford Cripps was in a way the most powerful man in Britain. As Chancellor of the Exchequer and Minister for Economic Affairs, he ruled the cupboard, stomach and pocketbook of every Briton. Prim and trim, he peered coldly through half-moon glasses, wore a smile that looked like the result of a bite from a persimmon, seemed always to be telling fuel-short Britons to take cold baths (as he had done every day for years). He was Mr. Austerity. Actually, Stafford Cripps was affable, friendly, generous. Britons knew he was doing a grim job that had to be done. He checked inflation, cut back the dollar expenditures of Britain and her dominions, devalued the pound, launched an economic life-saving program which, though it has not yet succeeded, is still basically the one by which Britain is hoping to survive.

He was talked of as a future Prime Minister. But in years of trying to keep up with a mind that never tired, Stafford Cripps's frail body broke. He came down with tuberculosis of the spine and another ailment that his doctors described only as "rare and dangerous." In 1950 he retired to a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps. There, racked with pain, he waited, cool as always, for death. Last week, three days before Stafford Cripps's 63rd birthday, it came.

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