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Two years after he married Isobel Swithinbank, granddaughter of the founder of Eno Fruit Salts Co., Sir Stafford forsook science for the bar, eventually built up a practice as a corporation lawyer which netted him as much as $150,000 a year. In World War I he drove a Red Cross ambulance in France, there contracted colitis, which caused him to become a vegetarian. (He sticks to his diet religiously, never drinks, but smokes his pipe and numerous long black cigars daily.) After eleven months in Flanders the Government recalled him to help build and run a mammoth explosives factory.
Stafford Cripps learned politics from his father, whom he often accompanied on speaking tours, but he did not run for Parliament until 1928. Then 39, he stood unsuccessfully as a Labor candidate for West Woolwich. In 1930, five days after he was knighted, Sir Stafford was appointed Solicitor General in the Labor Government, though he was not yet an M.P. By this time he had become an ardent pacifist (his son* is now a conscientious objector), and the more he studied "domestic ills" the more he became convinced that Socialism was their solution. Britain, however, was not fully aware of his conversion. Stanley Baldwin tipped him as a "future Conservative Prime Minister."
But from the early 1930s onward, Sir Stafford left no one in doubt as to where he stood. He refused Ramsay Macdonald's offer to serve in the National Government, because he would have no truck with the Conservatives. He formed a Socialist League of extreme leftists within the Labor Party, with a program to end the power of the House of Lords. Said he: "If need be, the Constitution as we know it must go by the board." He even committed the unforgivable sin of attacking the Crown: "No doubt we [Socialists] shall have to overcome opposition from Buckingham Palace. . . ."
In 1939 he organized a Popular Front of Liberals. Laborites and Communists to try to bring down the Chamberlain Government. For this he was ousted from the Labor Party. On the outbreak of war Sir Stafford offered his services to the Government. He was ignored. The next thing Britain knew, he was on a trip around the world, calling on Molotov, Nehru and Roosevelt. Some said that he was on a secret mission for the Chamberlain Government. Others believe that the trip was arranged by the Churchill group. In any case, soon after Churchill became Prime Minister, he appointed Sir Stafford Ambassador to Moscow.
Sir Stafford has annoyed a good many people?some by his politics, others by his personality. In 1936, Canadian-born, Conservative M.P. Beverley Baxter, then a top Fleet Street journalist, wrote: "In considering the case of Sir Stafford Cripps let me make a frank confession. If we ever are so politically bankrupt that we must choose between Communism and Fascism, I am for Fascism. . . . Sir Stafford Cripps, that political agent provocateur . . . would plunge our people into misery, bloodshed and chaos, and would inevitably bring into existence a dictatorship that would . . . end all personal liberty. . . ."