The unlikely bureaucrat who became the father of a nation
The man who would become the first Chief Secretary of the Communist Party of the Commonwealth of Great Britain was, at the time of his birth, the son of a Conservative MP. Born Richard Stafford Cripps in 1889, he embarked on a lengthy intellectual and political journey that began with his father’s defection to the Labour Party culminated in his move thoroughly leftwards in the late 1920s.
The Lansbury-era Labour Party was no place for a man of the true left, however, and Cripps became a leading figure in the ever-expanding ILP. A frequent backbench critic of the increasingly pacifistic government, he became an unlikely ally of Winston Churchill, who was grateful to find he was not the only sane man left in Parliament.
When the Eden government collapsed in February 1940, Cripps made an impassioned speech calling for Churchill to be sent for by the King. In return, Churchill made him Minister of Information. Thanks to security protocols making it impossible for Churchill to make a live broadcast, it fell to Cripps to inform the nation via radio that the British Expeditionary Corps had been annihilated at Calais.
Realising that a serious rapprochement with the USSR was the only hope of defeating Hitler, Churchill made Cripps the ambassador to the Kremlin in September 1940. He arrived in the Soviet Union only days before the German invasion of Britain. Immediately upon learning that the Prime Minister was dead, Cripps requested an audience with Stalin himself. This was denied, but the lower-level apparatchiks were just as capable of informing Cripps that he would not receive any support while ‘the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union are in alignment with the people of Germany’.
Come May 1941, Cripps’ luck changed overnight - along with the luck of many unfortunate Soviet conscripts on the German border. Soon, Cripps had formed the Free British Government (FBG), based in Moscow, and begun regular radio broadcasts critical of the Lloyd George regime. To many, this vaguely aristocratic bureaucrat with a larger-than-life charisma became the unlikely figurehead of British resistance. Ian Fleming (famous to a generation of post-war boys as the inspiration for the dashing and witty resistance hero Jack Flame, scourge of Von Ribbentrop) recalled listening to Cripps’ broadcasts with his comrades before going out to wreak havoc with dynamite, farmers’ shotguns and pipe-guns (the crude submachine gun design that could be assembled out of essentially anything).
The Free British Government was made up initially of Cripps and his diplomatic staff. Soon, however, the first of the ‘Arctic Stowaways’ - men fleeing Nazi persecution for their political beliefs - arrived. Clement Attlee, James Maxton and Harry Pollitt had not always seen eye to eye before the war. But now, together with Cripps, they were able to co-operate for the common good.
Help from Moscow’s rulers, however, was not forthcoming. This was understandable, as by the autumn of 1941 it looked as though the city would fall by Christmas, and with it, the Soviet war effort. As more and more Arctic Stowaways trickled in, Cripps realised there was something he and the FBG could do to help.
The Cooper-Macmillan regime in Ottawa had gained a deal of legitimacy through the young Queen Elizabeth’s ‘decision’ to reside in Canada, but President Roosevelt sent shockwaves through the ‘British establishment’ when he declined to formally recognise either the Protectorate, Ottawa or Moscow as the legitimate government of Britain. Sensing an opening, Cripps began to lobby Roosevelt and British escapees in Canada - if they were able to get across the border into the US, it would be theoretically possible for civilian aircraft to fly them to the Russian Far East.
So began the great journey of what would become the British Shock Army.
The first ‘Red British’ units (as they were affectionately and disparagingly known by Moscow and Ottawa respectively) became operational in the suburbs of Moscow in January 1942. Their war would take them from the Russian capital to the streets of Whitehall, via Kharkov, Minsk, Prague, Vienna and Paris. Their eventual commander, Marshal Slim, decamped from India with the thousands of men he could persuade to embark on the journey that would liberate their homeland - or keep it from harm, in the case of the ethnically Indian troops. So it was that a capital that fell when defended by men from the Home Counties was liberated by men from Newcastle, Toronto and Calcutta.
Cripps was a skilled political operator, and was able to make British liberation a military priority ‘as soon as it was viable’, after talks with the Soviet politburo. Hours after the celebrations began on Liberation Day, Cripps flew to Croydon Airport (or what was left of it) and held up the red flag.
“I have in my hand a piece of cloth,” he said as he descended the steps from the aircraft, “bearing upon it the blood of the workers and soldiers who have slaved for this day. We will remember them - and from the ashes of Nazism, we will build socialism in their name!”
The ‘Ottawa Government’ was, by this point, a tired irrelevance, and offered loud protests to which no-one paid attention when Cripps called to order the first meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Commonwealth of Great Britain (the continued use of the Protectorate-era name was useful for legal, treaty reasons as well as being ideologically acceptable). Cripps, as Chief Secretary, began the work of government from Britain House, the new name for the rebuilt Senate House, formerly the centre of administration for the University of London. With Parliament damaged by both bombs and ideological taint (it would reopen as a museum in 1949) and Downing Street out of the question, Cripps made his home in the so-called ‘British Kremlin’.
A tireless worker and phenomenally skilled administrator, Cripps regularly went without sleep for days at a time as the country was rebuilt. The Friendship Conference of 1948 saw him at his best, shaking hands with Larkin outside the GPO in Dublin. The enforced ‘East Prussia’ treatment of Ulster, with Soviet bayonets forcing Unionists onto boats bound for Scotland, was the only controversy of the period of Soviet Occupation. Historians nevertheless hang it around Cripps’ neck to this day, and perhaps they are right to do so.
On 1 January 1949, Cripps, flanked by Attlee, Slim, Pollitt, Dutt, Latham and many others, stood on the platform outside Britain House as the occupation force formally withdrew and the CGB was born. As the final tank drove out of sight, Cripps coughed into his handkerchief. Attlee would later record in an interview that ‘the flecks of blood I saw then were like daggers in my heart.’
But Cripps still had seventeen months of life in him. He probably would have lived longer if he had not refused to retire. But there was still so much to do. The railway network (particularly in the southeast) was dilapidated and wrecked. Millions of Britons lacked proper homes. Education, a gross parody under Lloyd George, needed outright revolution in light of the brave new world.
Cripps died in his sleep on 1 May 1951. At the May Day parade, his death was announced to tearful crowds and the nation mourned for a week. An unlikely bureaucrat had become an impossible hero - and as Britons stared into the 1950s, a decade of uncertainty stared back. It was, however, tempered by the new European era of brotherhood. From Moscow to Connemara, Narvik to Marseilles, the states of Europe were united - and Britain stood proudly among them.
