Stafford Cripps Quotes

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." [On British Labour politician Stafford Cripps.]

Sir Stafford Cripps in 1947, speaking in the House of Commons during the debate to grant independence to India, described the alarming situation. ‘The Indian Army in India is not obeying the British officers… in these conditions if we have to rule India for a long time, we have to keep a permanent British army for a long time in a vast country of four hundred millions. We have no such army…’ His

was Halifax’s idea to accord with Sir Stafford Cripps’s

Sir Roy Fedden headed the British team sent to defeated Germany by Sir Stafford Cripps. Fedden, a slim, elegant, clean-shaven man whose photographs usually reveal an expression of focused determination, showed keen intelligence and a fascination with car and aircraft engines at an early age. Passionately fond of his wife Norah Crew, and somehow finding time between engine experiments to sail and fish, Fedden, 60 years of age in 1945, attacked his task with customary gusto. Fedden Years earlier, Erhardt Milch and Hermann Goering, to Fedden's astonishment, permitted him to tour no less than 17 of their secret aeronautics facilities when he visited Germany in 1937 and 1938. The Luftwaffe leaders hoped to overawe Fedden with the potential of German military aircraft design, and thus cause him to influence the British government to reach an accommodation with the Third Reich. Fedden, in fact, urged the English leadership to modernize their aircraft design to match the Germans' potential and was fired.               Realizing their error several years later, the government re-employed Fedden in 1944, and a mix of aeronautics engineers, scientists, and RAF officers comprised Fedden's team.

In the context of the Indian colony, Sir Stafford Cripps stated in the British Parliament on 5 March 1947 that Britain had only two alternatives:  either to (1)transfer power to Indians, or (2)considerably reinforce British troops in India to retain hold. The latter (option-2), he judged as impossible!{