Richard Stafford Cripps was born in 1889 into a solidly uppermiddle- class family. His father, later given a peerage by Asquith, was a lawyer, his mother one of the famous Potter sisters, themselves the daughters of a prosperous Manchester merchant. Another of the sisters, Beatrice, married to Sydney Webb, provided a link with politics, but until Cripps's father accepted office in Mac-Donald's first Labour Government the environment which Cripps himself knew best was comfortably and undemandingly conservative. The deepest shadow on an otherwise happy childhood was the death of his mother when he was five years old.

Sent to Winchester, he proved a brilliant scholar with an unexpected aptitude for chemistry, and won the first scholarship ever offered in the subject at New College, Oxford. His examination papers were so outstanding that they were sent to Sir William Ramsey at University College, London, with the result that Cripps was invited to study and work with him. At 22, being already the inventor of a device for measuring the density of liquids and gases, he became the youngest student ever to read a paper, of which he was co-author, before the Royal Society.

This, however, was not the prelude to a scientific career. Following his father's example he read for the Bar, passed his finals in 1912, and was called to the Middle Temple in 1913.

On the outbreak of war in 1914 he spent a few months in France as a Red Cross lorry driver, but was soon recalled to put his scientific training to good use, somewhat unexpectedly, in the national cause. At Queensferry on the Dee estuary the government had built, at a cost of £7 million, the largest explosives factory in the British Empire, incorporating the two finest sulphuric acid plants in the world. After a brief spell of training Cripps was sent there to be assistant superintendent, with responsibility among other things for the cost accounts of the factory. Not a single person on the staff, either management or operatives, he later told the House of Commons, had ever worked in a chemical or explosives factory before, but the plant was so successful that it had to be dismantled at the end of the war, ‘to prevent the commercial manufacturers [of sulphuric acid] going out of business’.