Cripps's speech was heard in almost total silence. It was so brilliant, the Manchester Guardian commented, that both friends and foes disliked it, but he had earned himself a reprieve, unlike Bonsall and his colleagues, whose troubles were about to enter their next stage. Towards the end of March 1937 it was announced that proceedings were to be taken under the Coal Mines Regulations Act against the owners, manager and other officials of Gresford Colliery.

An almost inevitable consequence of the undisciplined manner in which the inquiry had been conducted was confusion in some minds between alleged breaches of the Regulations and actions which could be shown to have caused the accident and for which there was no evidence. The Solicitor General, for the Director of Public Prosecutions, took special care to make it plain at the outset that there were ‘no allegations that any of the defendants were responsible, by the acts with which they were charged, for the explosion’. The alleged breaches were of a technical nature, carrying small penalties even if proved, and there is no truth in the assertion made by two of Cripps's biographers that as a result of the revelations under Cripps's cross-examination of witnesses, a manager of the mine was imprisoned.