The coal industry was front page news so often in the 1920s and 1930s, and especially in 1926, when the whole nation was drawn into its struggles, that even a man so wholly absorbed in his own professional commitments as Cripps could scarcely fail to acquire at least a nodding acquaintance with its problems, but there seems little reason to suppose that up to this time he had interested himself in them particularly. The explosives factory at Queensferry was on the very edge of the North Wales coalfield, a dozen or so miles from Gresford Colliery, and even nearer to some of the Flintshire pits, but his preoccupation with sulphur can have left him little time for studying coal or anything else. His uncle by marriage, Sydney Webb, was an authority on the subject, having been one of the miners' chosen lay representatives on the Sankey Commission of 1919, and was presumably able to provide him with some background information. His own arrival in Parliament occurred too late for him to have heard the debates on the 1930 Coal Bill, and almost from the time he set foot in the House until the change of government 10 months later his energies were devoted to the complicated and demanding Land Tax Bill.

After the election of 1931 the circumstances changed. In the landslide that engulfed Labour only the most massive majorities ensured survival, and they were to be found almost by definition in areas of old-established major industry—South Wales, Lancashire, the West Riding, the North East, Glasgow.