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From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, M.P.

by George Haw · English · Gutenberg #41023 · 461,367 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, M.P.

Author: George Haw

Author of introduction, etc.: G. K. Chesterton


        
Release date: October 11, 2012 [eBook #41023]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM WORKHOUSE TO WESTMINSTER: THE LIFE STORY OF WILL CROOKS, M.P. ***

FROM WORKHOUSE TO WESTMINSTER

[Illustration: WILL CROOKS, M.P.

_Photo: G. Dendry._]




FROM WORKHOUSE TO WESTMINSTER

The Life Story of WILL CROOKS, M.P.

By
GEORGE HAW

WITH INTRODUCTION BY G. K. CHESTERTON

FOUR FULL-PAGE PLATES

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
MCMIX


First Edition _February 1907_.
Reprinted _March, June and August 1908_.
_January and November 1909._

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


TO

MRS. WILL CROOKS

THIS SLIGHT RECORD OF HER HUSBAND'S CAREER

IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR




PREFACE


This record of the career of a man whom I have known intimately in his
public and private life for over a dozen years can claim at least one
distinction. It is the first biography of a working man who has
deliberately chosen to remain in the ranks of working men as well as in
their service. From the day in the early 'nineties when he was called
upon to decide between a prospective partnership in a prosperous
business and the hard, joyless life of a Labour representative, with
poverty for his lot and slander for his reward, he has adhered to the
principle he then laid down, consistently refusing ever since the many
invitations received from various quarters to come up higher. There have
been endless biographies of men who have risen from the ranks of Labour
and then deserted those ranks for wealthy circles. Will Crooks, in his
own words, has not risen from the ranks; he is still in the ranks,
standing four-square with the working classes against monopoly and
privilege.

This book would have been an autobiography rather than a biography could
I have had my way. Nor was I alone in urging Crooks to write the story
of his life, as strenuous in its poverty as it has been in its public
service. He always argued that that was not in his way at all--that, in
fact, he did not believe in men sitting down to write about themselves
any more than he believed in men getting up to talk about themselves.

So I have done the next best thing. Since the interpretation depends
upon the interpreter, I have tried, in writing this account of his life,
to make him the narrator as often as I could. Most of the incidents in
his career I have given in his own words, mainly from personal talks we
have had together during our years of friendship, sometimes by our own
firesides, sometimes amid the stress of public life, sometimes during
long walks in the streets of London. Nor do any of the incidents lose in
detail or in verity by reason of many of those cherished conversations
having taken place long before either of us ever dreamed they would
afterwards be pieced together in book form.

Not to Crooks alone am I indebted for help in compiling this book. I owe
much to members of his family, to my wife, and to other friends of his.

GEORGE HAW.




CONTENTS

                                                    PAGE
INTRODUCTION                                        xiii

CHAPTER I.
EARLIEST YEARS IN A ONE-ROOMED HOME                    1

CHAPTER II.
AS A CHILD IN THE WORKHOUSE                            8

CHAPTER III.
SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS                             16

CHAPTER IV.
ROUND THE HAUNTS OF HIS BOYHOOD                       25

CHAPTER V.
IN TRAINING FOR A CRAFTSMAN                           33

CHAPTER VI.
TRAMPING THE COUNTRY FOR WORK                         43

CHAPTER VII.
ONE OF LONDON'S UNEMPLOYED                            50

CHAPTER VIII.
THE COLLEGE AT THE DOCK GATES                         57

CHAPTER IX.
FROM THE CHEERING MULTITUDE TO A SORROW-LADEN HOME    67

CHAPTER X.
A LABOUR MEMBER'S WAGES                               75

CHAPTER XI.
ON THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL                          85

CHAPTER XII.
TWO OF HIS MONUMENTS                                  96

CHAPTER XIII.
THE TASK OF HIS LIFE BEGINS                          105

CHAPTER XIV.
THE MAN WHO FED THE POOR                             112

CHAPTER XV.
TURNING WORKHOUSE CHILDREN INTO USEFUL CITIZENS      119

CHAPTER XVI.
ON THE METROPOLITAN ASYLUMS BOARD                    128

CHAPTER XVII.
A BAD BOYS' ADVOCATE                                 134

CHAPTER XVIII.
PROUD OF THE POOR                                    144

CHAPTER XIX.
THE FIRST WORKING-MAN MAYOR IN LONDON                154

CHAPTER XX.
THE KING'S DINNER--AND OTHERS                        166

CHAPTER XXI.
THE MAN WHO PAID OLD-AGE PENSIONS                    175

CHAPTER XXII.
ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT                               186

CHAPTER XXIII.
ADVENT OF THE POLITICAL LABOUR PARTY                 195

CHAPTER XXIV.
THE LIVING WAGE FOR MEN AND WOMEN                    202

CHAPTER XXV.
FREE TRADE IN THE NAME OF THE POOR                   210

CHAPTER XXVI.
PREPARING FOR THE UNEMPLOYED ACT                     219

CHAPTER XXVII.
AGITATION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS                    227

CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE QUEEN INTERVENES                                 241

CHAPTER XXIX.
HOME LIFE AND SOME ENGAGEMENTS                       252

CHAPTER XXX.
COLONISING ENGLAND                                   264

CHAPTER XXXI.
THE REVIVAL OF BUMBLEDOM                             271

CHAPTER XXXII.
APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE                                 280

CHAPTER XXXIII.
"THE HAPPY WARRIOR"                                  296

INDEX                                                303

       *       *       *       *       *

LIST OF PLATES


WILL CROOKS, M.P.                      _Frontispiece_

THE CROOKS FAMILY                      _Facing p._ 18

WILL CROOKS ADDRESSING AN OPEN-AIR
MEETING AT WOOLWICH                        "      192

MR. AND MRS. WILL CROOKS                   "      248




INTRODUCTION


Mr. Will Crooks, as I know him in his own house at Poplar and in that
other House at Westminster, always seems to me to be something far
greater than a Labour Member of Parliament. He stands out as the supreme
type of the English working classes, who have chosen him as one of their
representatives.

Representative government, a mystical institution, is said to have
originated in some of the monastic orders. In any case, it is evident
that the character of it is symbolic, and that it is subject to all the
advantages and all the disadvantages of a symbol. Just exactly as a
religious ritual may for a time represent a real emotion, and then for a
time cease to represent anything, so representative government may for a
time represent the people, and for a time cease to represent anything.
But the peculiar difficulties attaching to the thing called
representative government have not been fully appreciated. The great
difficulty of representative governments is simply this: that the
representative is supposed to discharge two quite definite and distinct
functions. There is in his position the idea of being a picture or copy
of the thing he represents. There is also the idea of being an
instrument of the thing he represents, or a message from the thing he
represents. The first is like the shadow a man throws on the wall; the
second is like the stone that he throws over the wall. In the first
sense, it is supposed that the representative is like the thing he
represents. In the second case it is only supposed that the
representative is useful to the thing he represents. In the first case,
a parliamentary representative is used strictly as a parliamentary
representative. In the second case a parliamentary representative is
used as a weapon. He is used as a missile. He is used as something to be
merely thrown against the enemy; and those who merely throw something
against the enemy do not ask especially that the thing they throw shall
be a particular copy of themselves. To send one's challenge is not to
send one's photograph. When Ajax hurled a stone at his enemy, it was not
a stone carved in the image of Ajax. When a modern general causes a
cannon-ball to be fired, he is not understood to indicate that the
contours of the cannon-ball represent in any exact way the curves of his
own person. In short, we can in modern representative politics use a
politician as a missile without using him, in the fullest sense of the
word, as a symbol.

In this sense most of our representatives in modern representative
government are merely used as missiles. Mr. Balfour is a missile. Mr.
Balfour is hurled at the heads of his enemies like a boomerang or a
javelin. He is flung by the great mass of mediocre Tory squires. He is
flung, not because he is at all like them, for that he obviously is not.
He is flung because he is a particularly bright and sharp missile; that
is to say, because he is so very unlike the men who fling him. Here,
then, is the primary paradox of representative government. Men elect a
representative half because he is like themselves and half because he is
not like themselves. They elect a representative half because he
represents them and half because he misrepresents them. They choose Mr.
Balfour (let us say) half because he does what they would do and half
because he does what they could never do at all.

We are told that the Labour movement will be an exception to all
previous rules. The Labour movement has been no exception to this
previous rule. The Labour Members, as a class, are not representatives,
but missiles. Poor men elect them, not because they are like poor men,
but because they are likely to damage rich men: an excellent reason.
Labour Members are the exceptions among Labour men. As I have said, they
are weapons, missiles, things thrown. Working-men are not at all like
Mr. Keir Hardie. If it comes to likeness, working-men are rather more
like the Duke of Devonshire. But they throw Mr. Keir Hardie at the Duke
of Devonshire, knowing that he is so curiously shaped as to hurt
anything at which he is thrown. Unless this is thoroughly understood,
great injustice will necessarily be done to the Labour movement; for it
is obvious on the face of it that Labour Members do not represent the
average of labouring men. A man like Mr. J. R. Macdonald no more
suggests a Battersea workman than he suggests a Bedouin or a Russian
Grand Duke. These men are not the representatives of the democracy, but
the weapons of the democracy. They are intended only to fulfil the
second of those functions in the delegate which I have already defined.
They are the instruments of the people. They are not the images of the
people. They are fanatics for the things about which the people are
good-humouredly convinced. They are philosophers about the things which
are to the people an easy and commonplace religion. In a word, they are
not representatives; they are not even ambassadors. They are
declarations of war.

Such being the problem, we must reconcile ourselves to finding many of
the Labour Members men of a definite and even pedantic class; men whose
austere and lucid tone, whose elaborate economic explanations smack of
something very different from the actual streets of London. This
economic knowledge may be very necessary. It may remind us of our
duties; but it does not remind us of the Walworth Road. It may enable a
man to speak for the proletarians, but it does not enable a man to speak
with them.

Now, if a man has a good rough-and-ready knowledge of the mechanics of
Battersea and the labourers of Poplar; if the same man has a good
rough-and-ready knowledge of the men in the House of Commons (a vastly
inferior company); he will come out of both those experiences with one
quite square and solid conviction, a conviction the grounds of which,
though they may be difficult to define verbally, are as unshakable as
the ground. He will come out with the conviction that there is really
only one modern Labour Member who represents, who symbolises, or who
even remotely suggests the real labouring men of London; and that is Mr.
Will Crooks.

Mr. Crooks alone fulfils both the functions of the representative. He is
a representative who, like Mr. Keir Hardie and the others, fights,
cleaves a way, does something that only a man of talent could do,
expresses the inexpressible, sacrifices himself. But also, unlike Mr.
Keir Hardie, and the rest, he is a representative who represents. He is
a picture as well as a projectile; he is the stone carved in the image
of Ajax. He is really like the people for whom he stands. A man can
realise this fact, merely as a fact, without implying any disrespect,
for instance, to the Scotch ideality of Mr. Keir Hardie, or the Scotch
strenuousness of Mr. John Burns. They are expressive of the English
democracy, but not typical of it. The first characteristic of Mr.
Crooks, which must strike anyone who has ever had to do with him, even
for ten minutes, is this immense fact of the absolute and isolated
genuineness of his connection with the working classes. To all the other
Labour leaders we listen with respect on Labour matters, because they
have been elected by labourers. To him alone we should listen if he had
never been elected at all. Of him alone it can be said that if we did
not accept him as a representative, we should still accept him as a
type. I need not dwell, and indeed I feel no desire to dwell, on those
qualities in Mr. Crooks which express just now the popular qualities of
the populace. I feel more interest in the unpopular qualities of the
populace.

The greatness of Mr. Crooks lies not in the fact that he expresses the
claims of the populace, which twenty dons at Oxford would be ready to
express; it is that he expresses the populace: its strong tragedy and
its strong farce. He is not a demagogue. He is not even a democrat. He
is a demos; he is the real King. And his chief characteristic, as I have
suggested, is that he represents especially those popular good
qualities which are unpopular in modern discussion. Will Crooks is to
the ordinary London omnibus conductor or cabman exactly what Robert
Burns was to the ordinary puritanical but passionate peasant of the
Scotch Lowlands. He is the journeyman of genius. All that is good in
them is better in him; but it is the same thing. Walt Whitman has
perfectly expressed this attitude of the average towards the fine type.
"They see themselves in him. They hardly know themselves, they are so
grown."

In numberless points Mr. Crooks thus completes and glorifies the common
character of the poor man. Take, for instance, the deep matter of
humour: humour in which the English poor are certainly pre-eminent among
all classes of the nation and all nations of the world. By all
politicians, including Labour politicians, humour is only introduced
exceptionally and elaborately; by all politicians the comic anecdote is
led up to with dextrous prefaces and deep intonations, as if it were
something altogether unique and separate. All politicians take their own
humour very seriously. Mr. Crooks recalls the real life of the streets
in nothing so much as in the fact that humour is a constant condition.
He and the poor exist in a normal atmosphere of amiable irony. If
anything, they have to make an effort to become verbally serious:
something of the same kind of earnest that it costs an ordinary member
of Parliament to become witty. Anyone who has heard Mr. Crooks talk
knows that his permanent mood is humorous. He is never without a story,
but his face and his mind are humorous before he has even thought of the
story. He lives, so to speak, in a state of expectant reminiscence. The
man who said that "brevity was the soul of wit" told a lie; nobody
minds how long wit goes on so long as it is wit. Mr. Crooks belongs to
that strong old school of English humour in which Dickens was supreme;
that school which some moderns have called dull because it could go on
for a long time being interesting.

I have merely taken this case of popular humour as one out of a hundred.
A similar case of Mr. Crooks's popular sympathy might be found in his
pathos, which is equally uncompromising and direct. Even his political
faults, if they are faults, against which so much criticism has for a
time been raised, have still this pervading quality, that they are
essentially the popular faults. This instinct for a prompt and practical
and hand-to-mouth benevolence, this instinct for giving a very good time
to those who have had a very bad time, this is the very soul of that
immense and astonishing altruism at which all social reformers have
stood thunderstruck: the kindness of the poor to the poor. This attitude
may or may not be the great vice of the governors; there is no doubt
that it is the great virtue of the people. The charity of poor men to
poor men has always been spontaneous, irregular, individual, liable
therefore in its nature to some faults of confusion or of favouritism.

It is the misfortune of Mr. Crooks that alone among modern
philanthropists and social reformers he has really been the typical poor
man giving to poor men. This quality which has been seen and condemned
in him is simply the quality which is the common and working morality of
the London streets. You may like it; you may dislike it. But if you
dislike it you are simply disliking the English people. You have seen
English people perhaps for a moment in omnibuses, in streets on Saturday
nights, in third-class carriages, or even in Bank Holiday waggonettes.
You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not yet
entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not represent
it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less than Tories
or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with it a trail of
all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as against
hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for
respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the family
which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If ever that
people enters politics it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as
mere pedants. It will be able to point only to one figure, powerful,
pathetic, humorous, and very humble, who bore in any way upon his face
the sign and star of its authority.

G. K. CHESTERTON.




FROM WORKHOUSE TO WESTMINSTER




CHAPTER I

EARLIEST YEARS IN A ONE-ROOMED HOME

     Difference between "Will" and "William"--Early Memories--Crying for
     Bread--An Aspersion Resented--A Prophecy that has been
     Fulfilled--Will earns his First Half-Sovereign.


Will Crooks!

In the little one-roomed home where he was born at No. 2, Shirbutt
Street, down by the Docks at Poplar, it was the earnest desire of all
whom it concerned that he should be known to the world as William
Crooks. The desire found practical expression in the register of Trinity
Congregational Church in East India Dock Road close by. Thither, within
a few weeks of his birth, in the year 1852, he was carried with modest
ceremony and solemnly christened by a name which everybody ever since
has refused to give to him.

For somehow "William Crooks" does not sound like the man at all. Looking
at it gives you no suggestion of the good-humoured, hard-headed Labour
man, known as familiarly to his colleagues in the House of Commons as
he is to the great world of wage-earners outside by the shorter and more
expressive name of Will Crooks.

Born in poverty, the third of seven children, Will Crooks, who is
blessed with keen powers of observation and a good memory, can carry his
mind back to the days before he was put into breeches.

"I remember before my fourth year was out," I have heard him tell,
"something of the public rejoicings on the declaration of peace after
the Crimean War. The following year was also memorable to me as the time
I witnessed troops of soldiers marching to the East India Docks on the
outbreak of the Mutiny."

Those were days of want and sorrow, as were many days that followed, in
the little one-roomed home in East London. His father was a ship's
stoker, who lost an arm by the starting of the engines one day when he
was oiling the machinery as his vessel lay in the Thames.

"My very earliest recollections are associated with mother dressing
father's arm day after day. I was only three years old at the time, but
I know that all our privations dated from the day of this accident to my
father, because he was forced to give up his work.

"It must have been with the aid of some good friends that at last my
father got an old horse, hoping to earn a little by leading and carting;
but nothing came of this small venture, and in time the horse had to be
sold to pay the rent. Almost the only work of any kind that father,
being thus disabled, could get to do was an odd job as watchman.

"Those were very lean years indeed, and I don't know what we should have
done but for mother. She used to toil with the needle far into the night
and often all night long, slaving as hard as any poor sweated woman I
have ever known, and I have known hundreds of such poor creatures. Many
a time as a lad have I helped mother to carry the clothes she had made
to Houndsditch. There were no trams running then, and the 'bus fare from
Poplar to Aldgate was fourpence, a sum we never dared think of spending
on a ride.

"My elder brother was as clever with the needle as many a woman, and
often he would stay up all through the night with mother, helping her to
make oil-skin coats."

One night, as the mother worked alone, young Will woke up in the little
orange-box bedstead by the wall where he slept with a younger brother.
Silently he watched her plying the needle at the table until he noticed
tears trickling down her cheeks.

"What are you crying for, mother?"

"Never mind, Will, my boy. You go to sleep."

"But you must be crying about something, mother."

And then, in a doleful tone, she said, "It's through wondering where the
next meal is coming from, my boy."

The little chap pretended to go to sleep soon after; but now and again
he would peep cautiously over the side of the box at his mother silently
crying over her work at the table. And he puzzled his young head as to
what it all meant.

"My mother crying because she can't get bread for us! Why can't she get
bread? I saw plenty of bread in the shops yesterday. Do all mothers have
to cry before they can get bread for their children?"

It was the first incident that made him think.

There was one morning, the morning after a Christmas Day of all times in
the year, when his mother refused to let him or the others get up, even
when she left the house. It was not until she returned after what seemed
a long time, bringing with her a portion of a loaf, that she allowed
them to get out of bed.

"It was many years afterwards before I learnt the reason for her strange
conduct that Boxing Day morning. Then I found out that she had made a
vow that her children should never get up unless there was some
breakfast for them.

"We were so poor that we children never got a drop of tea for months
together. It used to be bread and treacle for breakfast, bread and
treacle for dinner, bread and treacle for tea, washed down with a cup of
cold water. Sometimes there was a little variation in the form of
dripping. At other times the variety was secured by there being neither
treacle nor dripping. The very bread was so scarce that mother could not
afford to allow the three eldest, of whom I was one, more than three
slices apiece at a meal, while the four youngest got two and a half
slices. Whenever we could afford to buy tea or butter, it was only in
ounces. Once my brother and I were sent to buy a whole quarter of a
pound of butter--it turned out that auntie was coming to tea--and on the
way we speculated seriously whether mother was going to open a shop."

Perhaps the first occasion upon which Crooks as a lad showed something
of that spirited resentment at aspersions on the poor which ultimately
led him into public life was one that arose in a cobbler's shop. He was
about eight years old, when his father sent him back with a pair of
boots that had been repaired to ask that a little more be done to them
for the money.

"I don't know what he wants for his ninepence," said the cobbler,
referring to the lad's father; "but, there!"--throwing the boots to his
man--"put another patch on. He's only a poor beggar."

There was an angry cry from the other side, of the counter. "My father's
not a poor beggar!" shouted the boy. "He's as good a man as you, and
only wants what he has paid for."

If the boy thought much of the father the father thought much of the
boy. It had often been his boast that "Our Will will do things some
day."

One little fancy of the old man's was brought to my notice the morning
after Crooks was first returned to Parliament for Woolwich. His elder
brother told me then of a little incident that took place over
forty-five years before.

"We children were playing in the home together when young Will said
something which made the dad look up surprised. And I heard him say to
mother, 'That lad'll live to be either Lord Mayor of London or a Member
of Parliament.'"

The poverty deepened and darkened in the little one-roomed home during
Will's boyhood. It soon became impossible even to spend an odd ninepence
on boot repairs. The mother met this emergency as she met nearly all the
others. She became the family cobbler, as she had all along been the
family tailor. Often would she go on her knees, hammer in hand, mending
the boots. The children could not remember the time when she did not
make all their clothes.

"God only knows, God only will know, how my mother worked and wept,"
says Crooks. "With it all she brought up seven of us to be decent and
useful men and women. She was everything to us. I owe to her what little
schooling I got, for, though she could neither read nor write herself,
she would often remark that that should never be said of any of her
children. I owe to her wise training that I have been a teetotaller all
my life. I owe it to her that I was saved from becoming a little wastrel
of the streets, for, as a Christian woman, she kept me at the Sunday
School and took me regularly to the Congregational Church where I had
been baptised.

"I can picture her now as I used to see her when I awoke in the night
making oil-skin coats by candle-light in our single room. Youngster
though I was, I meant it from the very bottom of my heart when I used to
whisper to myself, as I peeped at her from the little box-bedstead by
the wall, 'Wait till I'm a man! Won't I work for my mother when I'm a
man!'"

He thought he was a man at thirteen, when he could bring home to her
proudly five shillings every week, his wages in the blacksmith's shop.
There came a memorable Saturday night when, having worked overtime all
the week and earned an extra five shillings, he was paid his first
half-sovereign. He threw on his coat and cap excitedly and ran all the
way home from Limehouse Causeway, the half-sovereign clenched tightly in
his hand, until he burst breathlessly into the little room, exclaiming:

"Mother, mother, I've earned half a sovereign, all of it myself, and
it's yours, all yours, every bit yours!"




CHAPTER II

AS A CHILD IN THE WORKHOUSE

     With an Idiot Boy in the Workhouse--Life in the Poor Law School at
     Sutton--At Home Once More--A Fashionable Knock for the Casual
     Ward--A Bread Riot.


But we must go back a few years--to the evil day when, the father being
a cripple, the family have to enter the workhouse.

The mother had before this been forced to ask for parish relief. For a
time the Guardians paid her two or three shillings a week and gave her a
little bread. Suddenly these scanty supplies were stopped. The mother
was told to come before the Board and bring her children.

Six of them, clinging timidly to her skirt, were taken into the terrible
presence. The Chairman singled out Will, then eight years of age, and,
pointing his finger at him, remarked solemnly:

"It's time that boy was getting his own living."

"He is at work, sir," was the mother's timid apology. "He gets up at a
quarter to five every morning and goes round with the milkman for
sixpence a week."

"Can't he earn more than that?"

"Well, sir, the milkman says he's a very willing boy and always
punctual, but he's so little that he doesn't think he can pay him more
than sixpence yet."

And the little boy looked furtively at the great man in the great chair,
never dreaming that the time would come when he would occupy that chair
himself, and that almost the first order he would issue from it would be
one putting an end to the bad practice of making mothers drag their
young children before the Board.

On that unhappy afternoon the Guardians, firm in their resolve not to
renew the out-relief, offered to take the children into the workhouse.
The mother said 'No' at first, marching them all bravely home again.
Stern want forced her to yield at last. The day came when she saw the
five youngest, including Will, taken from home to the big poorhouse down
by the Millwall Docks. The crippled father was admitted into the House
at the same time.

They were put into a bare room like a vault, the father and two sons,
while the three sisters were taken they knew not where. There the lads
and their dad spent the night and the next day until the doctor saw them
and passed them into the main workhouse building. Then Will lost sight
of his father, though he was permitted to remain with his young brother
and share with him the same bed.

In the dormitory was an idiot boy, who used to ramble in his talk all
through the night, keeping the others awake. Sometimes Will succeeded in
coaxing his young brother off to sleep, but as for himself, he would
lie awake for hours listening to the strange talk of the idiot boy, and
thinking of his mother. Often in the night the idiot boy would cry out
for his own mother, leaving Will wondering who she was and where she
was, and whether the plaintive cry of her imbecile child ever reached
her ears in the night's stillness.

The lad was ravenously hungry all the time he spent in the workhouse. He
often felt at times as though he could eat leather; yet every morning,
when the "skilly" was served for breakfast, he could not touch it.
Morning after morning, spurred on by hunger, he forced the spoon into
his mouth, but the stomach revolted, and he always felt as though the
first spoonful would turn him sick.

Somehow his father, away in the men's ward, got to know that young Will,
who he knew could relish dry crusts at home with the best of them, was
not able to eat the fare provided in the workhouse. The men occasionally
got suet pudding, and one dinner-time the old man secretly smuggled his
portion into his pocket. In the afternoon he made over to the children's
quarters, hoping to hand it to Will. The pudding was produced, the lad's
hungry eyes lighted up, when, behold! it was snatched away, almost from
his very grasp. The burly figure of the labour master interposed between
father and son. This was a breach of discipline not to be tolerated in
the workhouse.

"But the boy's hungry, and this is what I've saved from my own dinner,"
argued the father (all in vain). "You don't know how that boy likes
suet pudding."

For two or three weeks the Crooks children were kept in the workhouse,
before being taken away in an omnibus with other boys and girls to the
Poor Law School at Sutton. Then came the most agonising experience of
all to Will. They parted him from his young brother. In the great hall
of the school he would strain his eyes, hoping to get a glimpse of the
lone little fellow among the other lads, but he never set eyes on him
again until the afternoon they went home together.

"Every day I spent in that school is burnt into my soul," he has often
declared since.

He could not sleep at night nor play with the other boys, haunted as he
was by the strange dread that he must have committed some unknown crime
to be taken from home, torn from his young brother, and made a little
captive in what seemed a fearful prison. The nights seemed endless, and
were always awful. He whispered his fears on the fourth day to another
Poplar boy who was there.

"Ah! you just wait until Sunday," said the other lad. "Every Sunday's
like a fortnight."

When Sunday did come it proved to be one lasting agony. He thought time
could not be made more terrible to children anywhere. They had dinner at
twelve and tea at six, confined during the yawning interval in the dull
day-room with nothing to do but to look at the clock, and then out of
the window, and then back at the clock again.

During the week, after school hours, he hung about in abject misery all
the time. From the day he went in to the day he left he never smiled.
One afternoon he was loitering in the playground as the matron showed
some visitors round.

"Who is that sad-faced boy?" he heard one of them ask.

"Oh, he's one of the new-comers," the matron answered. "He'll soon get
over it."

The new-comer said to himself, "I wonder whether you would soon get over
it if you had been taken from your mother and parted from a young
brother?"

How long he stayed in the workhouse school he has never been able to
tell. It could not have been very long in point of time, but to the
sensitive lad it seemed an age. An indescribable burden was lifted from
his shoulders when one day at dinner someone called him by his name.

He sprang to his feet.

"Go to the tailor's shop after dinner and get your own clothes."

"What for, sir?"

"You are going home!"

His heart leapt up. The boys crowded round him, wishing they were in his
place. Poor miserable lads, he parted from them with feelings of the
deepest pity.

At the gate he met his young brother and sisters again, and they were
taken back to Poplar, to be welcomed with open arms by their mother. She
had worked harder than ever to add to the family income in order to
justify her in going before the Guardians to ask that her children be
restored to her own keeping.

Not until thirty-three years later could he command the courage to enter
that same workhouse school again. Many changes for the good had been
made, but the sight of the same hall, with the same peculiar odour,
brought back the same old feeling of utter friendlessness and despair.
And he saw in imagination a sad-faced boy sitting on the form, straining
his eyes in the vain search for his young brother.

The mother had moved to a cheaper room when the children returned home
from the workhouse school. It was in a small house in the High Street,
next door to the entrance to the casual ward, with the main workhouse
building in the rear. This was Will's home for the rest of his boyhood.

There, with the workhouse surrounding him as it were, he got daily
glimpses of the misery that hovers round the Poor Law. Men and women
would sit for hours huddled on the pavement in front of his home waiting
for the casual ward to open. Will came bounding out of the house in the
dull dawn to go to work as an errand boy one morning, when he kicked
violently against a bundle of rags on the pavement.

There was a cry of pain in a woman's voice, and the lad pulled up sharp,
filled with remorse:

"I'm _so_ sorry, missus; I am really. I didn't see you."

"All right, kiddie. I saw you couldn't help it. I'm used to being
kicked about the streets."

But the lad could not forget it. And when he came home at dinner-time,
"Oh, mother," he said, "I kicked a poor woman outside our door this
morning, and I wouldn't have done it for anything, had I known."

Sometimes a poor wayfarer would knock at the door, mistaking it for the
entrance to the casual ward. In answer to a series of sharp raps one
night Will raced to the door with the mother of another family who
rented the front room. She got there first and opened it, to find a
tramp on the step.

"Is this the casual ward?"

"The casual ward!" cried the woman in disgust, turning away and leaving
Will to direct him. "That's a nice fashionable kind of knock to come
with asking for the casual ward!"

It was from this house that he saw a bread riot in the winter of 1866,
when he got the first of many impressions he was to receive of what a
winter of bad trade means to a district of casual labour like Poplar.
Hundreds of men used to wait outside the workhouse gates for a 2-lb.
loaf each. The baker's waggon drove up with the bread one afternoon
while they waited. The ravenous crowd would not let it pass into the
workhouse yard. They seized the bread, frantically struggling with each
other. Almost as fiercely they tore the bread to pieces when they got it
and devoured it on the spot.

Sights like these of his childhood, with the shuddering memories of his
own dark days in the workhouse and the workhouse school, made him
register a vow, little chap though he was at the time, that when he grew
up to be a man he would do all he could to make better and brighter the
lot of the inmates, especially that of the boys and girls.

Some children's dreams come true, and this was one of them.




CHAPTER III

SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS

     The School of Life--Borrowed Magazines--Reading Dickens--Crooks's
     Humour and Story-Telling Faculty--Discovering Scott--Declaiming
     Shakespeare--Books that influenced him.


Little education of the ordinary kind came into Will's life as a lad. We
have seen that he turned out before five o'clock every morning at eight
years of age to take milk round for a wage of sixpence a week. Soon
after coming out of the workhouse he got a job as errand boy at a
grocer's at two shillings a week. At eleven he was in a blacksmith's
shop, where he stayed until at fourteen he was apprenticed to the trade
of cooper.

"In a sense, my training for becoming a servant of the people has been
better than a University training," he tells you. "My University has
been the common people--the common people whom Christ loved, and loved
so well that He needs must make so many of us. The man trained as I have
been amid the poor streets and homes of London, who knows where the shoe
pinches and where there are no shoes at all, has more practical
knowledge of the needs and sufferings of the people than the man who has
been to the recognised Universities.

"I am the last to despise education. I have felt the need of more
education all my life. But I do protest against the idea that only those
who have been through the Universities or public schools are fit to be
the nation's rulers and servants. Legislation by the intellectuals is
the last thing we want. See to what extremes it sometimes leads. There
was a case under the Workmen's Compensation Act when eight leading
lawyers argued for hours whether a well thirty feet deep was a building
thirty feet high. Finally they decided solemnly that it was not. That
was legislation by the intellectuals being carried out by the
intellectuals."

He once complained in the House of Commons that Mr. Balfour--then Prime
Minister--was using a dead language in answering a Labour Member's
question. He had asked whether the Aliens Bill would take precedence
over Redistribution. Mr. Balfour replied that the two things were not at
all _in pari materia_.

"Will the right hon. gentleman please speak in English?" pleaded the
questioner. "It is well known both inside and outside this House that I
do not know Latin."

Mr. Balfour said that what he meant to convey was that you could not
compare resolutions with a Bill, because a Bill involved a number of
different stages, while the other dealt with the matter as one
substantive question.

"A very loose translation," remarked a Member, amid the laughter of the
House.

Crooks was learning life at the time other lads are usually learning
Latin. And his knowledge of life, carrying with it an unbounded
sympathy with suffering, an intense love of truth and justice, has
proved more useful to him and to the class he serves than any knowledge
of a dead language would.

Yet it was a pleasure to him to go down to Oxford in the early part of
1906 to speak on the need for University men taking up social work. It
was a greater pleasure to receive on his return the following letter
from one in authority at Christ Church College:--


     I am writing a line thanking you again for your kindness in coming
     and speaking here on Saturday. From all sides I hear nothing but
     commendation of your speech. There was a considerable number of our
     men present, and as I surveyed them I was glad to see that some who
     are really thinking about things were impressed.


Crooks always tells you that his best "schoolmaster" was his mother, the
righteous working woman who could not read a line or write a word.

She and one of her boys spent nearly three hours one evening preparing a
letter to a far-away sister, the mother painfully composing the
sentences, the lad painfully writing them down. The glorious epistle was
at last complete, the first great triumph of a combined intellectual
effort between mother and son. Proudly they held the letter to the
candle-light to dry the ink, when the flame caught it, and behold! the
work of three laborious hours destroyed in three seconds. It was more
than they could bear. Mother and son sat down and cried together.

[Illustration: THE CROOKS FAMILY.

(_Will is the second child from the right, looking over his father's
left shoulder._)]

"I have nothing but praise for my other schoolmaster," says Crooks. "I
mean the schoolmaster at the old George Green schools in East India Dock
Road. They were elementary schools then, and we paid a penny a week,
though even that small sum for all of us meant a sacrifice for mother.
The schoolmaster there was essentially a kind man. He had me under his
teaching in the Sunday school as well as in the day school. During the
few years I was with him prior to my workhouse days I learnt much that
has been of service to me ever since."

Neither books nor papers found their way into Shirbutt Street. The first
paper he remembers reading was _The British Workman_, brought
occasionally to the little house in High Street just after the workhouse
days. Then came a short spell of penny dreadfuls, from among which
"Alone in a Pirate's Lair" stands out in memory riotous and reeking to
this day.

Though the mother could not read herself, she encouraged her children by
borrowing occasional magazines and inviting them to read the contents to
her and her neighbours.

"I was about ten or eleven when _The Leisure Hour_ and _The Sunday at
Home_ were started, and mother and the neighbours used to get these and
ask us boys to read the stories to them.

"I owe something to an old man who went round the poor people's houses
selling books. From him I got some of Dickens's novels. I suddenly found
myself in a new and delightful world. Having been in the workhouse
myself, how I revelled in Oliver Twist! How I laughed at Bumble and the
gentleman in the white waistcoat! I have seen that white waistcoat,
pompous and truculent, administering the Poor Law many times since.

"After the unceasing hunger I experienced in the workhouse, you can
guess how I sympathised with Oliver in his demand for more. I thought
that a delightful touch in one of our L.C.C. day schools the other day.
The teacher asked a class what books they liked best.

"'Oliver Twist,' came one little chap's answer.

"'Why?'

"'Because he asked for more.'"

This early reading of Dickens may have helped to develop his own quaint,
rich humour. Will Crooks often reminds one of Charles Dickens. He knows
the Londoner of to-day, his oddities, whimsicalities, his trials,
humours, and sorrows, as thoroughly as Dickens knew the Londoner of
fifty years ago. Many a time I have journeyed with him down to his home
in East London, after he had finished a hard day's work in Parliament or
on the London County Council, possibly having been defeated on some
public question in a way that would make many men despair; and yet how
easily he has put aside all the worries and work, and made the journey
delightful by his unfailing fund of Cockney anecdotes. He is one of the
rare story-tellers you meet with in a lifetime. The charm, too, of all
his stories is that they never relate to what he has read, but always
to what he has heard or observed himself.

Some unknown friend at Yarmouth, who doubtless had heard him speak,
seems to have been impressed by this ready way he has of taking his
illustrations from the common things around him. Under the initials
A. H. S. he sent the following "Limerick" to _London Opinion_:--


     We smile when he's funny, or witty,
     We yawn when he's wise: more's the pity,
       For this best of the "Crooks"
       Draws from life, not from books,
     When he pleads for the people or city.


After Dickens the lad discovered Scott. "It was an event in my life
when, in an old Scotch magazine, I read a fascinating criticism of
'Ivanhoe.' Nothing would satisfy me until I had got the book; and then
Scott took a front place among my favourite authors.

"I was in my teens then, reading everything I could lay hands on. I used
to follow closely public events in the newspapers. Not long ago I met a
man in a car with whom I remonstrated for some rude behaviour to the
passengers. He looked at me in amazement when I called him by his name.

"'Why,' he said, 'you must be that boy Will Crooks I knew long ago. Do
you know what I remember about you? I can see you now tossing your apron
off in the dinner-hour and squatting down in the workshop with a paper
in your hand.'"

Crooks was still an apprentice when, as he describes it, the great
literary event of his life occurred.

"On my way home from work one Saturday afternoon I was lucky enough to
pick up Homer's 'Iliad' for twopence at an old bookstall. After dinner I
took it upstairs--we were able to afford an upstairs room by that
time--and read it lying on the bed. What a revelation it was to me!
Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up
before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted
land. It was a rare luxury to a working lad like me just home from work
to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs and gods of ancient
Greece."

The lad's imagination was also fired by "The Pilgrim's Progress."

"I often think of that splendid passage describing the passing over the
river and the entry into Heaven of Christian and Faithful. I can
sympathise with Arnold of Rugby when he said, 'I never dare trust myself
to read that passage aloud.'"

While in the blacksmith's shop he learnt many portions of Shakespeare,
with a decided preference for Hamlet. Often in the little forge the men
would say, "Give us a bit of Shakespeare, Will." The lad, nothing loath,
would declaim before them, more often than not in a mock heroic strain
that greatly delighted his grimy workmates.

Like many other members of the Labour Party, he was greatly influenced
in his youth by the principles of "Unto this Last" and "Alton Locke."
Later in life he was set thinking seriously by a course of University
Lectures on Political Economy delivered in Poplar by Mr. G. Armitage
Smith.

Quietly he began building up a little library of his own, supplemented
in later years by an occasional autograph copy from authors whose
friendship he had made. Father Dolling, for instance, sent him a copy of
his "Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum," inscribed:--


     WILL CROOKS.--The story of a kind of trying to do in a different
     way what he is doing.--With the author's best Christmas wishes,
     1898.


In the flyleaf of this book Crooks keeps the following letter, received
after his election to Parliament from the author's sister:--


     DEAR MR. CROOKS,--I have just seen the papers, and must send you a
     word of congratulation on your success. If, as I believe, the
     blessed dead are allowed to watch over and help us, I am sure my
     dear brother is thinking of you and praying that in your new sphere
     of usefulness you may be helped to do God's will.--Truly yours,

     GERALDINE DOLLING.


The book that he values most to-day is a pleasant little story for boys
called "Joe the Giant Killer." It was given to him by the author, Dr.
Chandler, Bishop of Bloemfontein, when rector of Poplar. The reason he
values it so is because the printed dedication reads:--


     "_To_ WILL CROOKS, L.C.C.
     _In memory of many years
     Of delightful comradeship in Poplar._"


When, after the big victory in Woolwich, Crooks was able to add M.P. as
well as L.C.C. after his name, there came among hundreds of other
congratulations a cabled cheer from South Africa. It was signed
"Chandler."




CHAPTER IV

ROUND THE HAUNTS OF HIS BOYHOOD

     Proud of his Birthplace--Famous Residents at Blackwall--Memories of
     Nelson's Flagship--Stealing a Body from a Gibbet--A Waterman who
     Remembered Dickens.


Of many interesting days spent with Crooks in Poplar, one stands out as
the day on which he showed me some of the haunts of his boyhood.

Poplar is always picturesque with the glimpses it gives of ships' masts
rising out of the Docks above the roofs of houses. With Crooks as guide,
this rambling district of Dockland, foolishly imagined by many people to
be wholly a centre of squalor, becomes as romantic as a mediæval town.

It was not always grey and poor, as so many parts of it are to-day,
though even these are not without their quaint and pleasant places.

We wended through several of its grey streets, making for the river at
Blackwall. Everywhere women and children, as well as men, whom we passed
greeted Crooks cheerily.

"Can you wonder so many of our people take to drink?" And he pointed to
the shabby little houses, all let out in tenements, in the street where
he was born. "Look at the homes they are forced to live in! The men
can't invite their mates round, so they meet at 'The Spotted Dog' of an
evening. During the day the women often drift to the same place. The
boys and girls cannot do their courting in these overcrowded homes. They
make love in the streets, and soon they too begin to haunt the
public-houses."

He changed his tone when we entered the famous old High Street that runs
between the West India Docks and Blackwall. He pointed out the house
where he spent many years of his boyhood after his parents moved from
Shirbutt Street. The old home is associated with his errand-boy
experiences. In those days he finished work at midnight on Saturdays,
and knowing that his parents would be in bed, he often lingered in the
High Street into the early hours of Sunday, playing with other lads who,
like himself, had just finished work.

As we continued our way down the High Street together, he surprised me
by his wonderful knowledge of the neighbourhood. Here was a Poplar man
proud of Poplar. He told me that the now silent High Street was at one
time a sort of sailors' fair-ground, like the old Ratcliff Highway. It
was there, he said, that Poplar had its beginning, according to the
historian Stow. There shipwrights and other marine men built large
houses for themselves, with small ones around for seamen.

Not for these people alone were the houses built. Worthy citizens of
London lived down there. Sir John de Poultney, four times Lord Mayor,
lived in a quaint old house in Coldharbour, at Blackwall, that stood
until recently. This same house once formed the home of the discoverer,
Sebastian Cabot. It was there that Cabot made friends with Sir Thomas
Spert, Vice-Admiral of England, who also had a house at Poplar, and
promised Cabot a good ship of the Government's for a voyage of
discovery. And, later still, Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have been the
tenant, and of course legend credits him with having smoked one of his
earliest pipes there.

Gone are the old houses now, with the old traditions, the old gaiety,
the old mad enthusiasm for the sea. In his day the Blackwall seaman was
a dare-devil, efficient man, eagerly coveted by shipowners and captains
alike. Never did a ship sail from Blackwall during Crooks's schooldays
without most of the boys staying away from school, regardless of results
to their skins the next morning, in order to join in the farewell
cheering from the foreshore. The welcome home to the Blackwall ships was
something to remember. It was always a bitter disappointment to the
boys, since it robbed them of an opportunity of playing truant, if a
ship came home and docked during the night, having come up, as the old
tide-master used to say, and brought her own news.

Little remains to suggest the sea in Poplar High Street to-day. The old
highway has lost its old glory. The old folks have forsaken the old
homesteads. Of the few old buildings that remain, nearly every one has
been cut up into small shops and tenements. One or two general dealers
still pose as ships' outfitters, and an occasional shop remains as a
marine store, as though in a final feeble struggle to preserve the old
traditions.

Crooks recollected well the period that costermongers thronged this
riverside highway. They came about the time seamen were deserting it, so
that the street for some time lost nothing of its noise or bustle. The
day came when they, too, departed, seeking a more profitable field in
Chrisp Street, on the northern side of East India Dock Road, where to
this day they still hold carnival. That they carried away something of
the seafaring character of their former highway is borne out by the
nautical turn they give to some of their remarks.

"Here," cried a fish-dealer of their number the other day, holding aloft
a haddock, "wot price this 'ere 'addick?"

"Tuppence," suggested a woman bystander.

"Wot! tuppence! 'Ow would you like to get a ship, an' go out to sea an'
fish for 'addicks to sell for tuppence in foggy weather like this?"

As we passed down that portion of the High Street that skirts the
Recreation Ground, Crooks pointed out the quaint old church of St.
Matthias. He told me it was the oldest church in Poplar, built as a
chapel-of-ease to the mother church of East London, St. Dunstan's. Then
it was that all the parishes that now go to make up the teeming Tower
Hamlets were comprised in Stepney. As the Port of London in those days
was confined to the Pool and lower reaches and to the riverside hamlets
of the East End, that was why people born at sea were often entered as
having been born in the parish of Stepney.

St. Matthias' Church afterwards became the chapel of the old East India
Company. Poplar people sometimes call it that to this day. The Company's
almshouses were near, and the chapel ministered to the aged almoners
alone. According to tradition, the teak pillars in the church served as
masts in vessels of the Spanish Armada. Upon the ceiling is the
coat-of-arms of the original East India Company. Adjoining the church is
the picturesque vicarage, where Crooks pointed out the coat-of-arms
adopted by the United Company a hundred years later on the amalgamation
with the New East India Company.

This chapel contains a monument to the memory of George Green, who
stands out as Poplar's worthiest philanthropist. Schools, churches, and
charities in Poplar to-day testify to his generosity. He was one of the
owners of the famous Blackwall Shipbuilding Yard, that turned out some
of the sturdiest of the wooden walls of England. They were proud in the
shipyard of the _Venerable_ and the _Theseus_, the former Lord Duncan's
flagship at the battle of Camperdown, the latter at one time Nelson's
flagship, in the cockpit of which his arm was amputated.

The people of old Poplar had at times unpleasant things to tolerate.
Sometimes the pirates hung at Execution Dock, higher up the river, would
be brought down, still on their gibbets, and suspended for a long
period at a place near Blackwall Point, as a warning to all seafarers
entering the Port of London.

One of the old East India Company pensioners used to tell Crooks's
father how one of the bodies hanging on a gibbet was stolen during the
night, under romantic circumstances. An old waterman at the stairs was
startled at a late hour by a young and ladylike girl coming ashore in a
boat and asking him to lend a hand with her father, who, she said, was
dead drunk in the bottom of the skiff. A youth was with her, and the
waterman assisted them to carry the supposed drunken man to a carriage
which was waiting. Not until the pirate's body was missing in the
morning did the old waterman know the truth.

We reached the river ourselves from the Blackwall end of the High
Street, while Crooks was giving me these entertaining glimpses into the
past of his native Poplar. The sight of Blackwall Causeway and the river
crowded with craft instantly reminded him of the last mutiny in the
Thames, of which he has gruesome recollections, associated with bad
dreams as a lad, caused by the knowledge that dead seamen lay in the
building adjoining his home. It was here at Blackwall Point that the
crew of the Peruvian frigate mutinied in 1861. He relates graphically
how the eleven men who were shot dead on the ship were brought ashore
and laid in the mortuary next his mother's house by the casual ward.

The old watermen at the head of the Causeway, waiting to row people
across to the Greenwich side, welcomed Crooks with a cheerful word as we
approached. They were soon full of talk. The eldest told how he went to
sea as a boy in the famous wooden ships turned out of Blackwall Yard.
His aged companion remembered the stage coaches coming down from London
to Blackwall. He was proud also of a memory of Queen Victoria's visit to
the neighbourhood to see a Chinese junk.

The two ancient watermen soon overflowed with reminiscences. One
remembered his grandfather telling how King George the Fourth would come
down to see the ships built at Blackwall, and how on one occasion a
sailor who had come ashore and got drunk took a pint of ale to his
Majesty in a pewter and asked him to drink to the Army and Navy.

"Ah!" exclaimed the other, fetching a sigh; "but don't you remember that
old Yarmouth fisherman who used to bring his smack round here from the
Roads and sell herrings out of it on this very Causeway?"

"Remember! What do _you_ think? That was the old man who would never
keep farthings. In the evening, when he'd got a handful in the course of
the day's trade, he would pitch them in the river for the boys to find."

"Likely enough," interposed Crooks. "I mudlarked about here myself as a
lad."

The eldest of the ancient watermen would have it that this old boy from
Yarmouth was the original of Mr. Peggotty, and that it was at Blackwall
Dickens first made his acquaintance. He said he had often seen Dickens
himself about those parts.

We ventured a doubt.

"Why, bless my life!" he cried; "ain't I talked to him at the Causeway
here many a time?"

This, of course, was unanswerable, so we asked what Dickens did when
there.

The ancient waterman thought a moment.

"What did Dickens do?" he ruminated. "Now, let me see. What _did_
Dickens do? I know: Dickens used to go afloat!"

The other declared that Dickens did more than that: he would often go
into the fishing-smack.

We immediately assumed that it was the fishing-smack of the old Yarmouth
salt that was meant. We were wrong. It was another "Fishing Smack," one
of the quaint old taverns by the river still standing in Coldharbour.




CHAPTER V

IN TRAINING FOR A CRAFTSMAN

     Three years in a Smithy--Provoking a
     Carman--Apprenticeship--Winning a Nickname--Activity of an Idle
     Apprentice--"Not Dead, but Drunk"--A Boisterous Celebration--The
     Workman's Pride in His Work.


The three years in the blacksmith's shop in Limehouse Causeway, that
commenced at the age of eleven after the errand-boy period, were years
of hard work and long hours. The lad's working day began at six in the
morning and often did not close until eight at night. Working overtime
meant ten and twelve midnight before the day's work was done. He was
paid for the overtime at the rate of a penny an hour.

He was kept hard at it all the time. Once, in the excitement of a
General Election, in the days of the old hustings, he stole away from
the forge for an hour. The smith had returned in his absence, and
inquired angrily where he had been.

"Only to see the state of the poll."

"_You'll_ know the state of the poll on Saturday, young fellow."

He did. A shilling was taken from his week's wages.

It was a heavy blow. It delayed a promised pair of new trousers. The
need for a new pair was constantly being brought to his notice in a
more or less personal way. The biggest affront came from a tall boy at a
shop he passed on the way home.

"Hi!" this youth would call after him. "Look at the kid wot's put his
legs too far frew his trowsis!"

Nevertheless, the little chap in the short trousers was immensely proud
to be at work. He would blacken his face before leaving for home so as
to look like a working man.

Many a long day's search had he before getting that job. He spent hours
one morning in calling at nearly all the shops in the two miles' length
of Commercial Road between Poplar and the City. But nobody wanted so
small a boy. On his way back, not yet wholly disheartened, he turned
down Limehouse Causeway and peeped in at the smithy.

"Can you blow the bellows, little 'un?" he was asked.

Couldn't he; you just try him!

They tried him for an hour, then told him he was just the boy they
wanted.

They got a lot of smiths' work in connection with the fitting out of
small vessels in Limehouse Basin and the West India Docks. The first job
at which Will assisted was on board the barque _Violet_.

The Causeway where the smithy stood was so narrow that carts could not
pass each other. Two carmen driving in opposite directions met just
outside the smithy door one afternoon. Neither would give way, and they
filled the air with lurid fancies. Young Will came out of the smithy and
took the part of the one whom he believed to have the right on his side.

Seizing the bridle of the other driver's horse, he commenced to back the
cart down the lane. The man's flow of language increased as he tried to
get at the lad with his whip. Will dodged first to one side and then to
the other, then under the horse's nose, eluding the lash every time. At
last he got the cart backed right out of the lane, allowing the other
driver to pass in triumph.

The enraged carman sprang down and chased the lad back into the smithy.
Will had just time to spring behind the big bellows out of sight before
the other appeared foaming at the door. With many oaths the man swore he
would have vengeance on the boy some day, come what would.

Some years afterwards Crooks found himself at work in the same yard as
his burly enemy, but time, which had made little difference to the man,
had transformed the boy out of all recognition. Crooks asked him if he
remembered the event.

"Yes; and if I came across that youngster to-day I'd break every bone in
his body."

"I don't think you would, Jack," Crooks replied, preparing to take off
his coat.

Then the carman understood.

In his third year at the smithy Will was getting six shillings a week,
with something more than a penny an hour for overtime. Small though the
wages were, they were very welcome at home; and it meant a great deal
to his mother when she sacrificed more than half this amount in the
lad's best interest.

She was as determined that her boys should learn a trade as that they
should learn to read and write. She took Will away from the smithy and
his six shillings a week, when she found he was not to be taught the
business but to be merely a smiths' labourer, and she apprenticed him to
the trade of cooper at a weekly wage of half a crown.

"The sacrifice of a few shillings a week," says Crooks, "which mother
made in order that I should learn a trade was only one of the many
things she did for me as a boy for which I have blessed her memory in
manhood many times. I really don't know now how she managed to feed us
all, after losing my three-and-six a week. I know that she always put up
a good dinner in a handkerchief for me to take to work. It may have got
smaller towards the end of the week, like many of the men's. I remember
one Monday dinner-time flopping down on a saw-tub and opening my
handkerchief as the foreman passed.

"'That looks a good meal to begin the week on,' he said. 'I see how it
is;--


     It's Monday plenty,
     Tuesday some,
     Wednesday a little,
     Thursday none,
     Don't worry about Friday,
     You get your money on Saturday.'"


Among the workmen was a thinker and reformer far ahead of his times. It
was dangerous in those days for workmen to give expression to advanced
views, and as he was a married man he made no display of his opinions.
He seems to have seen promise in young Will, for he talked to him freely
on social and political matters, encouraging him to read by lending him
books and papers, and inspiring him with an enthusiasm for the teaching
of John Bright.

So much so, that at home Will was nicknamed Young John Bright. An uncle,
looking in on the eve of the General Election of 1868, said jokingly,
"Now, young John Bright, tell us all about what is going to happen."
Nothing loath, Will delivered a long speech on the political situation,
and foretold, among other things, that the Liberals would sweep the
country, and that one of their first acts would be to disestablish the
Church of Ireland. The prophecy, needless to say, was fulfilled.

Will was one of half-a-dozen apprentices in the coopering establishment.
While still the youngest among them he made his mark by acting as
spokesman in a sudden emergency. The lads thought they had a grievance
under the piece-rate system. They went in a body to the head of the
firm, the eldest primed with a well-rehearsed speech stating their case.

If Will saved the situation, he began by nearly bringing disaster upon
it. It happened that the spokesman's father was an undertaker in
Stepney, and that on Sundays the lad, with becoming gravity, frequently
walked as a mute at funerals.

Just as the solemn procession of aggrieved apprentices was about to
enter the office, the employer's wondering eye upon them through the
window, Will called out in a stage whisper:

"Now, Joe, put on your best Sunday face!"

The fearful tension was broken. All the boys burst into laughter. The
lads tumbled over each other in their eagerness to get outside the
passage. When the head of the firm opened his door Will alone remained.

"What's all this about, Crooks?"

The youngest apprentice thereupon briefly ran over the lads' grievances,
and on being asked why the deputation fled in laughter, he explained the
meaning of the Sunday face.

The employer laughed as boisterously as his boys. He told Crooks to go
back to work, promising that the lads should have fair play. That very
day he issued orders placing the apprentices under better conditions.

One of the lads, with an unconquerable liking for lying in bed, had not
turned up by nine o'clock on a certain morning. The other apprentices
stole out with a barrow and went to his house with the object of
wheeling him to work.

Half an hour later the lad rushed into the cooperage panting and
dishevelled, his clothes torn, his hat missing.

"Done 'em!" he gasped, after the manner of Alfred Jingle. "I rushed out
o' the back door, got over the wall, over the next wall, fell on a
flower-bed, man came out (such langwidge!), climbed his wall afore he
could ketch me, landed clean on a dog kennel, dog tore me clothes, got
over another wall--into the street at last--boys caught sight o' me,
howling chase with barrow, woman let me run through her house, over
another wall. Done 'em!"

Something more than laziness explained the occasional absence of others
from work. Certain of the men would be missing for two or three days.
During an unusually long absence of one of the older coopers, the men
and lads rigged up a dummy figure, dressing it in whatever clothes of
their own they could spare. They placed the dummy in an improvised
coffin by the side of their missing comrade's bench, with an imitation
tombstone at the head, bearing the inscription, "Not dead, but drunk."

The morning came when the delinquent turned up. A deep silence fell over
the workshop as he entered. Men and apprentices alike suddenly appeared
to be absorbed in work. The late-comer pretended not to see the effigy
by his bench. With quiet deliberation he took off his coat, rolled up
his sleeves, and lighted the furnace-fire. No one spoke. The old man
brought two handfuls of shavings and piled them on the fire until it
roared again. Then suddenly he seized the dummy figure and hurled it on
the flames.

Everybody sprang forward to snatch his garments from the fire. One
rescued his coat, another his vest, another his cap, another his
muffler, another his pair of boots, the old man belabouring each in
turn.

"Ah!" he cried with a chuckle, as the singed garments were dragged away.
"I knew that would find you all out."

Quaint and boisterous customs were observed when an apprentice was out
of his time. The greater part of the day was given up by men and boys
alike to revelry and horse-play.

The ceremonies began at about eleven o'clock in the morning, to be kept
up for the rest of the day. First, the apprentice was seized and put
into a hot barrel. Round him stood some fifty men and boys checking
every attempt he made to get out, tapping him with hammers on the head
and fingers and shoulders every time he made an effort to escape. When
his clothes--the last he was to wear as an apprentice--had been singed
in the barrel out of all further use, he would be dragged out and tossed
in the air by about a dozen of the strongest men.

Only once did the employer try to stop these boisterous interludes. He
never tried again. The men laid hold of him, and for about five minutes
treated him to a vigorous tossing.

It then became the bruised and singed apprentice's privilege to pay for
bread and cheese and drink. In the afternoon the men turned the yard
into an imitation fair. Flags and bunting were put up and side shows
were improvised. One feature was to persuade the fattest men to walk the
tight-rope.

On the whole, Will had a happy time as an apprentice, working hard and
laughing hard, more than once threatened with dismissal because his
spirit of fun led him into mischief. He became a good craftsman, and to
this day boasts of being as skilful at his own trade as any man. He
attributes this to the old spirit of craftsmanship that held good in his
day. One incident during his apprenticeship helped to make him take a
pride in what he made with his own hands. An old workman in the shop,
after finishing a piece of work, set it in the middle of the floor and
walked round it admiringly several times.

"'Pon my honour, one would think you'd made a thousand-horse-power
engine," said the apprentice.

"Never you mind, sonny," replied the old workman. "Whether it's a
thousand-horse-power engine or not, _I made it myself_!"

"That is the spirit I want to see revived among workmen to-day," Crooks
told the Labour Co-partnership Association in 1905, relating the
incident at their annual exhibition at the Crystal Palace. He went on to
say:


     I want to see workmen proud of what they make with their own hands.
     That is impossible in many workshops to-day because of the soulless
     way in which they are conducted. Many workmen have got the idea
     they only exist for what other people can get out of them. I blame
     employers as much as workmen for this state of things. There are in
     the country some excellent employers. Unfortunately, they are
     becoming fewer. The individual employer is going out, and the
     limited liability company coming in, having as its one object the
     making of profit, utterly regardless of the bodies or souls of the
     men or women from whom the profit is wrung. The result of running
     works and factories for company dividends only has destroyed the
     old school of masters and men, both of whom had a pride in their
     work, both of whom stamped their work with the mark of their own
     individuality.

     To get back to a better state of things workmen must become their
     own masters, and the Co-Partnership Association is showing men the
     way. It is teaching them to live and work with and for each other.
     I want men who groan under the injustice of so much in our
     industrial system to understand that they can do much for
     themselves. By combination and co-operation they can run businesses
     of their own. But they must first take to the water before they can
     swim. It means discipline, but trade unionism has meant discipline.
     The administrative capacity of workmen can be developed to an
     enormous extent yet.

     How are we going to train our men and women workers to take on the
     responsibilities of regulating their own lot in a better manner?
     Trade unionists are now learning that instead of spending money on
     strikes it is better to spend it in starting workshops of their
     own. The time has come when Labour leaders and others might well
     cease talking to the workers about their power and begin talking to
     them about their responsibilities.


The day after this speech he received the following letter from George
Jacob Holyoake, a few months before that veteran co-operator passed
away:--


     "Against my will I was prevented from being present at the Crystal
     Palace, but that does not disqualify me from expressing my thanks
     for the wise and practical speech you made--in every way
     admirable."




CHAPTER VI

TRAMPING THE COUNTRY FOR WORK

     Marriage--Dismissed as an Agitator--Home broken up--"On the
     Road"--Timely Help at Burton--Finding Work at
     Liverpool--Bereavement--Back in London--A Second Tramp to
     Liverpool--Feelings of an "Out-of-Work."


On a grey morning in the December of 1871 two young people came out of
St. Thomas's Church, Bethnal Green, man and wife. Both were only
nineteen years of age. The husband was Will Crooks; his wife the
daughter of an East London shipwright named South.

They set up their home in Poplar, near the coopering yard where Will was
employed. At first they had to be content with apartments; then came a
small tenement; soon after a little house of their own.

It was fair and pleasant sailing for the first two or three years. He
got a journeyman's full wages the first week he was out of his
apprenticeship. It seemed as though he were to have an unbroken run of
good fortune. The bright hopes soon collapsed.

Good craftsmanship and trade unionism, blended as they were in Crooks,
made him rebel against certain conditions of his work. Finally he
refused to use inferior timber on a job, and objected to excessive
overtime. Although the youngest among them, he addressed the workmen on
the subject. A few days afterwards he was dismissed.

He took his notice lightly enough, confident that as master of his trade
he could soon secure work again.

It was not to be. Every shop and yard in London was closed to him. Word
had gone round that he was an agitator.

Try as he did, he could not break through the barrier that had been
raised against him. Wherever he applied, whether in Rotherhithe,
Battersea, Hackney, or Clerkenwell, he was known as the young fellow who
would not work with shoddy material and talked other men into the same
view.

The experience was the same at every place of call.

"What's your name?"

"Crooks."

"Of Poplar?"

"That's me."

"We don't want anyone."

From several of these places he heard afterwards that the instant he was
gone other men were taken on.

Since London was a closed door to him, he turned his back upon it, and
set out tramping the country in search of work. With a fully-paid-up
trade union card, he knew he could count on an occasional half-crown to
help him on the way at those towns where his society had branches.

His home had to be broken up. His wife with their child went to her
mother's, there to await for weary weeks the result of her husband's
first quest into the country.

The only piece of good news came from Liverpool. Not until he reached
that city did he get a job. He tramped into Liverpool from
Burton-on-Trent. Never in his life, either before or since, did a silver
coin mean so much to him as the half-crown given by a member of his own
trade to help him on the road as he set out from Burton for Liverpool.

Twenty-nine years later Crooks was speaking at a meeting of co-operators
in Burton when he recognised his former benefactor on the platform. He
told the audience of his last visit to their town, remarking how on that
occasion no one but this man offered him hospitality, whereas now, if he
lived to be a hundred and fifty years of age, he would not be able to
accept all the invitations he had received from friends and would-be
friends to spend week-ends with them. His regret was, he told the
meeting, that those good people did not begin to ask him earlier and
that they did not think of asking other poor men in a similar plight to
his when he first entered Burton.

By the time he dragged himself into Liverpool he was without a sole to
his boots. The journey was completed on the uppers of his boots, with
the aid of string, a device he had learnt from friendly tramps on the
road. Having got what looked like a promising job, he invited his wife
to join him with their child, enclosing the fare from his first week's
wages.

This work in Liverpool had not been obtained without much weary
searching. A good friend to the young fellow in his distress was the
Y.M.C.A. in that city. Nearly thirty years later he addressed a crowded
public meeting in the large hall of the Liverpool Y.M.C.A. He had an
enthusiastic welcome when he rose to speak.


     I am very grateful to you for your kind welcome of me to-night.
     This hall has carried my memory back to 1876 when I first visited
     Liverpool. I was then looking for work, knowing what it was to want
     a meal many a day. I don't know what I should have done without the
     many kindnesses I met with from Liverpool people, and from none
     more hearty and truly helpful than I received here in this
     building.


But Liverpool is associated with one of the saddest memories in his
life. This is how he refers to it:--

"My wife joined me, bringing our little girl, a bonny child of whom we
were immensely proud. The little one pined from the day it reached
Liverpool and died within a month. I thought my wife would have followed
the child to the grave within a day or two. I never saw her so much
affected in all my life. She pleaded to be taken away from that place.
'Anywhere,' she said, 'only let's get away.' So we buried our little
girl in Liverpool one rainy Saturday afternoon, and came back to London
to seek work the same night."

It was the most miserable railway journey of his life. If anything, the
misery was increased when as the dull dawn crept over London he and his
wife stepped out of the train and walked the seven miles of silent
streets between Euston and Poplar.

No better fortune awaited them in London. The young husband sought work
with no success. News reached him that his trade was thriving again in
Liverpool, so he set out to tramp there a second time.

"It is a weird experience, this, of wandering through England in search
of a job," he says. "You keep your heart up so long as you have
something in your stomach, but when hunger steals upon you, then you
despair. Footsore and listless at the same time, you simply lose all
interest in the future.

"I have always been drawn towards Canon Liddon since reading an address
of his in which he said that the roughest tramp upon the road was, in
his eyes, one who might come to be numbered among those favoured by
Christ, and that the most brilliant and distinguished guest he had ever
met had no higher possibility than that.

"Nothing wearies one more than walking about hunting for employment
which is not to be had. It is far harder than real work. The
uncertainty, the despair, when you reach a place only to discover that
your journey is fruitless, are frightful. I've known a man say, 'Which
way shall I go to-day?' Having no earthly idea which way to take, he
tosses up a button. If the button comes down on one side he treks east;
if on the other, he treks west.

"You can imagine the feeling when, after walking your boots off, a man
says to you, as he jingles sovereigns in his pocket, 'Why don't you
work?' That is what happened to me as I scoured the country between
London and Liverpool, asking all the way for any kind of work to help me
along."

I remember Crooks recalling his experience at a dinner-party given by
the Hon. Maud Stanley at her Westminster house. Crooks was then a
fellow-member with Miss Stanley of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, and
she invited us on that occasion to meet her friend Professor Wyckoff,
the American author, who wrote "The Workers." In "The Workers" the
author tells the story of how for a time he turned his back upon his
usual well-to-do haunts in order to find out what earning one's own
living by tramping from place to place doing manual work was actually
like.

Crooks, who, perhaps unconsciously to himself, had become the chief
entertainer at table, showed Mr. Wyckoff in a moment that, realistic
though his experiences had been, he could not possibly enter into the
feelings of the real out-of-work who had nothing but sixpence between
him and starvation. However hard up Mr. Wyckoff might have been at
times, he always had the consolation that if the worst came to the
worst, funds awaited him at home. The ordinary workman tramping the
country, said Crooks, had no such feeling of a sure foundation
somewhere, and it was only when you felt--as he had often felt when
tramping for work--the utter hopelessness and loneliness of things,
made doubly worse by the knowledge that wife and children were suffering
too, that you could enter fully into the feelings of an out-of-work.

Evidently Mr. Wyckoff had not thought of this view before, but it seemed
to me to mark the all-important difference between the amateur and the
real sufferer. There are some things no man can play at, and the game
Mr. Wyckoff, with the best intentions in the world, and with a good deal
of self-imposed suffering, tried to play was one of them. There are some
experiences of life which no one can ever have for the seeking only.
They come; they can never be commanded.




CHAPTER VII

ONE OF LONDON'S UNEMPLOYED

     A Casual Labourer at the Docks--A Typical Day's Tramping for Work
     in London--Demoralising Effects of being Out of a Job--Emptying the
     Cupboard for a Starving Family--Work found at last--Doing the
     "Railway Tavern" a Bad Turn.


In Liverpool again the prospect was not what he had been led to believe.
An odd job here and an odd job there still left him in want. At last, in
response to the earnest entreaties of his wife, whom nothing could
persuade to revisit Liverpool, he returned to take his chance again in
London.

This time Crooks determined to try to find work outside his own trade.
He went down to the Docks, where, by the aid of a friendly foreman, he
got occasional jobs as a casual labourer.

The sight of so many other poor fellows struggling at the Dock Gates
proved more than he could bear. He turned away from the eager mass of
men one morning, resolved never to join in the demoralising scrimmage
again. With a trade of his own he felt he had no right to take a job for
which so many men, more helpless than himself, were daily striving.

The morning he turned away finally from the Docks was the very one on
which his friend the foreman had promised him a job if he turned up at
the gates by noon. The piteous appeals of the hundreds of other men for
the half-dozen places offered so affected him that he hung back and sat
down out of sight. He saw the foreman scan the crowd, looking for him,
and then engage the number of men he wanted and go inside. Crooks went
off to seek work in other quarters.

One typical day of tramping for work in London he described to me
thus:--

"I first went down to the river-side at Shadwell. No work was to be had
there. Then I called at another place in Limehouse. No hands wanted. So
I looked in at home and got two slices of bread in paper and walked
eight miles to a cooper's yard in Tottenham. All in vain. I dragged
myself back to Clerkenwell. Still no luck. Then I turned towards home in
despair. By the time I reached Stepney I was dead beat, so I called at a
friend's in Commercial Road for a little rest. They gave me some Irish
stew and twopence to ride home. I managed to walk home and gave the
twopence to my wife. She needed it badly.

"That year I know I walked London until my limbs ached again. I remember
returning home once by way of Tidal Basin, and turning into the Victoria
Docks so utterly exhausted that I sank down on a coil of rope and slept
for hours.

"Another day I tramped as far as Beckton, again to no purpose. I must
have expressed keen disappointment in my face, for the good fellows in
the cooperage there made a collection for me, and I came home that night
with one and sevenpence.

"There are few things more demoralising to a man than to have a long
spell of unemployment with day after day of fruitless searching for
work. It turns scores of decent men into loafers. Many a confirmed
loafer to-day is simply what he is because our present social system
takes no account of a man being out of work. No one cares whether he
gets a job or goes to the dogs. If he goes to the dogs the nation is the
loser in a double sense. It has lost a worker, and therefore a
wealth-maker. Secondly, it has to spend public money in maintaining him
or his family in some kind of way, whether in workhouse, infirmary,
prison or asylum.

"A man who is out of work for long nearly always degenerates. For
example, if a decent fellow falls out in October and fails to get a job
say by March, he loses his anxiety to work. The exposure, the
insufficient food, his half-starved condition, have such a deteriorating
effect upon him that he becomes indifferent whether he gets work or not.
He thus passes from the unemployed state to the unemployable state. It
ought to be a duty of the nation to see that a man does not become
degenerate."

In his own unemployed days, he awoke every morning with the
half-suppressed prayer: "God help me to-day. Where shall I look for work
to-day? Where can I earn a bob?"

Actual starvation was only kept away by occasional help from his own
and his wife's people and by the few shillings out-of-work pay which his
Trade Union allowed him every week. Even in those days he was never so
hard up as not to be ready to help others in greater privation. He was
out one morning when he met a man whom he knew slightly near his own
house. He could see that he looked ill and that he wanted to speak. So
he went up to him and said:

"Well, mate, what's amiss?"

With tears in his eyes the man told his tale--his tale of starvation. He
was afraid or ashamed to ask for relief, and there had been no food in
his house for over twenty-four hours.

Crooks told the man to go home, promising to come to him presently. He
himself went back to his own home and told his wife.

"Let's see what we've got," she said.

All she found was a portion of a packet of cocoa and a loaf of bread.
She made a large jug of cocoa and gave her out-of-work husband that and
the loaf to take round to the other man's family.

"It's all we have in the house," she said; "but we've had our breakfast,
and they haven't."

Work came at last in an unexpected way. He was returning home after
another empty day when he hailed a carman and asked for a lift.

"All right, mate, jump up," was the response.

As they sat chatting side by side, the carman learnt that his companion
was seeking work.

"What's yer trade?" he inquired.

"A cooper."

"Why, the guv'nor wants a cooper."

So instead of dropping off at Poplar, Crooks accompanied the carman to
the works, and he who had tramped the country and London so long in
search of a job was at last driven triumphantly to work in a conveyance,
"like a Lord Mayor or a judge," as he afterwards described it.

On the first pay day, glad at heart, he was about to start for home. The
men stopped him.

"We always go to 'The Railway Tavern' on Saturdays. A decent chap keeps
the 'Railway.' Come and join us."

"Not me."

"Won't the missus let you?"

"No, she won't."

Throughout the next week he was mercilessly "chipped" in the workshop
and referred to as the man whose missus was waiting for him at the other
end. At the close of the next week he was asked after pay-time--

"Did the missus meet you last week?"

"Yes, and she'll meet me this week too."

"Come along, old chap, no kid, have a parting glass."

"No, I can part without the glass."

At the end of the third week a fellow-workman whispered: "What time are
you going home, Will?"

"Same time."

"Let me leave with you, will you?"

"Certainly. Your missus been at you?"

"Yes; the fact is, Will, I stayed drinking down here until I'd blown
eight bob last week. It meant my two little girls had to go without
their promised pairs of new boots."

"All right, Jim; I'll give you a whistle when it's time to go."

At the end of six weeks the "Railway" was without a customer from that
shop.

That work was a stepping-stone to another and a better job at
Wandsworth. His new employer urged him to leave Poplar and take a house
near the works.

"But suppose you pay me off when the busy time passes?" said Crooks.

"I shan't do that," was the answer. "I like your work too well."

The day came when Crooks was offered work nearer Poplar. When he handed
in his notice the Wandsworth employer became wrathful.

"Never mind, I'll come back here when I'm out of work again," said
Crooks good-naturedly.

"Will you? I can promise you there'll be no more work for you here.
Leaving me like this!"

"Oh, yes, there will. You haven't kept me on for love, you know. I like
you, and I'll come here for another job directly I'm out of work again."

It was not to be. Crooks was never out of work again in his life.

Years later he found himself sitting next to his old Wandsworth employer
at a public dinner.

"You never came back to claim that job," said the good-natured old man.

"I will when I'm out of work--as I promised."

"Ah! you don't know how often I wished you would come back. You may
have talked to the men a good deal about the rights of Labour, but I
never knew the rights of employers to be observed so honourably. You
seemed to keep the men more sober and the work up to a higher level of
efficiency than I had ever known before. That's why I wanted you to come
and live near, thinking to make sure of you. That's why I was so angry
when you handed in your notice."




CHAPTER VIII

THE COLLEGE AT THE DOCK GATES

     Commending himself to his Employers--"Crooks's College"--His Style
     of Teaching--Specimens of his Humour--Admonitions against Drink and
     Betting.


With regular work well assured, Crooks was able to give more time and
study to public affairs and to the Labour Movement. For an unbroken
period of ten years he held a good position in a large coopering
establishment in East London, where he was held in high esteem by men
and masters alike, the latter more than once intimating to him they
would make it worth his while to remain in their service all his life.

Crooks was always proud of the good standing he held in his employers'
eyes. He knew it was due solely to his skill as a workman, for it
certainly did not tell in his favour that he was beginning to be known
more widely than ever as a Labour agitator. This, as a term of derision,
used to be applied to all Labour leaders in the 'eighties and long
afterwards. Certain writers and speakers who wished to be particularly
derisive would refer to them as paid agitators. Even to this day an
occasional echo of the cry reaches the ears. The offenders belong to the
same school as the lady who withdrew her money from the bank after the
General Election of 1906 because so many Labour members had been
returned.

It was during these years of regular work that Crooks founded his famous
College. He began a series of Sunday morning Labour meetings outside the
East India Dock Gates, which have been continued ever since. The place
in association with these Sunday meetings came to be known among Poplar
workmen as Crooks's College.

Many a useful lesson has he driven home to his working class audiences
at his College at the Dock Gates. He generally leads off with some
little humorous fancy.

"If you fellows only have a quid a week, don't despise your share in the
country's government. You needn't go the length of the Cockney taxpayer
who rowed out to a man-o'-war at Portsmouth.

"'Ship ahoy!' he shouts. 'Ship ahoy!'

"At last he makes someone hear.

"'Is the captain aboard?' says he.

"'What d'yer want with the captain?' asks a bluejacket.

"'Feller,' says the taxpayer, big-like, 'just tell your captain that one
of the owners of this 'ere ship wants to come aboard, and look slippy
about it.'

"The captain invites him on the deck, and he goes round the ship
sniffing at this and complaining about that until the ship's carpenter
gets riled.

"'Don't you know that I have a share in this ship, feller?' says the
taxpayer.

"'Oh, have yer?' says the carpenter, handing him a chip. 'You just take
your share then, and get over the side double quick, or I shall be under
the necessity of showing you the way.'"

When the East End was suffering from one of the water famines that used
to be fairly common before the supply was taken over by a public
authority, he never tired of calling the attention of his Dock Gate
meetings to the fact that the company went on charging the same rates,
whether there was water or not.

"When I got home last night, my wife said, 'Will, the water's come on at
last; but just look at it--it's not fit to drink!' So I went to the tap
and saw a lot of little things swimming about in the water. The wife was
alarmed, and asked what we should do. 'My dear,' I replied, 'for
goodness sake don't say anything about it to anybody. If this gets to
the ears of the company they might charge us for the fish as well as for
the water.'"

Never was instruction at college imparted with so many human touches and
humorous sallies. He noticed that many of the men slunk away when the
public-houses opened. He made it a practice to commence his own address
a few minutes before the public-houses threw open their doors. In this
way he kept most of the men about him. The waverers among them were
shamed into staying by little thrusts like these:--

"Some of you chaps imagine you can only be men by taking the gargle. If
you could see yourselves sometimes after you've been indulging you
would jolly soon change your opinion. Perhaps you've heard of the man
who asked for a ticket at the railway junction.

"'What station?' asked the booking clerk.

"'What stations have you got?' he stammered, clinging to the ledge for
support.

"But even that chap was not so bad as the railway guard who went home a
bit elevated. He saw the cat lying on the hearthrug, and chucked it in
the oven, slamming the door and yelling, 'Take yer seats for
Nottingham.'

"I've heard men say they only take it because the doctor orders it. One
of these chaps was caught having secret nips of whiskey. 'Bless yer
heart!' he says. 'Don't yer know I has ter take it for me health? I
suffers wiv tape worms.'

"One of the chief reasons some of you chaps booze is because you are too
sociable-like in standing treat. A rattling boozer was once screwed up
to the point of signing the pledge. He writes his name, puts his hand in
his pocket, and asks how much?

"'Nothing to pay,' says the young lady, smiling.

"'What? Nothing to pay?' he repeats in amazement. 'Do I get it for
nothing? Do you mean to say that I, a working man, am offered something
for nothing?'

"'Nothing to pay,' repeats the young lady.

"'Well, 'pon my honour, this is the first time I've ever got anything
for nothing. Come and have a drink.'"

"Some of you fellows who live on the Isle of Dogs have seen the
allotment system started there. I asked one of the publicans of the
neighbourhood why he complained about the allotments. 'Why,' said he,
'the men used to come in and have a gargle on Saturday afternoons, but
now they go and dig clay.'

"But ask the men's wives what they say about the allotments, and you
will hear a different story. The men now have time not only to cultivate
their plots, but to look after their families.

"How many of our poor women who give way to drink can trace their
descent to the neglect of the men who married them. It may be hard to be
burdened with a drunken wife, but often enough a good deal of the fault
is on the side of the husband because of his early neglect. He should
have strengthened her. He should have shared her sorrows as well as her
joys. We ought not to leave a woman to bear all her own burdens. Many a
young wife breaks down because of early neglect at a time when she ought
to be built up, when it would be real manliness on the husband's part to
put up with a little trouble for her sake.

"Some of you giggle when you see a man nursing a baby in long clothes.
What is there to giggle at? I carried a baby in long clothes up the
stairs of Shadwell Station the other day, because I saw it was too much
for the poor mother who was struggling along.

"'Here,' I said, 'hand it over; I'm used to that sort of job.'

"My wife heard of it before I got home, and she said to those who told
her, 'Well, if the woman didn't thank him, I shall when he comes home.'

"Perhaps you thought I looked a fool clambering up the stairs with a
baby in long clothes. I don't think so. I satisfied myself by doing what
evidently wanted doing."

He hurried away from his college by the Dock Gates one Sunday morning to
keep an appointment to address the Isle of Dogs Progressive Club. He
found less than a dozen men in the lecture hall, while the bar and the
billiard room were crowded. He walked out without a word and sat down in
the club garden.

"This is all right. I'm enjoying myself perfectly here," he told the
bewildered secretary. "If they prefer to play at billiards and to drink
beer, let them. I am quite content to enjoy this garden."

In ten minutes time not a man remained in the bar or billiard room. The
lecture hall was filled.

"We deserve your reproach, Will," shouted someone from the audience when
at last he stepped on to the platform.

If he was severe on drink he was more severe on betting.

"Many a man here," he told one of his Sunday morning audiences at the
Dock Gates, "can tell me the pedigree of half-a-dozen race-horses. It
shows you can think if you like. But that kind of thinking is what I
call thinking off-side."

Crooks had a hundred happy illustrations for urging upon his
working-class hearers the duty of citizenship and co-operation.

"We chaps are like the old lady's cow that gave a good pail of milk
regular, but often kicked it over. We have built up trade unions and
friendly societies and co-operative societies that stand for the best
working class organisations in the world. But we have a weakness for
kicking the pail over. How? Because we are constantly spoiling our own
good work by allowing other classes to do all the governing of the
country.

"It reminds me of a group of boys I saw coming home from a football
match.

"'How did yer get on?' they were asked by other lads in the street.

"'Won.'

"'How many?'

"'Seven to nothing.'

"'Been playing a blind school?'"

And then Crooks would go on: "Well, we workers have been the blind
school, and we have been allowing other classes to score goals against
us all the time. If we haven't been blind we've certainly been
blindfold. Tear the bandage off your eyes. Be men."

Behind all his banter there was a serious message in all his Sunday
morning addresses.

"Labour may be the new force by which God is going to help forward the
regeneration of the world," he told his hearers. "Heaven knows we need a
little more earnestness in our national life to-day, and if the
best-born cannot give it, the so-called base-born may. We common people
have done it before. Who knows but what it is God's will that we should
do it again? We can all afford to laugh at that dear lady, bless her,
who could not bear the idea that some of the Apostles were fishermen,
and who solemnly asked her minister whether there was not some authority
for believing that they were owners of smacks.

"We working men are gaining power. Let us see that we also gain
knowledge to use the power, not to abuse it. Parliament is supposed to
protect the weak against the strong. It doesn't pan out like that. After
all these years of popular education, isn't it about time we taught the
dialectical champions in the House of Commons that the people are the
creators of Parliament, and that we demand as its creators that
Parliament should be at the service of the people and all the people,
instead of at the service of the powerful and the wealthy?

"But don't think that Parliament and municipality can do everything.
They are not going to make the world perfect. What they can do and what
we should insist on their doing is to make it easier to do right and
more difficult to do wrong. They can deal with those 'who turn aside the
needy from judgment and take away the right of the poor of My people,'
but they cannot make good men and good women. That must depend upon
ourselves."

That College at the Dock Gates can point to some notable achievements.
The Blackwall Tunnel, which has its entrance at the very spot where the
meetings take place, was one of the earliest things the College agitated
for. Between the dock wall and the tunnel is a large municipal gymnasium
and recreation ground, the scheme for which was first unfolded by Crooks
at the College, when the ground was a waste and the children were
without play-places.

Crooks's College began the campaign for a free library. The
well-equipped public library that now stands in the High Street was its
first achievement. The College founded the Poplar Labour League, which
first introduced Crooks to public life. Crooks's College first created
the demand for a technical institute for Poplar. The institute is now an
accomplished fact, comprising the best municipal school of marine
engineering in the country. Crooks's College started the campaign for
the footway tunnel under the Thames between the Isle of Dogs and
Greenwich, which now serves the daily convenience of thousands of
work-people. Crooks's College began that policy of humane treatment of
workhouse inmates which had a great deal to do with improved
administration of the Poor Law all over the country. Crooks's College
was the originator of the farm colony system in this country. Crooks's
College stood out for the welfare of Poor Law children. Crooks's College
broke down the corrupt practices on three of the old municipal
authorities in Poplar.

And perhaps the greatest occasion in the history of the College at the
Dock Gates was that Sunday morning in June, 1906, that followed the
opening of the Local Government Board Inquiry into the administration of
the guardians. For the week previously the Press and the local Municipal
Alliance had done their best to poison the mind of Poplar against its
long-trusted Labour man.

How would the College fare now? The attendance at the Dock Gates that
morning was one of the largest on record. Thousands of ratepayers were
there, and when Crooks walked through their ranks to the little portable
rostrum he had one of the great receptions of his life. He urged them
not to be discouraged because their cause seemed to be under a cloud,
but to strengthen his hands in maintaining the integrity of public life
and to possess themselves in quietness, confident that before long the
accused would become the accusers.




CHAPTER IX

FROM THE CHEERING MULTITUDE TO A SORROW-LADEN HOME

     The Dock Strike of 1889--"Our Dock Strike Baby"--At the Point of
     Death--Discouraging a Missioner--Before a House of Lords
     Committee--Entrance upon Public Life--A Widower with Six
     Children--Second Marriage.


The great Dock Strike of 1889 nearly brought Crooks to his grave. Much
of the brunt and burden of that famous struggle fell upon his shoulders.
Months before, he had prepared the way by his Dock Gate meetings. When
at last the disorganised bands of dock and river-side labourers startled
the industrial world by standing together as one man for better
conditions of work and a minimum wage of sixpence an hour, Will Crooks
was one of the half-dozen Labour Leaders who directed the campaign to
its historic triumph.

Seldom, while the strike lasted, did he take his clothes off. He worked
at his own trade during the day and gave nearly the whole of the night
to the strikers. The outdoor meetings he addressed kept him going up to
midnight. The early morning hours saw him lending a hand at the
organising offices and relief stations until the dawn called him to his
ordinary daily work again.

There were times when he gave both day and night to the dockers,
preferring to lose time at his own work rather than miss an opportunity
of lending a hand to his less fortunate fellows. Sometimes he would
accompany the men in their demonstrations through the City and the
West-End.

Those daily marches of the dock labourers opened London's eyes. The
orderliness of the ragged battalions, headed by "the man in the straw
hat," who was afterwards to take a seat in the Cabinet--John Burns--was
as impressive as their numbers. They were forbidden to use bands of
music in the City streets, so the men conceived the ingenious device of
whistling. It had a curious effect, some fifty thousand men whistling
the "Marseillaise" all the way from Aldgate to Temple Bar.

When Crooks did get home for an hour or two in the evening it was not to
rest, but to sit by the bedside of his ailing wife and tend the youngest
of his children. Ill though his wife was, little though she saw of him
during the strike, she urged him from her sick bed to keep on helping
the dockers.

"Don't mind me, Will," she told him, when he would peep in anxiously
after many hours' absence. "I shall be all right if you can only pull
those poor dockers through."

He came in one night after nearly two days' absence, having arranged to
spend the whole of that evening by her bedside. She had just given birth
to a son--"our Dock Strike baby," as he came to be called for long
afterwards, now a promising apprentice in a Thames shipbuilding yard.
She was very happy at the good news he brought of the progress of the
strike. She was happier still at the prospect of his being spared for
his first evening at home. Presently the sound of hurrying footsteps was
heard in the street. Something important had happened. The men wanted
Will Crooks. Would he come again?

He looked at his wife. She must decide.

"Go, Will," she said. "Never let it be said your wife kept you from
helping those in need."

The reaction came after the victory. When the dockers in their thousands
were back at work rejoicing at having won their sixpence an hour, Crooks
lay at the point of death in the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road. It
was the first time he had been ill in his life. Friends feared this
first illness was to be his last. Not until after a struggle of thirteen
weeks could he be pronounced out of danger.

He is fond of telling this incident that occurred in the hospital:--

"When I was approaching convalescence, and naturally fairly happy at the
thought of soon being able to get out and return home, a missioner, as I
think he was called, came to see me as I lay in bed in the hospital. He
said to me quite bluntly, 'Are you not a miserable sinner?'

"I said: 'No; I may be a sinner, but I am not a miserable one just now.'

"The missioner left my side in disgust, and then returned and asked to
be allowed to send me a Testament. I consented, and received in a day
or two one marked in several places with red ink, apparently intended to
impress upon me what a depraved and miserable creature I was.

"The missioner called again, and questioned me as to whether I had read
the marked passages and what I thought of them.

"I told him that, as applied to me, they were not true.

"I shall never forget the look I received, and I expect I was given up
as a lost man.

"A few minutes after he had left my ward a patient from another ward
came to see me, and said:--

"'I say, Twenty-five, that's the way to get rid of them.'

"I said, 'What have _you_ done to get rid of him?'

"'Oh,' he answered. 'The missioner said, "Are you not a miserable
sinner?" and I said "Yes"; and then he said, "Thank God for that," and
went away.'"

Soon after Crooks came out of the hospital he made his first appearance
in a public capacity in Parliament. He was invited on July 11th, 1890,
to give evidence before the Committee of the House of Lords on the
Infant Life Insurance Bill. It was seriously argued at the time that
working class parents deliberately neglected their children for the sake
of the insurance money. The Bill actually proposed that the insurance
money be kept out of the hands of the parents altogether and paid to
the undertaker. The offending clause disappeared after Crooks's
evidence.

The _Evening News_, which headed its report of the day's proceedings "A
Working Man shows the Weak Points in the New Bill," summarised what
Crooks told the Committee thus:--


     A journeyman cooper from Poplar, evidently a thoroughly
     straightforward and independent working-man of more than average
     intelligence and facility of expression, gave evidence yesterday
     before the Committee of the House of Lords, presided over by the
     Bishop of Peterborough.

     He said he objected to the provision in the Bill for the payment of
     insurance money to the undertaker. It was not merely to cover the
     actual expenses of burial that the working man insured his child,
     but to provide "black" and to meet other unavoidable expenses. If
     insurance were abolished workmen would be obliged to fall back on
     the old practice of "Friendly Leads," which generally led to
     drinking at public-houses.

     He knew thousands of families of working people, and was perfectly
     certain that there was not among them one mother lacking maternal
     affection. There was no sacrifice the poor would not make for their
     children, and it would be felt as a great reproach to say that a
     child had not been properly cared for. In other cases bad mothers
     would be bad mothers under any circumstances, and it was for the
     criminal law to find them out; but if there was one bad in a
     thousand he did not see why nine hundred and ninety-nine
     respectable persons should be punished.

     To stop child insurance, witness said in reply to Lord Norton,
     would punish honest parents and do no good whatever.


It was about this time that the working people of Poplar began to urge
him to go into public life. They elected him a member of the Poplar
Board of Trustees, in regard to which he had recently unearthed a
notorious scandal. Then he was made a Library Commissioner in
recognition of the prominent part he had taken in persuading Poplar to
adopt the Act. Soon afterwards he was returned as one of the two Poplar
representatives to the London County Council.

The cloud that had hung over his home all through the Dock Strike was to
grow yet darker. He had not been on the County Council many weeks when
his wife died. She had barely recovered from the illness that kept her
bedfast during the exciting days of the strike. Then there came the
three anxious worrying months as her husband lay between life and death
in the hospital. The worry wore her out, and a brave God-fearing woman
of the people went down to her grave commanding her husband to work on.

Thus, at the commencement of his public career and while still in his
thirties, Crooks found himself a widower with six children on his hands,
the youngest a baby.

Among the many letters of sympathy that poured in upon him, that which
got nearest to his heart came from one whose acquaintance he had but
recently made, who described himself as "a fellow sufferer under a like
bereavement." The writer was Lord Rosebery, then Chairman of the London
County Council.

All that first year of Crooks's public life was gone through while he
was bearing heavy burdens at home. His new duties as London County
Councillor, the many urgent calls to help the Labour movement in other
quarters, now that he was beginning to be known far beyond the bounds of
Poplar, kept him away from home often until a late hour. All this added
greatly to his domestic cares, since he had to be both mother and father
to his children. The eldest daughter, fourteen years of age, managed
bravely; but many a night he turned away from addressing the cheering
multitude of a crowded, glittering hall and went to a cheerless home to
find the youngest children crying. He would help to wash them, to mend
their clothes, and to cook for them.

A year's experience convinced him that neither he nor the children could
go on in that way. His aged mother rendered all the help her growing
infirmities would allow. The old lady, with her married children's aid,
now lived in modest comfort in a little house off the High Street. There
lodged with her a young nurse engaged at a neighbouring institution,
whose maiden name was Elizabeth Lake, a native of Gloucestershire.
Crooks laid his case before her. She consented to become his wife and
bring up his children. They were married in Poplar Parish Church in
1893.

The union has been a singularly happy one. Mrs. Crooks has done more
than bring up the children. She has guided and inspired her husband in
all his public life. So much so, that when some eight years later he
laid down his robes of office after a successful year as Mayor of
Poplar, he stated publicly in acknowledging a presentation to himself
and the Mayoress:--

"Without my wife's aid I would have been of little use in my public
work. Whenever I return home troubled or anxious, or defeated on some
pet scheme, I never have from my wife anything but cheering and
encouraging words. She it is who has made my public life possible. She
it is who deserves your thanks far more than I."




CHAPTER X

A LABOUR MEMBER'S WAGES

     The Will Crooks Wages Fund formed--The Poplar Labour
     League--Crooks's Election to the London County Council--Friends
     outside the Labour Movement--Money no Substitute for Personal
     Service--Refusing highly-paid Posts--Offer of a House rent-free for
     Life declined--Not Risen from the Ranks.


How came it that a working man like Crooks was able to give his whole
time to public work?

It was simply because his fellow workmen wished it. They went to him in
deputation in the early 'nineties, and said to him in effect:--

"Look here, Crooks. You can be more useful to us in public life than at
the workman's bench. We want you to stand for the London County Council
and some of the local bodies. Give up your work and we'll raise for you
from among ourselves an amount equal to your present wages."

To which Crooks replied:--

"All right, mates, since you wish it. But understand! as soon as you
tire of me, no grumbling behind my back. Come forward and say so
plainly, and I'll go back to the bench at once."

So the Will Crooks Wages Fund was formed by the Poplar Labour League.
The first treasurer was the Rev. H. A. Kennedy, of All Hallows',
Blackwall. Afterwards the then Rector of Poplar (Dr. Chandler) was
invited by the working men to become treasurer of the fund, and he held
the office until called away to a Colonial bishopric.

We have seen how the Poplar Labour League came into being. It was one of
the first achievements of Crooks's College by the Dock Gates. Originally
it was named the Poplar Labour Election Committee. Its first executive
consisted of the Rev. H. A. Kennedy and local representatives of the
London Trades Council, the Engine Drivers' and Firemen's Union, the
Watermen's Society, the Dockers' Union, the Philanthropic Coopers'
Society, the East London Plumbers' Union, the Federated Trade and Labour
Unions, and the Gasworkers' Union.

The League was one of the pioneers of Labour Representation in this
country. Long before the British Labour Party organised the present
system of paying its Members of Parliament, this little League in Poplar
for an unbroken period of a dozen years had shown how men from the ranks
of Labour could be maintained in public life. The League had a motto:
"The aim of every workman, whatever his task, whether he labours with
axe, chisel, or lathe, loom or last, hammer or pen, hands or head,
should be the ideal, the best, the perfect."

The League was successful from the start. Its earliest effort was put
forth at the London County Council election of 1892. The result of that
effort can be judged from the following remarks in the League's first
annual report:--


     The return of Will Crooks to the London County Council marks an
     epoch in the life of industrial Poplar.

     From time immemorial this hive of industry has been represented by
     employers of labour and wealthy capitalists. Their record is now
     broken. Labour has awakened to a sense of its duty. We hope the
     awakening will be permanent, and that worthy representatives may be
     found to fill the vacancies on the various administrative and
     legislative bodies.

     We suggest to all working men's societies that wherever and
     whenever it is possible they should subscribe to the Labour
     Member's Wages Fund, for be it remembered that our Member is a
     representative of all classes and not of one particular individual
     class; and so long as he retains our confidence it is our duty to
     support him to our utmost ability.


The response of the trade societies and workmen and friends generally
was such that within a few months the League by a unanimous vote decided
to raise the Labour Member's wages from £3 to £3 10s. a week to meet his
travelling expenses. For the first seven or eight years of his public
life that was absolutely the only source of Crooks's income.

The League remained faithful to its early pledge all the time. Through
good and ill report, through all the changes and dissensions which such
an organisation was bound to cause, the League never once faltered in
its support of Crooks. Regularly at its annual meetings the League
passed a vote of thanks to "our representative on the L.C.C. for his
untiring devotion to Labour's cause and his perseverance in initiating
social reform so beneficial to the working classes. They further desire
to record their perfect confidence in him and congratulate him on the
success of his work."

Many trade societies other than those on the original list became
subscribers to the Wages Fund through their local branches. Among them
were the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the Stevedores' Labour
Protection League, the London Saddle and Harness Makers' Society, the
Postmen's Federation, the London Carmen's Trade Union, the Friendly
Society of Ironfounders, the Municipal Employees' Association, and the
Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants.

Certain admirers of Crooks outside the Labour Movement also sent
subscriptions to the League for the Wages Fund. Canon and Mrs. Barnett
and Dr. Clifford were occasional subscribers; so were Mrs. Bernard Shaw,
Mr. Cyril Jackson, Mrs. Ruth Homan, Mr. G. W. E. Russell, Mr. Sidney
Webb, Sir Melville Beachcroft, Canon Scott Holland, Mr. Fred Butler, the
editors of two or three London newspapers, and both Conservative and
Liberal Members of Parliament.

Occasionally working men in distant parts of the country who had heard
Crooks speak or watched his public work would send in their mite,
generally anonymously. One such contribution, sent during the Woolwich
by-election, consisted of four penny stamps, stuck on a torn piece of
dirty paper, on which were written the words:--


     Will you please except four stamps toward the expens of will
     Crooks election and may god bless him in being successful in
     winning the seat for Labour

     from a working man.


That was all. Crooks keeps the stamps and the note to this day.

This may be the proper place to make public another fact bearing on his
financial position. Many people have sent cheques to him direct, some of
these marked for his own personal use, some for helping the poor as he
thought best, others containing nothing beyond a brief note without name
or address like the following:--


     This is sent by a well-wisher, who believes that you are an honest,
     straightforward fellow with a large heart for those less fortunate
     than yourself.


Every sum received in this way Crooks has given to the poor. He has
neither taken a penny for his own personal use nor allowed a penny to
pass into the coffers of the Labour League. In one distressful winter
over £300 was thus sent to him and his wife. With the co-operation of a
local committee, the whole of this sum was spent in employing
out-of-work women and girls in making garments for their needy
neighbours. By these means dozens of families were saved from the
workhouse.

Crooks discourages those who give money only. "Give part of yourself
rather than part of your wealth," he tells them.

He has little sympathy with people who give money and then run away. A
person once called at his house during a bad winter and offered him
£500.

"I am anxious about the poor people, Mr. Crooks," said the visitor, "so
I've brought down this money for you to help them."

"Have you?" was the response. "But what are _you_ going to do?"

"Oh, I'm going to the south of France. I cannot bear England in the
winter."

"Then I advise you to take the five hundred pounds with you."

"Do you refuse it?"

"Absolutely. It is cowardly for a man like you to offer five hundred
pounds and then run away. You ought to do more than give it; you ought
to spend it. Come down and see that the proper people get it. It is not
so hard to raise five hundred pounds for the poor as it is to distribute
it properly among the poor."

The Labour League did more than send Crooks to the London County
Council. It secured representation on the local Poor Law and municipal
bodies. It promoted social life as well as public life among the working
classes of Poplar. By entertainments, lectures, and excursions it
carried brightness and pleasure into the lives of the workmen, their
wives, and children. At Christmas time it acted as a kind of Santa Claus
to the poorest children of the district. It established a Loan and
Thrift Society, which soon had an annual turnover of £2,000. Throughout
it all the League never for a moment deserted its Labour Member.

Crooks in his turn remained faithful to the League in face of several
alluring offers. The one that tempted him most came from his own trade.
Before he quitted the workshop for public life a future managership had
been hinted at. He had not been on the County Council more than a few
months when a vacancy in his former workshop occurred. At once he was
approached and urged to give up the L.C.C.

The post offered him carried with it a salary of £500. He had six
children to bring up. There was the uncertainty as to the Labour League
being able to keep up the Wages Fund. He pondered over the matter
carefully. His decision changed the current of his life. A manager, no
matter how sympathetic, could not have remained long in the Labour
Movement. Besides, in this case there were hints of a future
partnership. Then it was that he decided calmly and deliberately to give
his life not to money-making, but to the service of the people. He
deliberately chose to remain a poor man in the service of poor men.
Having been made to bear so much of the care of this world, he
determined that he would know nothing of the deceitfulness of riches.

Nothing has ever shaken him from that decision. From various quarters
since then other good offers have come his way. One of them, a
Government post, must be regarded as a singular tribute to his worth,
since the offer came from a Conservative Cabinet Minister.

The manager of a large firm engaged in carrying out public works to the
value of over a million sterling, gave me at the time a frank opinion of
Crooks from the employers' standpoint.

"I can't help liking that chap Crooks. But it's a pity he's on what I
call the wrong side. He's been negotiating with our firm until he has
compelled us to pay our men several thousand pounds a year extra in
wages. And a lot of thanks they give him for it! I overhear them
sometimes talking at work. They say he wouldn't have got them more money
if he hadn't been getting something out of it himself. Now if Crooks
would only place his ability on the employers' side he could earn a
thousand a year easily."

For ten years after he entered public life Crooks was content with the
same five-roomed house in Northumberland Street where the deputation of
working men found him when they came to invite him to stand for the
County Council. When he did move it was into a neighbouring street,
Gough Street, where the upgrown family had the advantage of an
additional room. That remains his home to this day.

One of his ardent admirers in Poplar, a well-to-do man, on learning he
was moving from Northumberland Street, offered him a house of his own
rent free. It was a large and pleasant house in East India Dock Road,
boasting a garden front and back. The owner implored him to take it for
the rest of his life, "as a small tribute from one who appreciates the
splendid public services you have rendered to Poplar."

"It would never do for me to live in such a house," was Crooks's reply
in thanking the well-wisher. "My friends among the working people would
fear I was deserting their class, and would not come to me as freely as
they come now. My enemies would say, 'Look at that fellow Crooks; he's
making his pile out of us.' A Labour man like me must leave no opening
for his enemies."

We have seen, then, that the only source of Crooks's income during the
first years of his public life was the £3 10s. a week paid by the Poplar
Labour League. After six or seven years this salary was increased to £4
in view of his greatly widened sphere of public service. This payment
was stopped in 1903, when Crooks joined the official Labour Party in the
House of Commons. Then he received the usual payment of £200 a year,
given to each member of that party by the Trade Unionists of the
country. A small additional sum has since been voted to him annually by
the Poplar League and the Woolwich Labour Representation Association to
meet the out-of-pocket expenses inseparable from a Member of
Parliament's life. In addition he has received an occasional fee for a
public address.

Let these simple facts, then, be the answer to those people who,
surprised at the amount of public work he carries out, keep asking
suspiciously how he does it. Crooks himself never hesitates to speak
out, either in public or private, as to his financial position.

"How do I do it?" Crooks repeats to his working class audiences. "As a
pioneer of paid Labour representation I have been confronted with this
question through the whole of my public career. All well and good; but
why is the question not put to other politicians and public men? You
working men have been the worst offenders. You never think of asking the
question of such men seeking public positions as monopolists, food
adulterators, scamping contractors, property sweaters, bogus company
promoters, and others who fleece you at every turn. You never dream of
asking it of young untried men fresh from the Universities, who in many
cases are only after the spoils of office. You are inclined to regard
all these people as gentlemen. But let a man from your own ranks offer
to serve you in public life, and always there are a crowd of objectors,
generally thickest at public-house bars, who want to know where the
Labour man gets his money from? Talk about the fierce light that beats
upon a throne, what is it to the fierce light turned upon a Labour
representative?

"How often, as I go about, do I hear of people saying sneeringly: 'Look
at that fellow Crooks. Who is he? He's only one of us, who has risen
from the ranks.' You just tell these people that Will Crooks has not
risen from the ranks; he is still in the ranks, standing four-square
with the working classes against monopoly and privilege."




CHAPTER XI

ON THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL

     The Labour Bench at the L.C.C.--Its First Party Meeting--The
     Programme--Crooks's First Speech in the County Hall--The Trade
     Union Wages Principle Adopted--One of the Master-builders of the
     New London--Retrospect--Chairman of the Public Control
     Committee--Keeping an Eye on the Coal Sack--The End of Baby-farming
     in London.


When Crooks entered the London County Council in 1892 he was a stranger
to almost all outside the little circle of Labour men sent up from other
divisions.

As a pioneer in Labour representation in London he had more than the
usual amount of suspicion and opposition to surmount. In those days a
Labour representative was often subjected to fierce personal attacks
both from the class he represented and from the better-off classes whose
domains for the first time working-men were entering. His every word and
act were under a double microscope. He had to be a Spartan in endurance
and a saint in character.

"Imagine," he once said to me during his early days on the Council, at
the time when one of its members, a peer, was associated with a
notorious case in the High Court, "imagine what an outcry there would
have been up and down the land if that Councillor, instead of belonging
to the House of Lords, had been a Labour representative."

The Labour bench at the County Council set the standard for sound and
steady municipal administration to the Labour Party of the entire
country. John Burns sat at one end of the bench, Will Crooks at the
other. Between them sat, at different times, men like Will Steadman,
secretary of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress
and M.P. for Stepney and later for Central Finsbury; J. Ramsay
Macdonald, secretary of the Labour Party and M.P. for Leicester; Isaac
Mitchell, then secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions; H.
R. Taylor, of the Bricklayers' Society, at one time Mayor of Camberwell;
C. W. Bowerman, of the London Society of Compositors and M.P. for
Deptford; George Dew, of the Carpenters' and Joiners' Society and
secretary of the Workmen's Cheap Trains Association; Harry Gosling, of
the Watermen's and Lightermen's Society; and W. Sanders, of the Fabian
Society and Independent Labour Party.

Crooks took the minutes of the first party meeting of the Labour Bench,
and he holds the document to this day. The meeting was held at the
offices of the Dockers' Union in the Mile End Road on April 26th, 1892,
a few weeks after the election which first made a L.C.C. Labour Party
possible. A line of policy was laid down that looks quite modest to-day,
now that it has become an integral part of ordinary L.C.C.
administration. At the time it was regarded by people outside the Labour
Movement as rank revolution.

In the dull and dingy room in Mile End this little band of Labour men
declared for direct employment of labour and municipal workshops. The
L.C.C. Works Department, the first of its kind in the country, was the
result. They agreed on a minimum wage of sixpence an hour for labourers
and ninepence for artisans, with a maximum working week of fifty-four
hours. In many L.C.C. departments higher wages were afterwards secured,
and in others an eight-hour day was introduced. They demanded a system
of retiring pensions for workmen as for officials. This, too, in certain
departments soon became practical politics on the County Council.

A few days later Crooks was making his first speech at the County Hall.
He took part in the debate on the Fair Wages Clause, the final form of
which was settled on the principle he laid down. Up to the birth of the
London County Council, which was only three years old when Crooks joined
it, municipal bodies knew nothing of Fair Wages Clauses in contracts.
The London County Council set an example which has since been followed
by public authorities all over the kingdom.

This triumph for Labour was not won without a keen struggle. All kinds
of proposals were discussed with a view to defining a fair wage. It
looked as though the Labour Bench were in danger of losing the day, when
the situation was saved by what John Burns afterwards told Crooks was a
happy inspiration.

The County Council was about to adopt what the Labour Bench regarded as
an unsatisfactory resolution. Crooks hastily wrote out an amendment
which ultimately formed the basis of a settlement. He showed it to
Burns, as leader of the Labour Party, and the latter immediately got up
and moved it. The words are worth repeating, since they supplied the
foundation for a Fair Wages Clause destined to become famous:--


     That all contractors be compelled to sign a declaration that they
     pay the trade union rate of wages and observe the hours of labour
     and conditions recognised by the London Trade Unions, and that the
     hours of labour be inserted in and form part of the contract by way
     of schedule, and that penalties be enforced for any breach of
     agreement.


Before long this was the only proposal before the Council. The original
motion was withdrawn, while amendment after amendment directed against
the proposal Crooks had prepared was thrown out. Moderate and
Progressive members got up to say that to enforce trade union wages was
to fly in the face of political economy. It was this remark that drew
from Crooks his maiden speech. How little he was known then may be
judged from the fact that the _Daily Chronicle's_ report the next day
referred to him as Mr. Brooks. Thus:--


     Mr. Brooks said that political economy never took humanity into
     account, but unless humanity was considered there could be no
     justice to the worker. No contractor had ever been ruined by paying
     trade union rates of wages. The best wages had always meant the
     best workmen. Trade unions were anxious that the surplus labour of
     the country should be employed, and they only asked the Council to
     fix a minimum rate of wages. The sooner the Council employed men
     direct the better. In the name of humanity and Christianity he
     appealed to the Council to adopt trade union rates of wages.


The day this report appeared Crooks received the following letter from
"Marxian," of the _Labour Leader_, his friend George Samuel:--


     MY DEAR CROOKS,--Are you the Mr. Brooks of to-day's _Chronicle_
     report? If so, permit me to congratulate you on your speech. It
     struck the one true note in all the weary debate. The awakened
     consciousness of man has already interfered pretty considerably
     with the economic "law of population" and must interfere even more
     drastically with the economic "law of supply and demand." Both laws
     are for semi-brutes and not for men. To say that supply and demand
     shall settle wages is brutal. You may not be a very learned man,
     friend Crooks, but at any rate you are not weighted with that false
     learning which slays the heart to feed the head.


The fair wages debate went on from week to week at the County Hall, not
wearily, as Crooks's correspondent suggests, but with much spirit and
party feeling. Finally Lord Rosebery, as chairman, advised the Council
to hold a special meeting to settle the question. Before that meeting
took place the chairman invited Crooks to discuss the matter with him
with a view to arriving at a compromise likely to commend itself to the
majority. Crooks refused to withdraw his claim for trade union wages,
and after the two had had a long informal talk on the question, Lord
Rosebery accepted the Labour member's view.

When the special meeting assembled the late Lord Farrer (then Sir
Thomas Farrer) carried an amendment to the trade union motion. By this
amendment the word "London" was deleted from the motion, and it was made
to read that contractors should "pay the trade union rate of wages and
observe the hours of labour and conditions recognised by the trade
unions _in the place or places where the contract is executed_."

It will be seen, then, that the principle of trade union wages as laid
down by Crooks remained intact. On this principle the L.C.C. Fair Wages
Clause was established. It stipulates that the "rates of pay are to be
not less nor the hours of labour more than those recognised by
associations of employers and trade unions and in practice obtained." It
provides further that "where in any trade there is no trade union, the
Council shall fix the rates of wages and the hours of labour."

The Labour Councillor for Poplar was soon on the warpath again. He
called the Council's attention to the low wages paid to some of the park
attendants. He instanced the man in charge of Red Lion Square, who was
receiving no more than thirteen shillings a week.

"The man's not worth more," shouted a member. "He's got a wooden leg."

"Yes, but he hasn't got a wooden stomach," came the retort from the
Labour Bench.

And the man with the wooden leg, as well as other park attendants, had
their wages brought up to the living standard.

Crooks soon became a good all-round municipal administrator, as well as
a Labour representative. He had stated in his first election address:--


     As a workman I should seek especially to represent the interests of
     the working classes who form three-fourths of the ratepayers of
     Poplar, while giving every attention to the general work of the
     London County Council and to the general interests of Poplar.

     I am heartily in favour of what is known as the London
     programme--of Home Rule for London, as enjoyed by other
     municipalities; of the relief of the present ratepayers by taxing
     the owner as well as the occupier; and of the equalisation of rates
     throughout London for the relief of the poorer districts.

     I am in favour of municipal ownership or control of water,
     tramways, markets, docks, lighting, parks, and the police.

     I would support all measures which would help to raise the standard
     of life for the poor, especially in the way of better housing and a
     strict enforcement of the Public Health Acts.


Crooks, in fact, became one of the master-builders of the New London
which the L.C.C. created. In face of heavy opposition he was one of that
strenuous band of stalwarts who in the 'nineties raised London out of
the chaos and darkness that reigned before the County Council was called
into being, and gave the capital for the first time a sense of civic
unity.

In later years the claims of Parliament turned much of his energy into
other useful channels. But to this day he still remains a member of the
London County Council, and though now so much engrossed in national
politics, he is none the less proud of his record in the service of
London. He never looks back to the strenuous 'nineties on the County
Council without being thankful.

"I believe we put new life into the municipal politics of the whole
country in those days," he tells you. "The London County Council showed
the people of England what great powers for good lay in the hands of
municipalities. We became a terror to all the monopolists who had
fattened on London for generations. We struck at slum-owners, ground
landlords, the music-hall offenders, food adulterators, and those who
robbed the poor by unjust weights. We swept the tramway and water
companies out of London, and by substituting public control gave the
people better and cheaper services. We broke down the contractors' ring
and started our own Works Department, the worst abused but the most
successful and the most daring municipal undertaking of the last quarter
of a century.

"They were glorious days. That ten years' struggle between the people
and the monopolists was a strife of giants. The victory we gained in
London was a victory for progressive municipal government all over the
country.

"We on the Labour Bench were in the front of the battle all the time.
While the big campaigns were going on we were not neglecting the smaller
duties. We carried the County Council right into the working-man's home.
We not only protected poor tenants from house-spoilers and extortionate
water companies, we gave a helping hand to the housewife. We saw that
the coal sacks were of proper size, that the lamp oil was good, the
dustbin emptied regularly, that the bakers' bread was of proper weight,
that the milk came from wholesome dairies and healthy cows, that the
coster in the street and the tradesman in the shop gave good weight in
everything they sold."

For several years Crooks was a member and at one time chairman of the
Public Control Committee of the London County Council. It was this
committee that looked after these numerous small duties bearing so
important a relation to the working-man's home. Crooks kept a keen eye
on the coal sack. It was found that all over London coal was being
delivered in sacks too small to hold the prescribed weight. There was
consternation among the offending dealers when the County Council began
to pounce down upon them.

In reference to this matter Crooks tells a quaint story. During one of
the L.C.C. elections he heard a couple of lads in heated altercation.

"The County Council! Don't you talk to me about them people," one of
them cried. "They oughter be all at the bottom of the sea. They nearly
ruined my pore ole dad."

"That's bad. How was it?"

"Afore the County Council was heard of a two-hundredweight sack didn't
have to be no bigger 'n that"--holding his hand on a level with his
chest--"but now they have to be this size"--and his hand went above his
head. "Nearly ruined the pore ole man," he added. "He ain't got over it
yet."

The Public Control Committee did more than ensure proper weight; it saw
to it that dealers did not deliver coal inferior in quality to that
described on the ticket. It recovered damages from a merchant who
misrepresented the quality of his coals. When the case was reported to
the L.C.C. one of the older members, to whom this kind of thing was
wholly a new exercise of public duty, declared that he supposed the
Council would next be insisting that the workman's Sunday joint
consisted of nothing but good meat.

"And why not?" asked Crooks, who followed him in the debate. "If the man
pays for fresh meat and receives bad meat, and is too poor to take
action himself, it is the duty of the public authority to see that he
gets justice."

There is no more ardent believer than Crooks in Ruskin's dictum that
when a people apologises for its pitiful criminalities and endures its
false weights and its adulterated food, the end is not far off.

One at least of the pitiful criminalities of our modern
civilisation--baby-farming--was dealt a blow during his chairmanship of
the Public Control Committee from which it is not likely ever to
recover. He represented the L.C.C. before the Committee of the House of
Commons which considered the Infant Life Protection Bill promoted by the
Council. That was before his own Parliamentary career began. Day after
day the Labour man strove with barristers and Members of Parliament in
the Commons Committee Room to safeguard infants of misfortune from
cruelty and neglect. His advocacy prevailed. The Bill was passed.
Baby-farming as then existing in London came to an end.




CHAPTER XII

TWO OF HIS MONUMENTS

     Testimony from Sir John McDougall and Lord Welby--Declining the
     Vice-chairmanship of the L.C.C.--How Crooks Lost His Overcoat--Work
     on the Technical Education Board--The Blackwall Tunnel--Chairman of
     the Bridges Committee.


From the first, Crooks has shared the representation of Poplar on the
London County Council with Sir John McDougall. The retired merchant was
at the top of the poll in 1892, while the Labour man found himself
elected as the second member with a thousand majority over the two
Moderate candidates. At every L.C.C. election since Crooks has headed
the poll.

Two such men, of course, differ in their public policy widely. This
notwithstanding, Sir John paid his Labour colleague a striking tribute
during the parliamentary by-election in Woolwich. Sir John was Chairman
of the London County Council at the time. This is what he wrote to the
Woolwich electors a few days before the poll:--


     Mr. Crooks has been my colleague on the London County Council for
     the last twelve years, and during the whole of that time he has
     worked with great zeal and ability for the good of London.... His
     zeal is great, and his wisdom is as great as his zeal. I doubt
     whether anyone in London has done so much as he in all the
     measures which tend to the uplifting and the good of the people.


Lord Welby, another of his colleagues on the County Council, seized the
same opportunity to tell the electors what he thought of their Labour
candidate. The two opinions, coming from men who had often opposed his
policy, and whose walks of life lay so widely apart from his own, form
no small tribute to the worth of his municipal work. Said Lord Welby:--


     Mr. Crooks's knowledge, his experience, his courage, his readiness
     of humour, his good temper, and, above all, his devotion to the
     work he has undertaken have made him one of the most useful, as
     well as one of the most popular, members of the London County
     Council.


His devotion was shown by his attendance. For thirteen years in
succession he never missed a single Council meeting. Until Parliament
began to claim his time his record of attendance every year, both at
Council and Committee meetings, stood among the half-dozen highest.

After such a long unbroken service, it was bitter to be kept at home by
an illness one Tuesday, the day the L.C.C. meets. Only one other
councillor--Sir William Collins--had kept pace with him during those
thirteen years. Crooks wrote to his friendly rival from a sick bed:--

"To-day you go ahead in this long and pleasant competition between us. I
cannot help thinking that after all it is a case of the survival of the
fittest, for I cannot leave my room."

"I hate to win under such conditions," said Sir William in his cheering
reply.

At one time the Progressive party proposed to nominate him as
vice-chairman, a position entitling the holder to the L.C.C.
chairmanship in the year following. The honour was declined. He believed
he could be more useful as an independent member.

So the sequel proved. As a member of the Parks Committee he never
wearied in working for more open spaces and children's play-places in
the poorer parts of London. It had long been a grievance to the working
classes of London that nearly all the parks lay in the West End and the
suburbs. Since the poor districts were now too thickly covered with
houses ever to permit of spacious parks being provided in their midst,
Crooks was one of the most earnest in pleading that the Council should
make amends by rescuing every vacant plot of land that remained and
converting it into a recreation ground, no matter how small.

His strenuous plea secured for the East-End alone three splendid open
spaces. These are the Bromley Recreation Ground, the Tunnel Gardens at
Poplar, and the Island Gardens that take their name from the Isle of
Dogs. To visit any one of these, and see therein children playing and
tired people finding rest, is to feel deeply what a benign influence has
fallen over these poor neighbourhoods.

Crooks obtained this recreation ground for Bromley at the cost of his
overcoat. The open space was formed out of something like a morass by
the banks of the Lea. It lay hidden away in that labyrinth of sterile
streets stretching southwards from Bow Bridge to the spot where the
lesser river loses itself in the Thames.

He had persuaded a party of his County Council colleagues to go with him
to the neighbourhood. They all left their overcoats in the private
omnibus that took them down from the County Hall, while he showed them
over the unwholesome little waste, as it then was, and pointed out its
possibilities as a recreation ground. When they returned they learnt
that one of the overcoats had been stolen.

"I see it's not mine," said Lord Monkswell, pointing to his astrachan.

"Nor mine," added the Hon. Lionel Holland, then M.P. for the division,
as he picked up one lined with fur.

"No," said Crooks; "people about here daren't wear overcoats like those.
If there's one missing, it's bound to be mine worse luck."

He laughed at the loss then and many times afterwards, though he had a
private reason for lamenting it; it was a recent gift from half a dozen
working-men admirers. He laughed because he found he was able to make
use of the incident in his long agitation on the L.C.C. to get the waste
reclaimed.

Whenever his colleagues inquired where was this mysterious outlandish
place he was so anxious to convert into a recreation ground, he would
make reply:--

"It's the place where they preferred my coat to Lord Monkswell's."

It came to be so well known on the County Council as the place where
Crooks lost his overcoat, that when finally he got a definite proposal
to buy the ground brought forward there was nothing but a good-natured
acquiescence from every member.

On the formation of the L.C.C. Technical Education Board, he pleaded the
cause of good craftsmanship with some effect. He carried a resolution
conferring special facilities for technical instruction upon
working-class districts.

Long after he retired from the Board he received from a working-man's
son a little proof of the practical results of his efforts. It came in
the following letter:--


     You will probably remember how some years ago you pleaded my case
     on the L.C.C., and how, through your influence, I was enabled to
     complete my studies in naval architecture at Greenwich College.

     I am sure you will be glad to know that I have now passed my final
     examination and have just been admitted a member of the Royal Corps
     of Naval Constructors. My official appointment is that of Assistant
     Constructor in one of the principal Government Dockyards, where I
     have been on probation for the last twelve months or more. The
     final examinations were held last July in London and occupied more
     than three weeks, with an exam, almost daily.

     I feel that I owe you a debt of gratitude for pleading my cause at
     the time. My father had spent his all on me while I was at the
     college, and he being a toolsmith with seven children, you can well
     understand that what he had by him he could ill afford on me.

     My father and the others of the family desire to join with me in
     this letter of thanks and gratitude to you.


Mention has already been made of how Crooks and the Poplar Labour League
originated at the Dock Gate meetings the scheme for a technical
institute for his native borough. So many times was this project delayed
that he often told his Poplar audiences he feared he would go down to
posterity as the man who talked of an institute that never came. It was
not until the early part of 1906 that the institute was opened. There is
a reference to it in the annual report of the Poplar Labour League for
that year:--


     Some years ago the League mooted the idea of a technical institute
     for Poplar. Mr. Crooks took it up and carried it to official
     quarters, never letting the subject drop, until it stands at last
     an accomplished fact. A School of Marine Engineering and Nautical
     Academy has recently been opened in Poplar.

     A handsome building has been erected in High Street, and in it will
     be taught seamanship and navigation, marine engineering and naval
     architecture and propulsion, general mechanical engineering,
     electrical engineering, pattern making, carpentry and woodwork, and
     theoretical and practical chemistry, physics, and mechanics.
     Nothing more appropriate could have been built in Poplar. It is
     mainly due to the tireless efforts of Mr. Crooks that it exists,
     and it will stand as a monument to him.


But Poplar boasts a greater monument to its Labour Councillor. He was on
the L.C.C. Bridges Committee during the making of Blackwall Tunnel. In
its day the largest subaqueous tunnel in the world, its construction
involved years of anxious labour.

The tunnel carries vehicular and passenger traffic under the Thames
between Poplar and Greenwich, five miles below the nearest bridge, that
at the Tower. Before it was made the two million Londoners living east
of the bridges were without any public means of crossing the river. To
build an ordinary bridge was impossible with so many ships passing night
and day to and from the London Pool. It was decided to take the traffic
under the Thames by descending roadways leading to a tunnel some seventy
feet below high-water mark.

From the time he joined the Council to that day in May, 1897, when the
King as Prince of Wales went down to Poplar to open the tunnel, on
behalf of Queen Victoria, Crooks was among the keenest of the public men
engaged in carrying that great engineering feat through. He made himself
so thoroughly master of the details that he was in great demand all over
London as a lecturer on the tunnel. The chief engineers on the works who
heard the lecture congratulated him on the way he made intelligible and
interesting the complicated system by which the tunnel was bored through
the clay within a foot or two of the river bed.

So satisfied were his fellow County Councillors with the practical work
he did at Blackwall that on its completion they elected him Chairman of
the Bridges Committee. In that capacity he steered through the Council
and through a Committee of the House of Commons two other schemes for
tunnels under the Thames, one for foot passengers only between Greenwich
and the Isle of Dogs, and the other for general traffic between Shadwell
and Rotherhithe, designed on a larger scale than the tunnel at
Blackwall. Interest in these schemes, however, can never be so great as
it was in the Blackwall experiment, the first of its kind attempted.

In the special Blackwall Tunnel number issued by the _Municipal
Journal_, Crooks figures among those described as "the men who made the
tunnel." Following sketches and portraits of Sir Alexander Binnie (then
the L.C.C. engineer, who designed the tunnel), of Sir Weetman Pearson,
M.P. (the contractor who executed the work), of Sir William Bull, M.P.
(who was then chairman of the Bridges Committee), is a reference to
other members of the Committee who took a prominent part in the work.
The first place after the chairman is given to Crooks. The _Municipal
Journal_ says:--


     Mr. Will Crooks, more than any other man, has made Londoners
     acquainted with the tunnel. His popular lecture on Blackwall Tunnel
     has been given in all parts of London to all kinds of audiences,
     and everywhere the clear, picturesque description Mr. Crooks has
     given, aided by the lantern and his own genial wit, has made
     intelligible to Londoners, old, young, rich, and poor, what is,
     after all, a somewhat dry and difficult subject.

     This only goes to show how closely Mr. Crooks himself has been
     identified with the construction of the tunnel. As one of the
     representatives of the Poplar district, he has turned his
     membership of the Bridges Committee to good account by giving to
     the tunnel his special attention. No Councillor has been so
     frequent a visitor to the various works, and it is doubtful
     whether any outsider went so many times into the compressed air.

     The workmen had just cause to bless the Poplar County Councillor.
     It was owing to Mr. Crooks's efforts that a revised schedule of
     wages was adopted. The result of this was that the contractors paid
     an additional £26,000 in wages. With all his zeal for the workmen,
     Mr. Crooks never once came in conflict with either the contractors
     or the engineers. Men and masters at Blackwall have all held the
     worthy Labour Councillor in the highest regard, and both are sorry
     that their long and cheerful connection must now be severed.


The same number of the _Municipal Journal_ contained an article by
Crooks himself, entitled, "A Labour View of the Blackwall Tunnel." The
article displayed with what tact and modesty the Labour member had
safeguarded the interests of his own class without neglecting the
interests of the people of London. It bore out the statement made in his
first speech to the Council, that no contractor ever lost by paying the
trade union rate of wages.




CHAPTER XIII

THE TASK OF HIS LIFE BEGINS

     Elected to the Poplar Board of Guardians--Bumbledom in
     Power--Prison preferred to Workhouse--Poverty treated like Crime.


Six months after his return to the London County Council, Poplar elected
Crooks to the Board of Guardians. When he took his seat as a member in
the very Board-room where thirty years before he clung timorously to his
mother's skirt he knew that the task of his life had begun.

He and his friend George Lansbury were elected together--the only Labour
men on a Board of twenty-four. They were the firstfruits of the reduced
qualification for Guardians introduced by Mr. (afterwards Lord) Ritchie,
at that time President of the Local Government Board.

To Crooks belongs much of the credit for this welcome change. He felt
keenly that working-men and women could never become Guardians of the
Poor so long as the £40 property qualification remained. He persuaded
the Poplar Trustees, of whom he was one, to ask the Local Government
Board to make it possible for workpeople to become Guardians. Mr.
Ritchie, ever sympathetic towards the East-End, a division of which he
was then representing in Parliament, met this request from Poplar by
lowering the qualification to £10. His successor at the Local Government
Board, Sir Henry Fowler, abolished the property qualification
altogether.

At the time of Crooks's election the dissatisfaction felt by ratepayers
with the old Guardians was deep and bitter. The Local Government Board
has evidence in its possession that poor people of the district were
saying at the time that if you wanted out-relief you must move into such
and such a street, where rents were collected by someone who had
influence with the Board.

Inside the workhouse Crooks found a state of things that seems
incredible to-day. Bumbledom held sway over paupers and Guardians alike.

There were Guardians who had never been inside the workhouse once. When
Crooks attempted to enter as a Guardian he found that the Master had
power to shut the gate upon him. Without the Master's permission, except
on the regular House Committee days, Guardians had no legal right inside
the workhouse at all.

The two Labour men raised such a hubbub over this anomaly that Sir Henry
Fowler issued an order giving a Guardian the right to enter the
workhouse at any reasonable hour. As a result there began, not only in
Poplar but all over the country, a marked improvement in the treatment
of old people in workhouses.

Here was a distinct score at the first venture. With the right of
admission established, Crooks made full use of it. He found most of the
officers hostile. So much so, that during a fire that broke out in the
workhouse bakery, bringing the brigade engines round, one of the
officers exclaimed, in the presence of the others when the fire was at
its height:--

"The only thing wanting now is that Crooks and Lansbury should be put on
the top of it."

The cheers with which this remark was received were soon to give way to
grave concern. It was clear the two Labour men meant to put an end to
many things. Several of the officers were summarily suspended by Crooks
one morning when he appeared on the scene unexpectedly.

A woman inmate had contrived to escape from the workhouse. She came
round to his house and knocked him up. In consequence of an alarming
story she told him respecting the conditions under which a fellow inmate
had died in her arms that very night, Crooks hurried round to the
institution and suspended certain of the officers on the spot.

The officers whom Crooks had suspended were dismissed by the Board. Nor
were they by any means the last to be dismissed or to take their
departure, for other scandals were brought to light.

"We found the condition of things in the House almost revolting," Crooks
stated in evidence before the Local Government Board Inquiry of 1906.
"The place was dirty. The stores were empty. The inmates had not
sufficient clothes, and many were without boots to their feet. The food
was so bad that the wash-tubs overflowed with what the poor people
could not eat. It was almost heart-breaking to go round the place and
hear the complaints and see the tears of the aged men and women.

"'Poverty's no crime, but here it's treated like crime,' they used to
say.

"Many of them defied the regulations on purpose to be charged before a
magistrate, declaring that prison was better than the workhouse.

"One day I went into the dining-room and found women sitting on the long
forms, some sullen, some crying. In front of each was a basin of what
was alleged to be broth. They called it greasy water, and that was
exactly what it looked and tasted like. They said they had to go out and
wash blankets on that. I appealed to the master to give them something
to eat, as they said they would sooner go to prison than commence work
on that. Those women, like the men, were continually contriving to get
sent to prison in order to escape the workhouse. After a few heated
words between the master and me he gave them some food, and none of them
went to prison that day.

"A few weeks later I was in the workhouse when these same women were
creating a fearful uproar.

"'Ah, there you are,' said the master, meeting me. 'Go and look at your
angels now! A nice lot they are to stick up for!'

"I went to the dining-room. There was a dead silence the moment I
entered.

"'I am right down ashamed of you,' I said. 'When you were treated like
animals, no wonder you behaved like animals. Now that Mr. Lansbury and I
have got you treated like human beings, we expect you to behave like
human beings.'

"They said not a word, and later in the day the ringleaders, without any
prompting, came to me and expressed their regret. From that day to this
no such scene among the workhouse women has ever been repeated.

"The staple diet when I joined the Board was skilly. I have seen the old
people, when this stuff was put before them, picking out black specks
from the oatmeal. These were caused by rats, which had the undisturbed
run of the oatmeal bin. No attempt was made to cleanse the oatmeal
before it was prepared for the old people.

"Whenever one went into the men's dining-room there were quarrels about
the food. I have had to protect old and weak men against stronger men,
who would steal what was eatable of their dinners. There was no
discipline. The able-bodied men's dining-room on Sundays gave one as
near an approach to hell as anything on this earth. It was everybody for
himself and the devil take the hindmost. If a fellow could fight he got
as much as he wanted. If he could not, he got nothing. Fights, followed
by prosecutions at the police courts, were common. The men boasted that
prison had no worse terrors than that place. They were absolutely beyond
control. They wandered about all over the place, creating all kinds of
discord, and even threatening to murder the officers. Two labour masters
nearly lost their lives in trying to control them.

"The inmates were badly clothed as well as badly fed. Not one of them
had a change of clothing. Their under-clothes were worn to rags. If they
washed them they had to borrow from each other in the interval.

"The inmates' clothes were not only scanty, they were filthy. On one
occasion the whole of the workhouse linen was returned by the laundry
people because it was so over-run with vermin that they would not wash
it.

"One of the inmates--a woman--who was doing hard work at scrubbing every
day, asked me whether she couldn't have a pair of boots.

"'Surely,' I said, putting her off for the time, 'nobody here goes
without boots?'

"A second and a third time when I came across her scrubbing the floors
she pleaded for boots. She raised her skirt from the wet stone floor,
and showed two sloppy pieces of canvas on her feet, and that was all she
had in the way of boots."

Crooks went on to relate that he walked along the corridor and saw a
female officer. "There's a woman over there who has asked me three times
to get her a pair of boots," he said.

She drew her skirt round her and said, "Oh, why do you worry about
these people; they are not our class."

"Worry about them!" Crooks rejoined. "What do you mean by our class? We
are here to see these people properly clothed. I do not want to quarrel,
but that woman must have a pair of boots to-day."




CHAPTER XIV

THE MAN WHO FED THE POOR

     Chairman of the Poplar Board of Guardians--Bumbledom
     Dethroned--Paupers' Garb Abolished--Two Presidents of the Local
     Government Board Approve Crooks's Policy.


This, then, was the state of the workhouse when Crooks went on the
Board. It was soon evident that a strong man had arrived. He whom some
of the Guardians at first described as "a ranter from the Labour mob"
soon proved himself the best administrator among them.

Within five years of his election he was made Chairman. The Board
insisted on his retaining the chair for ten consecutive years. During
that time he wrought out of the shame and degradation he found in the
workhouse a system of order and decency and humane administration that
for a long time made the Poplar Union a model among Poor Law
authorities, and one frequently recommended by the Local Government
Board.

Of course he made enemies. Some of the old Guardians whom he had turned
out of public life nursed their resentment in secret. Others joined
them, including contractors who had fared lavishly under the old
_régime_. Presently a Municipal Alliance was formed, and though it could
do nothing against Crooks at the poll, since the ratepayers would
persist in placing him at the top, it found other methods of attacking
him, of which more hereafter.

One of the first things he aimed at was a change in the character both
of officers and of Guardians. He saw no hope for the poor under the old
rulers. At each succeeding election his opposition brought about the
defeat of the worst of them.

The officers could not be dealt with so publicly. Some of the officers
in the infirmary, addicted to drunkenness, were able to defy the
Guardians for an obvious reason. It was one of their duties to take
whisky and champagne into the infirmary for the delectation of some of
the Guardians, whom a billiard table often detained into the early
hours. Crooks and Lansbury raised such indignation in the district as to
make it impossible for this state of things to continue.

In 1894 the Master and Matron resigned. Gradually the old school of
workhouse officials who had run the place as they liked were weeded out.
A more intelligent, more sympathetic, better disciplined staff grew up
in their place. Bumbledom was dethroned. The sick were nursed better.
The inmates were clothed better. All, both old and young, were fed
better.

The tell-tale pauper's garb disappeared altogether. When the old people
walked out they were no longer branded by their dress. They wore simple,
homely garments. They all rejoiced in the change save a few like the old
woman Crooks came across one afternoon on her day out. She was looking
clean and comfortable, and he asked how she liked the new clothes.

"Not at all, Mr. Crooks. Nobody thinks you come from the workhouse now,
so they don't give you anything."

His greatest reform had reference to the food. "Skilly" went the way of
"greasy water." Good plain wholesome meals appeared on the tables.

"And became more expensive," say the critics.

"Yes," Crooks retorts; "but to economise on the stomachs of the poor is
false economy. If it's only cheapness you want, why don't you set up the
lethal chamber for the old people? That would be the cheapest thing of
all."

Let us see what he actually gave these people to eat, since for feeding
the poor he was afterwards called to the bar of public opinion.

First he developed the system of bread-baking in the workhouse, in order
to get better and cheaper bread than was being supplied under contract
from outside. Under the direction of one or two skilled bakers, the work
provided many of the inmates with pleasant and useful occupation. They
made all the bread required in the workhouse for both officers and
inmates, all the bread required in the children's schools, all the
loaves given away as out-relief.

Instead of being likened to india-rubber, as it used to be in the old
days, the bread now came to be described by the _Daily Mail_ as equal to
what could be obtained in the best restaurants in the West-End. Yet
they were making this bread in the workhouse cheaper than it was
possible to buy ordinary bread outside.

And then, for the benefit of the infirm old folk, Crooks persuaded the
Guardians to substitute butter for margarine, and fresh meat for the
cheap stale stuff so often supplied. He held out for milk that had not
been skimmed, and for tea and coffee that had not been adulterated. He
even risked his reputation by allowing the aged women to put sugar in
their tea themselves, and the old men to smoke an occasional pipe of
tobacco.

Rumours of this new way of feeding the workhouse poor reached the
austere Local Government Board. First it sent down its inspectors, and
then the President himself appeared in person. And Mr. Chaplin saw that
it was good, and told other Boards to do likewise. He issued a circular
to the Guardians of the country recommending all that Poplar had
introduced. More, he proposed that for deserving old people over
sixty-four years of age "the supply of tobacco, dry tea, and sugar be
made compulsory."

This humane order of things, you may be sure, did not commend itself to
all Guardian Boards; and when later there came further instructions from
headquarters that ailing inmates might be allowed "medical comforts,"
the revolt materialised. A deputation of Guardians went to Whitehall to
try to argue the President into a harder heart. Crooks and Lansbury were
there to uphold the new system. Mr. Walter Long had succeeded Mr.
Chaplin then. He listened patiently to ingenious speeches in which
honourable gentlemen tried to show that it was from no lack of love for
the poor they had not carried out the new dietary scale, but----

"Gentlemen," Mr. Long interrupted at last, "am I to understand you do
not desire to feed your poor people properly?"

Then all with one accord began to make excuse. It was the difficulty of
book-keeping, they said. It appeared they were prepared to stint the
poor rather than add to the book-keeping.

From that day an improved dietary scale was introduced into our
workhouses. The man who fed the poor in Poplar saw the workhouse poor of
the kingdom better fed in consequence.

What kind of food was it that Poplar dared to give to the poor? Those
"luxuries for paupers" down at Poplar, about which the world was to hear
so much, what were they? A working-man had appeared, and after years of
unwearied well-doing had got rid of "skilly" and "greasy water,"
substituting, with the approval of two Presidents of the Local
Government Board, the following simple articles of food.

Observe the list carefully, for the kinds and quantities of food here
set out were precisely those supplied to the able-bodied inmates during
the outcry that arose over "paupers' luxuries" at the time of the Local
Government Board Inquiry in 1906. The list is the official return of the
food supplied in one week to each inmate.


                   A MAN'S DIET FOR A WEEK.

                         (COST, 4s. 2d.)

     Breakfasts   Bread                  3½ lbs.
                  Butter                 3½ ozs.
                  Coffee                 7 pints.
     Dinners      Mutton                 13½ ozs.
                  Beef                   4½ ozs.
                  Bacon                  3 ozs.
                  Irish stew             1 pint.
                  Boiled pork            4½ ozs.
                  Bread                  14 ozs.
                  Potatoes and greens    4½ lbs.
     Suppers      Bread                  3½ lbs.
                  Butter                 3½ ozs.
                  Tea                    7 pints.


                 A WOMAN'S DIET FOR A WEEK.

                          (COST, 4s.)

     Breakfasts   Bread                  2-5/8 lbs.
                  Butter                 3½ ozs.
                  Coffee                 7 pints.
     Dinners      Mutton                 12 ozs.
                  Beef                   4 ozs.
                  Bacon                  3 ozs.
                  Irish stew             1 pint.
                  Boiled pork            4 ozs.
                  Bread                  1¾ lbs.
                  Potatoes and greens    3 lbs.
     Suppers      Bread                  2-5/8 lbs.
                  Butter                 3½ ozs.
                  Tea                    7 pints.


When you read down that list and think of the scare headlines that
appeared in London daily papers during the Inquiry--"Splendid Paupers,"
"Luxuries for Paupers," "A Pauper's Paradise"--you may well ask, Are we
living in bountiful England? Or have we fallen upon an England of meagre
diet and mean men, an England that whines like a miser when called upon
to feed on homely fare its broken-down veterans of industry?

Dickens is dead, else would he have shown us Bumble reincarnated in the
editors of certain London newspapers.




CHAPTER XV

TURNING WORKHOUSE CHILDREN INTO USEFUL CITIZENS

     A Home for Little "Ins-and-Outs"--Technical Education for Workhouse
     Children--A Good Report for the Forest Gate Schools--Trophies won
     by Scholars--The Children's Pat-a-Cakes.


After he had fed the old people and clothed the old people, and in other
ways brought into their darkened lives a little good cheer, Crooks
turned his care upon the workhouse children.

The Guardians' school at Forest Gate lay four miles from the Union
buildings at Poplar. With five or six hundred children always under
training in the school there still remained varying batches of neglected
little people in the workhouse. The greater number of these belonged to
parents who came into the House for short periods only.

These little "ins-and-outs" were getting no schooling and no training
save the training that fitted them for pauperism. What to do with them
had long been a perplexing problem. If they were sent to Forest Gate one
day their parents in the workhouse could demand them back the next day
and take their discharge, even though they and their children turned up
at the gates for re-admission within the next twenty-four hours.

When Crooks proposed the simple expedient of sending these children to
the surrounding day-schools everybody seemed amazed.

The idea had never been heard of before. The London School Board of the
day did not take kindly to it at all. It poured cold water on the
project at first. The neighbouring schools were nearly all full, and the
Board thought it would hear no more of the matter by suggesting that if
the Guardians could find vacant places they were at liberty of course to
send the children.

Crooks framed an answering letter that it was the School Board's duty to
find the places, and that, come what would, the Guardians were
determined to send the children to the day schools.

Soon places were found for all. The little people who, through neglect
and idleness in the workhouse, had been getting steeped in pauperism,
were now dressed in non-institution clothes, and they went to and from
the neighbouring schools, playing on the way like any other children.

That was the beginning of a system destined to have a far-reaching
effect on Poor Law children all over the country. Other Unions, faced
with the same problem, seeing how well it had been dealt with at Poplar,
went and did likewise.

The Labour Guardian did not rest there. The children were a great deal
better for coming in daily contact with the outside world, but much of
the good work was undone by their having to spend every night in the
workhouse. He wanted to keep them away altogether from its
contaminating influence. He persuaded the Guardians to purchase a large
dwelling house about a quarter of a mile away from the workhouse. This
became a real home for the children. There they are brought up and
regularly sent to the public day schools outside, entirely free from
workhouse surroundings.

So long as the mark of the workhouse clings to children, so long, says
Crooks, will children cling to the workhouse. That is what makes him so
keen in getting rid of the institution dress and of everything else
likely to brand a child.

He helped to banish all that suggested pauperism from the Forest Gate
School. The children were educated and grew up, not like workhouse
children, as before, but like the children of working parents. With what
result? Marked out in their childhood as being "from the workhouse,"
they often bore the stamp all their life and ended up as workhouse
inmates in their manhood and womanhood. Under the new system, they were
made to feel like ordinary working-class children. They grew up like
them, becoming ordinary working-men and working-women themselves; so
that the Poor Law knew them no longer.

"If I can't appeal to your moral sense, let me appeal to your pocket,"
Crooks once remarked at a Guildhall Poor Law Conference. "Surely it is
far cheaper to be generous in training Poor Law children to take their
place in life as useful citizens than it is to give the children a
niggardly training and a branded career. This latter way soon lands
them in the workhouse again, to be kept out of the rates for the rest of
their lives."

How far the principle was carried out at Forest Gate may be judged from
the report made by Mr. Dugard, H.M. Inspector of Schools, after one of
his visits. Thus:--


     There is very little (if any) of the institution mark among the
     children.... Both boys' and girls' schools are in a highly
     satisfactory state, showing increased efficiency, with increased
     intelligence on the part of the children.... They compare very
     favourably with the best elementary schools.


In all that related to games and healthful recreation Crooks agreed in
giving the scholars the fullest facilities. The lads were encouraged to
send their football and cricket teams to play other schools. The girls
developed under drill and gymnastic training, and became proficient
swimmers.

In fact, the scholars at Forest Gate began to count for something. They
learnt to trust each other and to rely upon themselves. They grew in
hope and courage. They learnt to walk honourably before all men. In
consequence, thousands of them have become merged in the great working
world outside, self-respecting men and women.

I met Crooks looking elated one evening, and he told me he had just come
from the Poor Law schools' swimming competition at Westminster baths.

"There were three trophies," he said. "The first, the London Shield, was
for boys. Poplar won that with 85 marks, five more than the next best.
The second, the Portsmouth Shield, was for girls, with a Portsmouth
school competing. Our Poplar girls won that with 65 marks, the two next
schools getting only 35 each. The third trophy, the Whitehall Shield,
for the school as a whole with the highest number of marks, was also won
by Poplar. I feel as pleased as though I'd done it myself."

The best administration in an out-of-date building is always hampered.
Forest Gate belonged to the old order of Poor Law schools known as
barrack buildings. Although the Guardians made the very best of the
school, there were structural defects that hindered the work seriously.
It was therefore decided to build cottage homes at Shenfield in Essex,
where a special effort is being made to train the girls as well as the
boys in rural pursuits in order to keep them out of the overcrowded
cities.

The Parliamentary Committee on Poor Law Schools that sat in 1896 invited
Crooks to give evidence. Many of the things he urged were included in
the Committee's recommendations. Among them was the extension of the
full benefit of the Education Act and the Technical Education Acts to
all Poor Law children.

"The wine and spirit dues that provide the technical education grants,"
he told the committee, "might be said to belong to Poor Law children by
right, because it is always being urged that it is owing to drunken
parents that these children get into the workhouse. I don't believe it,
but there is the claim."

At that time the Poor Law schools received no benefits in the way of
scholarships or technical education grants. It was largely due to his
advocacy that the scholars were at last given the same opportunities as
other children. One of the great moments of his life was when he opened
a letter from the headmaster at the Hunslet Poor Law school, telling him
that "in consequence of what you have done, one of our boys has just
taken a County Scholarship--the first Poor Law child to benefit under
the Technical Education Acts."

Crooks would like to go much further. Until Poor Law children are taken
entirely away from the control of Guardians he will never be satisfied.
Why should the authority that looks after workhouses for the old and
infirm be entrusted with the task of training the young? The two duties
lie as far apart as East from West. He would place these children wholly
under the education authority.

No matter where, he is always ready to put in a word for Poor Law
children on the least opportunity. It was news to his colleagues on the
London County Council when, in the course of a debate in the summer of
1894, he told of his own experience in a Poor Law school. He seems to
have made a deep impression by his speech on that occasion, judging by
the following comment made shortly afterwards by the _Municipal
Journal_;--


     Those who heard Mr. Crooks's speech in the Council Chamber, when
     the subject of the training of Poor Law children came up on a side
     issue, will not readily forget it. One of the daily papers, in its
     admiration the next day, declared it to be the best speech heard at
     the Council. Be that as it may, the speech, coming spontaneously
     with the pent-up indignation of a soul that had suffered sorely
     from a pernicious system, was a marvellous one, producing a
     marvellous effect. Councillors in the front benches turned round
     and visitors in the gallery stretched forward to catch a glimpse of
     the short dark figure on the Labour bench pleading so powerfully
     for the children of the poor.


Nor had he been in the House of Commons long before his voice was heard
there on behalf of workhouse children. Speaking in a debate in 1903 on
the various methods of dealing with these children, he said:--


     At one time there was no stronger advocate of boarding-out than
     myself. It is an ideal system in theory, but its success by
     practical application has yet to be proved. Many requests are made
     by country people to be allowed to adopt children on charitable
     grounds, but when inquiries come to be made into the incomes of
     these people the Guardians generally find it is hoped to make a
     profit out of the children. I have visited a village where a widow
     boarded four children--two more than the law allows. For these
     children she was paid sixteen shillings a week. She lived in a
     district where the labourer's wages were only eleven shillings.

     In regard to another case I personally investigated, I asked how
     the boy was getting on.

     "Oh, all right; but he is growing so big and eats such a lot that I
     wish you would take him away and send me a smaller boy."

     The boarded-out children, so far from losing the pauper taint, are
     more frequently known by the name of the Union from which they
     come than by their own names. In fact, in some villages, I found
     "boarding-out" a staple industry. Boarding-out is all right in good
     homes; the difficulty is to find good homes.


Not long after he made this speech, there was an outcry in a section of
the Press over "an amazing example of extravagance" at Poplar. It
appeared in the form of a letter from a correspondent. The
correspondent--who turned out to be a member of a firm of
contractors--waxed virtuously indignant over the Guardians' tenders
because they included, he alleged, supplies of luxuries for paupers. The
so-called luxuries for the most part proved to be medical comforts
ordered by the doctor for the ailing. Among the other items was 1 cwt.
of pat-a-cake biscuits, and these were singled out specially as a
specimen of how the workhouse inmates were pampered.

I met Crooks in the Lobby of the House of Commons at the time of the
outcry, and asked what he thought of it all.

"Perfectly true," he said. "We in Poplar are guilty of the great crime
of inviting tenders for the supply of a few pat-a-cakes; but our
horrified critics are in error in assuming that the pat-a-cakes are for
the workhouse inmates. They are for the children. We order 1 cwt. for
the half-year, which I believe works out at the rate of a cake for each
child about once a week. There's extravagance for you! Isn't it
scandalous? Just imagine our kiddies in the workhouse school getting a
whole pat-a-cake to eat!

"That's not the worst of it. Those youngsters of ours, not content with
getting an occasional pat-a-cake, have actually been overheard to sing
the nursery rhyme on the subject. We shall be having a Local Government
Board inspector sent down to stop it if it leaks out. You should hear
the little ones holding forth!


     Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man,
     Bake me a cake as fast as you can!
     Prick it, and pat it, and mark it with T,
     And put it in the oven for Tommy and me.


"The youngsters lie awake at nights, wondering when their turn will come
again to have a farthing pat-a-cake. One of the little girls came
running up to me in the playground the other day, exclaiming: 'Oh, Mr.
Crooks, what do you think? I had a pat-a-cake for tea last Sunday. They
promised it to us the day before, and I was so pleased when I went to
bed that night that I nearly forgot to go to sleep.'"




CHAPTER XVI

ON THE METROPOLITAN ASYLUMS BOARD

     Mr. Chaplin's Humane Circular to Poor Law Guardians--Crooks
     Appointed a Member of the Metropolitan Asylums Board--Chairman of
     the Children's Committee--His Knack of Getting His Own
     Way--Reorganising the Labour Conditions of the Board's Workmen.


We have seen that the policy of Poor Law reform which Crooks was
carrying out at Poplar won the good-will of the Local Government Board.
Soon after Mr. Henry Chaplin took his seat in Lord Salisbury's Cabinet
of 1895 he sent for Crooks, and the two spent a whole morning discussing
the weak points in our Poor Law system. Mr. Chaplin made many notes
during the conversation, and at parting good-naturedly remarked that
Crooks had given him enough work to occupy the next two or three years.

Shortly afterwards, the Minister and the Labour man made a personal
investigation of Poplar and other East-End workhouses and infirmaries.
The visit to each institution was a surprise one. When the two men
entered the children's ward of the Mile End workhouse, they found the
nurses absent and the children screaming. In about half a minute Crooks
had all the children laughing.

"What's the secret of your magic?" asked the President of the Local
Government Board.

"It comes natural when you are used to them," said Crooks.

As already shown, Mr. Chaplin declared emphatically for the Poplar
policy. His notable circular to Poor Law Guardians, for which as
President of the Local Government Board he will perhaps be best
remembered, gave the support of the Government of the day to that policy
of humane administration of the Poor Law which Crooks had established at
Poplar. It laid down three principles which the Labour man had urged
upon the President at their first meeting:--


     1. Children to be entirely removed from association with the
     workhouse and workhouse surroundings.

     2. Old people of good character who have relatives or friends
     outside not to be forced into the workhouse, but to be given
     adequate out-relief.

     3. Old people in the workhouse of good behaviour to be provided
     with additional comforts.


Mr. Chaplin further showed his confidence in the Labour Chairman of the
Poplar Guardians by inviting him to become one of the Local Government
Board's representatives on the Metropolitan Asylums Board. The work
meant a heavy addition to Crooks's public duties, with the London County
Council and the Poplar Guardians demanding so much of his time. There
was no hesitation, however, in accepting the new office when he found it
afforded further opportunities to serve the afflicted poor and help
neglected children. Mr. Chaplin's successor at the Local Government
Board, Mr. Walter Long, twice re-nominated Crooks to the same position.

Although the Asylums Board comes but little before public notice, except
in times of epidemic, it has far-reaching powers. It is the largest
hospital authority that any country can show. It has fourteen infectious
disease hospitals with accommodation for nearly seven thousand people.
It maintains six thousand imbecile patients in four asylums. It looks
after the welfare of several hundred boys on a Thames training-ship, and
of some two thousand children in various homes.

The members, or "managers," as they are called, are all nominated either
by London Boards of Guardians or by the Local Government Board. An
indirectly elected body is the last that expects to see a representative
of Labour. Imagine, therefore, the amazement of this somewhat select
company when, in May, 1898, a Labour man walked into their midst as the
nominee of a Conservative Cabinet Minister.

He was eyed at first with suspicion. The suspicion soon changed to
curiosity. The Labour man never spoke. The managers expected a torrent
of loud criticism, and here was immovable silence. For the first five
months Crooks never opened his mouth at the Board meetings.

"What's your game?" asked a friendly member in an aside one afternoon.

"I'm learning the business," was the quiet reply. "This is an old
established Board with notions of its own, and it's not going to be
dictated to by new-comers. But you wait, my friend, and you'll find
before long I'll be getting my own way in everything here."

So it proved. During the two or three years that he was Chairman of the
Children's Committee and of a special committee that reorganised the
hours and wages of the Board's large staff, he never lost a single
recommendation he brought before the Board.

"How is it, Mr. Crooks, that whatever you ask this Board for you always
get?" he was once asked by Sir Edwin Galsworthy, for many years the
Board's Chairman.

Crooks returned the sally that it was because he was always right. His
real secret was--convert the whole of your committee. A majority vote in
committee never satisfied him. Nothing short of the support of every
single member would suffice. Many times in committee has he adjourned
the discussion rather than snatch a bare majority.

"Let's take it home with us," he would say jocularly from the chair.
"Perhaps after a week's thought you'll all come back converted to my
view. If not, then you must come better prepared to convince me that I
am wrong than you are now."

The difficult and delicate work of reorganising the Labour conditions of
the Board's workmen and attendants was at last brought to a triumph. He
came out of the chair with the goodwill of the whole staff and of the
entire Board of Managers. His colleagues included large employers of
labour, eminent medical men, and retired army and navy officers. All
agreed that he had settled for them Labour difficulties which had
created nothing but confusion and perplexity before.

Working on his invariable rule that it pays best in every department of
work to observe fair conditions, he scored a signal success on the very
body where before his coming Labour members were regarded as
revolutionaries. As at Blackwall Tunnel, he gained his points without
losing the trust or friendship of the employers of labour.

The task put his administrative ability to a test which only able
statesmen can stand. The rare faculty he has of obtaining the maximum of
reform out of existing agencies carried him safely over every shoal.

Crooks is every inch an Englishman as well as every inch a Labour
member. He applies his Labour principles on typical English lines; hence
his success among all bodies of Englishmen, no matter what their party
or class.

Few men have higher ideals or feel more deeply the injustice of much in
our present-day social system, but Crooks recognises that the only way
to get reform is to put your hand to the plough with things as they are,
and not wait for the millennium before getting to work.

He sees the crooked things of this life as keenly as anyone, but because
the things cannot be put wholly straight in his own day he does not
hold aloof. He does what he can in the living present to put them as
nearly straight as existing machinery makes possible, trusting that the
next or some succeeding generation will continue the work until the
things are put perfectly straight at last.




CHAPTER XVII

A BAD BOYS' ADVOCATE

     Efforts on behalf of Diseased and Mentally-deficient
     Children--Altering the Law in Six Weeks--Establishing Remand Homes
     for First Offenders--London's Vagrant Child-Life--Reformatory and
     Industrial Schools--The Boy who Sat on the Fence--Theft of a Donkey
     and Barrow--Lads who want Mothering.


Soon the call of the children reached his ears again.

He had barely finished reorganising the labour conditions on the Asylums
Board when he undertook a great task in the interests of the two
thousand children who had just been placed under the Board's care. These
children were all sufferers from some physical or mental trouble, and it
was because they required special treatment that a Parliamentary
Committee had recommended that they be transferred from the London
Guardians to the Asylums Board.

A comprehensive scheme had to be framed by the Board for looking after
its new charges. Crooks gave three hard years to these children's
well-being. During that time, as Chairman of the Children's Committee,
he wrought some remarkable changes in the lot of the diseased and
mentally-deficient little people handed over to the Board's keeping.

New homes were set up in the country and at the seaside for the
afflicted and convalescent children. The little people's meals were made
pleasant, their clothes deprived of the institutional taint. They were
free to be merry, and their laughter was better medicine than the
doctor's.

The sad lot of the mentally-deficient children, some of them little
better than imbeciles, appealed greatly to the strong, clear-brained
Labour man from Poplar. There were three or four hundred of these, all
from London workhouses, the sight of whom so often reminded Crooks of
the idiot boy who slept in his dormitory when he, as a child, was an
inmate at Poplar.

The Asylums Board was not allowed to keep these mentally-deficient boys
and girls after sixteen years of age. The children had thus to be sent
away only half trained, often direct to the workhouse again, from which
they never emerged unless to be taken to an institution more hopeless
still.

Crooks conceived the idea that if the Board kept these luckless little
people until they completed their twenty-first year it might be possible
to give them such a training as would enable them to look after
themselves outside, and live useful lives, instead of being a
life-burden to the State and of no use to anyone. The Local Government
Board agreed, and the managers now train these youthful charges till
they reach manhood and womanhood.

The experiment has already justified itself. Many a youth and maid who
would have been left in mental darkness all their lives have by this
longer period of training gained a glimmering of light. Their limited
intelligence has been sufficiently developed to enable them to assist at
earning their own living and to look after themselves.

Other children under the Board's care might be said to suffer from an
excess rather than from a lack of intelligence. On the Asylums Board
they are known as remand children. In the police courts they are known
as first offenders. They consist of boys and girls who, having been
charged before a magistrate with offences which render them liable to be
sent to an industrial or a reformatory school, get remanded for
inquiries.

At one time, pending the inquiries, these youthful offenders used to be
detained in prison. When Crooks joined the Asylums Board they had been
transferred to the workhouse. The influence for evil was little better
in the one place than in the other. The one introduced them to
criminality, the other to pauperism.

"These children want keeping as far as possible from both prison and
workhouse," argued Crooks with his colleagues. "We ought to put them in
small homes and give them school-time and playtime, like other children,
until their cases come befo

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