From Workhouse to Westminster Part 12

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-chairmans.h.i.+p 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 munic.i.p.al 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 compet.i.tion 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 ent.i.tling the holder to the L.C.C.

chairmans.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ces and children's play-places in the poorer parts of London. It had long been a grievance to the working cla.s.ses 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 s.p.a.cious 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 s.p.a.ce was formed out of something like a mora.s.s 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 craftsmans.h.i.+p with some effect. He carried a resolution conferring special facilities for technical instruction upon working-cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed my final examination and have just been admitted a member of the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors. My official appointment is that of a.s.sistant Constructor in one of the princ.i.p.al 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 grat.i.tude 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 grat.i.tude 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 inst.i.tute 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 inst.i.tute that never came. It was not until the early part of 1906 that the inst.i.tute 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 inst.i.tute 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 seamans.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.senger 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 s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sengers 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 _Munic.i.p.al 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 _Munic.i.p.al 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 members.h.i.+p 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.