From Workhouse to Westminster Part 32

Mr. George R. Sims gave a sketch of "A Morning with Will Crooks" in the _Daily Chronicle_ of May 2nd, 1906. He suggested that if 81, Gough Street--Crooks's Castle, as he called it--had a bra.s.s plate on the door, the most appropriate device to be inscribed upon it would be, "Inquire within upon everything."

It was twenty minutes past ten when I arrived. At half-past ten we were due at the relieving office. But before we started, some three or four pathetic narratives had found their way into the little hall for Mr. Crooks to mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

I appreciated the situation, and expressed sympathy.

"It is depressing," said the people's M.P., "but, after all, somebody's got to listen and somebody's got to help."

We went out into the street. In the hundred yards that we walked to our destination six sad riddles of life were submitted to Mr.

Crooks for solution.

The broad-shouldered, black-bearded, smiling politician of the people had a cheery word of advice for all applicants, and scarcely had these pavement consultations ended before we were seated in the relieving office listening to tales of woe told by a procession of poor pet.i.tioners with whom the world had gone woefully wrong.

The committee of relief were generous and sympathetic. Poplar has a reputation for generosity in this matter. It struck me that at times the committee might have impressed a little more earnestly upon the recipients of out-relief the other side of the situation; but I am bound to admit that undeserving cases--cases which had a history of drink and thriftlessness--were dismissed with no illusions....

We went to the workhouse at the dinner hour. A comfortable place certainly, and the dinner probably better than a good many of the inmates had been accustomed to when they were earning their own living....

A pleasant hour with Mr. and Mrs. Crooks and their daughters at the castle, a stroll in the little garden which is Mrs. Crooks's delight, a short interview with Tommy the Tortoise, and it is time for the Member for Woolwich to start for Westminster and take his place in the National a.s.sembly.

He takes up a leather case containing some sixty or seventy letters to be answered, and we go out into the street, which is happily bathed in suns.h.i.+ne. We get on the top of an omnibus, and I listen to the merry stories merrily told until we arrive at Aldgate Station and bid each other good-bye.

I have spent a most interesting and instructive morning with a typical Englishman, a man who has laboured with skill and used his brains as well as his hands to good purpose--a man who has fought his way up from boyhood, a man whose heart is as big as his shoulders are broad.

Beyond his sterling common sense and his sympathy with suffering, Will Crooks has one golden quality in a tribune of the people. He has a sense of humour. It does your eyes good to see him smile. And he has a laugh that makes you feel the suns.h.i.+ne even when the north wind blows.

Sometimes the Labour man has nearly a hundred letters a day to deal with. First attention is always given to those from people seeking counsel or help in Poplar and Woolwich.

An old man of ninety-four asks him to visit him for old times' sake. A widow has lost her property--will Mr. Crooks see her righted? A sick woman wants to know how she can get into a convalescent home. An anxious father asks him to speak to a wayward son, because "the lad sets such store by what you say, Mr. Crooks." Again, it is a distracted mother who writes, maybe about a son or a daughter who has run away or fallen into trouble.

Amusing letters come sometimes, varying the note of sorrow sounded in so many of the others. This, for instance, from a sympathetic Frenchman, who evidently imagines that a place called Poplar must be studded with trees of that name and surrounded by open fields. "I see," wrote this sympathiser from across the Channel, "that you are doing much for the unemployed, and I have pleasure in sending you enclosed cheque for them.

I would suggest, in view of the importance of the poor children having pure milk, that the money be spent in putting unemployed men to work in cleaning out the ponds in the fields and lanes of Poplar where the cattle drink."

While Crooks is essentially a home-loving man, counting it one of his chief joys to have an evening free or a week-end to call his own, he regards it as a duty to speak at religious and temperance meetings, and on behalf of other movements not necessarily allied with the Labour Party.

One day finds him with the Bishop of London at the Mansion House meeting of the United Temperance Council. Another day he is speaking with the President of the Baptist Union, the Rev. John Wilson, one of his best supporters in Woolwich, at the Union's annual gathering. Another day he is congratulating Canon Hensley Henson, at the annual meeting of the London Wesleyan Mission, on having "six of his paris.h.i.+oners on the platform"--a reference to the presence of half a dozen members of Parliament, Canon Henson being rector of the House of Commons.

After addressing the Baptist Union on a second occasion, a letter came to him from the secretary, the Rev. J. H. Shakespeare:--

On behalf of the Council of the Baptist Union and on my own behalf I beg to thank you most warmly for the magnificent services you rendered to us last Tuesday night. It was delightful to hear you. I personally was very curious to see you managing a dense crowd of men. It does not seem to me that there is any reason why you should ever stop drawing from the rich and endless resources of your eloquence and wit and your wise sayings.

I feel very deeply indebted to you for having kept your engagement under such trying circ.u.mstances, and I hope you were not too fatigued afterwards.

A different letter was one from his old friend the Hon. and Rev. J. G.

Adderley, announcing his call to Birmingham:--

Alas! I leave dear old London on November 2nd. Thank you for all you have been to me during my time here. I have known you now fifteen years.

The many occasions on which he addressed working men at adult Sunday schools in different parts of the country forced him to this conclusion, to which he gave public expression:--

The adult school movement has, I do sincerely believe, done more to make men understand that Brotherhood is not merely a word, but a real living thing, than any other movement of recent days. Men under the influence of adult schools now begin to see that their whole life on earth does not consist merely in eating, drinking, and working and going to a place of wors.h.i.+p, but in taking a living part in G.o.d's work personally--in a word, in striving for some of Christ's ideals on earth as in Heaven.

He a.s.sisted at conducting something like an adult school in Poplar.

Besides the Sunday morning meetings at the Dock Gates, the Labour League, in conjunction with the Rector of Poplar, carry on a winter series of addresses at the Town Hall on Sunday afternoons, to which Crooks and his friend, Mr. Fred Butler, give a good deal of their time.

Of these Town Hall meetings he wrote in the article he contributed to the volume of essays on "Christianity and the Working Cla.s.ses":--

The meetings are always crowded with working-men and their wives and working girls and lads. The rector or myself takes the chair--often we are both on the platform together. The gatherings are not religious in the orthodox sense, nor is any attempt made to teach religion, but I venture to say they have as much influence for good on the work-people of Poplar as many of the churches. We nearly always begin with music by singers or players who give their services, and then we have a "talk," generally by a public man, on social questions, on education, on books, and authors, and citizens.h.i.+p. Some of our speakers take Biblical subjects.

Thus every week we get together a good company of work-people who ordinarily attend no place of wors.h.i.+p on Sunday; and if nothing more, we keep them out of the public-house, we make them think for themselves, we awaken some sense of citizens.h.i.+p. The presence of the rector has convinced many, who were formerly hostile to all parsons, Anglican and Nonconformist, that the Churches and Labour can work in harmony. Without pretending to be this, that, or the other, our gatherings have made for the love of one's neighbour, and therefore for the cause of Christ.

Nearly every P.S.A. and adult school and men's Sunday meeting in London wanted him. He would be at the Whitefield Tabernacle one Sunday, at the Leysian Mission another, at Dr. Clifford's church another.

The demands made upon him by temperance bodies redoubled after the introduction of the Licensing Bill of 1904, of which he was an uncompromising opponent. In nearly all his temperance addresses, full as they were of his humorous fancies, he denounced the practice, followed by so many temperance reformers, of making cheap jests at the men or women whom drink has degraded.

"We who can overcome temptation should be the last to make light of those who have failed to overcome temptation. Rather should we use our greater power to a.s.sist them."

What he said from public platforms he did not hesitate to repeat on the floor of the House of Commons. Speaking after Mr. Balfour, in one of the debates on the Licensing Bill, he said:--

"I wish to take the opportunity, while the Prime Minister is in the House, to say a few words on the question of temptation, because the impression left on my mind by the remarks of the right hon. gentleman is that every man who indulges in drink is capable of taking care of himself and of overcoming the drink habit by his own efforts. I hold that there are thousands of our fellow-men and women who cannot resist temptation when the opportunity to drink is put in their way. No doubt if everyone had the moral fibre of the Prime Minister there would be little need for a measure of temperance reform. Those hon. members who attend prayers at the opening of the proceedings of this House listen to the words, 'Lead us not into temptation.' I ask the Prime Minister whether he has ever thought that the thousands of people in our asylums through drink are there because they are capable of looking after themselves? No; it is because temptation has been too much for them.

Does not that involve an obligation on the State to take temptation out of their way?"

The National Free Church Council invited him to address their annual gathering in 1906. The Council met in Birmingham in March, and the President (the Rev. J. Scott Lidgett), in introducing Crooks, said the invitation to him had not been given lightly. It was a deliberate recognition of the claim that Labour had upon the thought, energy, and prayer of the Free Churches. Then, turning to Crooks, he clasped his hand. "Thus," said the President, "Labour and the Free Churches are joined in their endeavour to solve some of the great human problems."

"The world," said Crooks in his opening remarks, "could be divided into two cla.s.ses--some willing to work and the rest willing to let them." He went on to ask the representatives of the churches to put it out of their heads that the workman who did not go to a place of wors.h.i.+p was a man utterly without religion. Such a man often had greater faith and more works to his credit than many regular wors.h.i.+ppers.

Shortly afterwards the Free Church Council asked him to the banquet given at the Hotel Cecil in celebration of the return of nearly two hundred Free Churchmen to the House of Commons.

"You Free Churchmen," he said in his after-dinner speech, "have to come out of yourselves a great deal more in the future than you have in by-gone days. You cannot live for Sunday alone. You have to live for all the seven days of the week, and we expect you to come out and take a share of the work of social reorganisation. You are all of you, or the majority of you, a little bit ashamed of South Africa, and some of you wish you had got your tongues loose two or three years ago instead of now. You can imagine how I feel about this. A few of us at that time had to take our lives in our hands because we dared to say that that was a wicked war. Remember, the Empire does not consist in yelling about the Union Jack; the Empire begins in the workman's kitchen....

"I have been told plenty of times that our men and women are not G.o.d-fearing. Aren't they? I know the stories they tell you parsons sometimes; but down at the bottom of their hearts is a deep religious feeling which some of us would be better for having. Why can I always get the truth from the poor, who so often deceive you parsons? Why, because they feel I am a brother, and they have a doubt about you. You have got to wear that doubt off. You have got to make the humblest of our brothers and sisters understand that you do really care for them, that you intend to use the Parliamentary machine to abolish sweating and slumdom. We have got to promote industry in such a way that every honest worker may find useful work to do. We have to deal with the s.h.i.+rker whether he wears a top hat or hobnail boots."

CHAPTER x.x.x

COLONISING ENGLAND

Signs of Progress--a Crown Farm Cut Up into Small Holdings--The Colony Experiment at Laindon--How it was Killed by the Local Government Board--The Hollesley Bay Farm--A Minister for Labour Wanted.