From Workhouse to Westminster Part 16

"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 a.s.sociation 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 cla.s.s.

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 inst.i.tutional 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 inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sist 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 before the magistrate again."

So two or three dwelling-houses were taken in different quarters of London and adapted as Remand Homes. Crooks headed a deputation from the Asylums Board to the London magistrates at Bow Street to urge them in future to commit all remand children to the Homes. The magistrates were sympathetic enough, but showed it was their duty to carry out the law, and that the law clearly laid it down that youthful offenders under remand must be sent to the workhouse.

"We'll alter the law, then," was Crooks's reply. "For I'm determined these youngsters shall no longer be sent to the workhouse."

In the record time of six weeks the law was altered. It sounds miraculous to those who know the ways of Whitehall. Crooks's resource proved more than equal to red-tapeism.

First the Asylums Board wrote to the Home Office. Then the Home Office sent the usual evasive reply. The correspondence would have gone on indefinitely had not Crooks waited on the Home Secretary in person.

As the Labour man expected, Mr. Ritchie knew nothing about the matter, the Home Office officials having settled it without consulting the Secretary of State. Always willing to co-operate in anything that promised to keep children away from the workhouse, Mr. Ritchie asked Crooks what he had to suggest. The visitor pointed out that the Juvenile Offenders' Bill was at that very moment before Parliament, and that the insertion in that measure of an additional clause of half a dozen lines only would keep remand children away from the workhouse for all time.

The Home Secretary seized the idea at once, and Crooks's suggestion became law the following month.

The first of the Remand Homes was opened at Pentonville Road for the convenience of children charged at the police courts of North London and the East-End. Sometimes as many as fifty young offenders, boys and girls, can be seen there at the same time.

Instead of loafing about the workhouse, as before, and becoming inured to pauper surroundings, they are now taught as in a day school. They have play in the open air and recreation indoors in the way of games and books. Moreover, the girls are taught to sew and knit, the boys instructed in manual work. Though seldom there more than a fortnight before being taken back to the police court, they go away cleaner, better informed, not without hope. And the magistrates now feel justified in sending about 80 per cent. of them back to their parents.

A visit to this Remand Home at Pentonville will teach you disquieting truths about the vagrant child-life of London. These wayward youngsters tell their tales with startling frankness.

That bright-faced lad of twelve--why is he here?

"Stealing," he answers us.