From Workhouse to Westminster Part 2

"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 pa.s.s 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 d.i.c.kens--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 cla.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Shirb.u.t.t 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 d.i.c.kens'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 b.u.mble 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 cla.s.s what books they liked best.