From Workhouse to Westminster Part 31

"The Prime Minister urges the plea that there is no time," Crooks went on to tell the House. "What would the business men of this House think, when they went down to their offices to-morrow, if they were told by the manager that grouse-shooting would begin on the Twelfth and that therefore business would have to be suspended? Does the Government prefer grouse-shooting to finding work for honest men? Was this Bill of theirs only introduced to kill time--to wait until the birds were big enough to be shot? I don't want to stop your holidays. Go and kill your grouse and your partridges. But are you going to put dead birds before living men?

"There was the day on which the Eton and Harrow match was played. What will the unemployed say when they hear that the Government could not find time to discuss this Bill because Ministers wished to see two schools play cricket? Do you think the working man gets a day off to see his sons play cricket in the public parks? Unlike many hon. members of this House, workmen do not live by dividends. They have nothing to sell but their labour. When out of work a little help often saves them from ruin and pauperism. They are only asking to be given an opportunity to fulfil the Divine curse by earning their living in the sweat of their brow."

His appeal went home. The following day the Government sprang a surprise on the House. The Bill would be taken that week. It was pa.s.sed within a few days. "H. W. M.," in his parliamentary sketch in the _Daily News_ of August 5th, referring to what he called "the strange story of the pa.s.sing of the Unemployed Bill," said:

At the end of last week its chances seemed to have disappeared.

To-day it has pa.s.sed Committee, and Monday will see it through the Commons. The Member chiefly responsible for this issue is Mr.

Crooks, who has shown undoubted subtleness as a Parliamentary tactician.

In his final speech on the Bill, Crooks argued that even the loafer would become a better man by being given, not the charity that demoralised, but a day's work for a day's pay. Such a man, by being put on a farm colony for a few months, would be turned into a good citizen.

He stood for discipline in Labour as the Government stood for discipline in the Army and Navy. He wanted to preserve the manhood of the nation rather than to see it degraded, as it was by the present system of despising an unemployed man. The type of men who hung idle about all our large towns was the type that filled the workhouses and prisons. Take them in their early stages of unemployment, put them under proper discipline on the land, and he was prepared to prophesy they would become useful citizens. It was a loss to the nation that men and women should be going about without the common necessaries owing to being out of work.

So the Bill went through, and people of all cla.s.ses agree with his old friend, Mr. A. F. Hills, a large employer, who wrote to him a letter on the subject, ending with the words: "I believe that generations yet unborn will in the years to come rise up and call you blessed."

In the opinion of many people well able to gauge the distress and discontent of the country, the Act came just in time to prevent serious disorders in the large towns. For the winter that immediately followed found the unemployed in a worse plight than ever.

Promptly the Distress Committees formed under the Act got to work. The London Committees found themselves at first stranded for funds. The weak point in the Act was that which allowed only the expense of organisation to be made a public charge. The Committees found themselves asking, What was the use of organising work for the unemployed when there were no means of paying wages? It looked as though public subscriptions were not to be forthcoming. Was the Act, so hardly won, to fail on its first trial?

Again Poplar fought the cause of the poor for the whole country. This time the workless men's wives took action. The women of Poplar met in the Town Hall, Mrs. Crooks in the chair, with the object of urging Parliament to vote money to the Distress Committees set up under the new Act.

Mrs. Crooks, as reported in the _Times_, said:

They were endeavouring to enlist the help and sympathy of those in high places to give some little time to the consideration of the claims of the wives and children of men who were willing to work, but who were unable to find the wherewithal to feed those near and dear to them. The Queen had more than once shown her desire to help. Was it, then, too much to expect that their wealthy sisters would use their influence with their all-too-powerful husbands to appeal, with the women of Poplar, to the King and Government to call Parliament together with a view to pa.s.sing estimates to enable work to be undertaken--work that would give them their daily bread?

Theirs was a cry for national defence, and Parliament must see to it.

The meeting decided to pet.i.tion the King to instruct the Prime Minister to call Parliament together. In acknowledging a vote of thanks to his wife for taking the chair, Crooks said the mothers and sisters had remained too long indoors, suffering in silence. If the King could see that meeting it would make him realise what unemployment meant to the wives and mothers of his industrial army, and he would no doubt do something to ensure that they should not lack the sustenance needed to bring up strong daughters and strong sons as faithful and loyal citizens. They had got the machinery, and they had got certain powers, but they needed funds. They had got an organisation that could gather up all the information as to useful work that needed doing--work that would be profitable and inspiring to the men who did it, instead of being degrading, like the foolish and useless and expensive task-work which was all the Poor Law had to offer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. & MRS. WILL CROOKS

_Photo: G. Dendry._]

About a month later took place the memorable women's march to Whitehall.

The day, November 6th, was truly a tragic and historic one in the social life of London.

Headed by Mrs. Crooks and the then Mayoress of Poplar (Mrs. Dalton), some six thousand poor women gathered on the Thames Embankment, near Charing Cross Bridge, and marched to the offices of the Local Government Board in order to back up their appeal to the Premier to aid their out-of-work husbands and brothers. The women came not only from Poplar, where the march had been organised by George Lansbury, but from Edmonton, Paddington, West Ham, Woolwich, and Southwark. Some carried infants in arms; others had children dragging at their skirts.

"Work for our men--Bread for our children." So ran the appeal on the banner that floated above the Southwark contingent, led by Mrs. Herbert Stead.

The Embankment was deep in mud, and, as the women trudged bravely through it--those carrying babies unable to save their skirts from dragging in the road--the scene was one that filled you with an indignant shame. Even those other women in motors and carriages, who had driven down to see the sight out of curiosity, sank back into their cushions aghast, sickened, ashamed at this spectacle of their sisters'

plight.

In Whitehall the processionists told off a dozen of their number to form the deputation to Mr. Balfour. The women were accompanied into the Local Government Board offices by Crooks and Lansbury and two or three other men from the Central Workers' Unemployed Committee.

The object of the visit was explained by Lansbury, and then a working woman from Poplar read the women's memorial. The memorial spoke of the misery, degradation, and desperation of the women which had driven them to determine to bear their lot in silence no longer. They thought that Parliament should make it impossible for unscrupulous employers to grind the faces of the poor. The Government had gone to the aid of the tenantry of Ireland. The plight of the poor in London was worse. If war were threatened, ways would be found for raising money. The country was faced with a worse evil than war in the presence of starving citizens.

In the name of their country, their homes, and their children, they appealed to the Prime Minister not to send them empty away.

Several of the workless men's wives who, it had been arranged, should speak broke down; so Mrs. Crooks explained they had not come to utter words only; they had come as Englishwomen, driven to despair, in the hope that the Premier, as the chief Minister of the King, would no longer leave them in a worse condition than that of his dogs and horses.

Mr. Balfour was sympathetic, but had nothing to suggest. He saw no hope of Parliament voting money. The deputation came away sullen and disappointed. For the time it looked as though the women's march had been in vain. But, before a week pa.s.sed, another woman spoke. The need was met by Queen Alexandra. On November 13th her Majesty issued her famous appeal:

"I appeal to all charitably disposed people in the Empire, both men and women, to a.s.sist me in alleviating the suffering of the poor starving unemployed during this winter. For this purpose I head the list with 2,000."

Before the winter was over the public, in response to this appeal, subscribed 150,000--a sum that proved sufficient that winter to keep Distress Committees going in London and elsewhere during the time of greatest privation.

The needs of the next winter were provided for by the State. The new Liberal Government had not been in office many months before it voted 200,000 to the Distress Committees appointed under the Unemployed Act.

Poplar had done its work. The women had marched to victory.

CHAPTER XXIX

HOME LIFE AND SOME ENGAGEMENTS

Crooks becomes a Grandfather--A Glimpse of his Home Life--Mr. G. R.

Sims on "A Morning with Will Crooks"--Crooks's Daily Post-bag--Sample Letters--Speaking at Religious and Temperance Meetings--On Adult Sunday Schools--On the Licensing Bill--A Homily to Free Churchmen.

By this time Crooks had moved from Northumberland Street to Gough Street, a few minutes' walk away. The change was from a five-roomed house to a six-roomed house, "with exactly three and a half feet more s.p.a.ce for a garden at the back," as he jocularly described it.

His two eldest daughters had both married, and his eldest son, who was doing well at the same trade his father learnt--that of cooper--had also settled down to married life in Poplar. This son had the pleasure one day of telephoning to his father at the County Council offices, just after the latter had pa.s.sed his fiftieth birthday, "You became a grandfather this morning. Cheer up!"

Another daughter qualified at the Cheltenham Training College as a school teacher. The youngest daughter elected to be "mother's right hand at home." The youngest son was apprenticed in a Thames shipbuilding yard.

Of his children he would often remark, during the controversy over religious education in schools, that they seemed to disprove the theories of both contending parties. One of his daughters and a son, who were educated in Board Schools, became communicating members of the Church of England, while two daughters educated in Church of England schools afterwards became Nonconformists.

A glimpse of his home life was given in the "Celebrities at Home"

series, published in the _World_. The writer described Gough Street as a row of tiny houses so much alike that the only difference between one and another was the number on the door.

But if you did not know Mr. Crooks's number, you could guess his house by waiting at the corner of the street. Because, between half-past nine and half-past ten, the door-knocker of No. 81 will beat a tattoo twelve or twenty times to the hour, when all the other knockers are silent. For this is the hour when Mr. Crooks is at home and receives his visitors, while he takes his breakfast in a spasmodic and interrupted manner--bad, one feels sure, for his digestion. They are not social callers. They come because they want something--an order for free medicine or for an artificial limb, for advice as to a likely quarter to get work, for a hundred and one needs of poor people who have no resources of their own.

They are pleasant rooms in which the Labour member finds the best happiness of his life. They are not large. They are not handsomely furnished, for a Labour member has no need of luxury; but to Mr.

Crooks every little adornment in them has its own story to tell and its own pleasant memory. On one of the walls are two oil paintings of ships in distress--"good or bad," says Mr. Crooks, "I'm no judge," But they are valuable to him, because they were painted by a man down on his luck, as a thanksgiving for a good turn done to him by the only friend he had.

"Bless you," says Mr. Crooks, "they all bring me little things, and I can't refuse them. See that champagne gla.s.s on the piano? That was given me by a poor old lady I used to look after a bit. That wine gla.s.s on the other side came from another old friend. Someone will bring me a China shepherd, another a vase or candlestick, or a comic pig. It's pleasant, you know!"...

Mr. Crooks is one of the pleasantest and most interesting men to visit. If you take him at the right time--half-past nine o'clock--it means an early journey from the West!--he will sit you down to a plate of porridge and give you more information about the life of the working-cla.s.ses in the course of an hour than the most laborious reading of Blue-books will do in a lifetime.

The visitor must be prepared for interruptions. In a corner of the breakfast-room is a member of the family who likes to have his say.

It is a poll-parrot--"as cunning as a barge-load of monkeys," says his owner affectionately. He has a peculiar habit of cracking invisible filbert-nuts at the back of his throat, rather disconcerting to a stranger; and although he dotes on Mr. Crooks, it is a little game of his to snub the Labour member by depreciatory remarks and scornful whistles of derision. But he always has an affectionate "Goo'-bye, Will!" for his master when he puts on his hat in the morning. To Mrs. Crooks he is always courteous. "Goo'-morning, mother!" he says, when the lady comes down to breakfast, and thrusts his beak out for a kiss. Then he calls "Tilly! Tilly!" in a shrill voice, like an elderly landlady, and is not satisfied till Mrs. Crooks's pretty, black-eyed daughter has given him his morning greeting.

"He has his little prejudices, like the rest of us," says Mr.

Crooks. "He can't abide babies, and squawks at them fearfully."