From Workhouse to Westminster Part 34

Again, when a few weeks later the triennial election for the London County Council took place, the people of Poplar stood by their Labour member. Progressive and Labour seats fell all over London in March, 1907, but Crooks was re-elected for Poplar at the top of the poll with 3,504 votes, though the Alliance strained every nerve to oust him.

Then it was that his outside accusers began to suspect they had been misled. Here was a prophet in his own country indeed--accused and slandered outside, but trusted and honoured by his neighbours. And when a month later the election of Guardians took place, and Poplar, put to a third test, declared more emphatically than ever for the Crooks policy by defeating about two-thirds of the Alliance candidates and electing an increased number of Labour men, the eyes of the public were opened.

But the revival of b.u.mbledom was not yet at an end. The Local Government Board Inspector's report came out three and a half months after the inquiry closed. The unusual course was followed of publishing it before the evidence. When the evidence did appear it disproved many of the Inspector's conclusions.

The Inspector was bound to say there was no reflection upon the "personal integrity of Mr. Crooks and Mr. Lansbury."

While deprecating the standard of comfort in the workhouse, the Inspector made no reference to the doctor's statement that he did not think the inmates were too well fed or clad. Rather, he tried to undermine Crooks's policy by remarks of this kind:--

Mr. Crooks in his evidence admitted that the dietary in the workhouse was better than could be obtained by the independent labourer in the borough with a wife and two children to keep who received anything under 30s. a week.

The evidence gives a different version. What Crooks said (page 389) was:--

"A man with 30s. a week with a wife and two children can only just keep himself in decency. When he gets below that he gets below the Local Government Board diet.... The men in the workhouse get a bare subsistence, and no man outside ought to be paid wages less than enable him to get that kind of living. What you have to prove is that we are giving the people in the workhouse such luxury as a man in ordinary work at from thirty to forty shillings a week could not get at home. But what he" [the legal representative of the Munic.i.p.al Alliance] "does not say is that we are dealing with the very aged in the workhouse--the able-bodied, as you know, are exceedingly limited in number--but he does not appreciate for a moment that after all a man's liberty is worth something. Liberty has not fallen in value. It is a priceless something.

A man will die for it. And our people will die--a good many of them--rather than go into the workhouse."

It happened that the people of Poplar were dying for it about that very time. While the Local Government Board was hara.s.sing Crooks for his efforts to save the poor from starvation, another Department of the State was in correspondence with the Guardians over two cases of people who had died from starvation in Poplar. This was the Home Office.

It is a theory of the British Const.i.tution that no person in the kingdom should die of starvation. Yet in London alone forty-eight people died of starvation in the winter of 1905-6. Whitechapel, which gives no out-relief, and is held up as a model by the Inspector who conducted the Poplar inquiry, had ten deaths from starvation within its borders during the year. Poplar, where the Guardians are said to be too generous in their treatment of the poor, was unable, with all its zeal, to prevent two people dying from want of food.

One of the victims was a child whose father refused to go into Poplar workhouse--this so-called "palace of luxury"--because he thought he might still be able to earn a trifle outside. Out-relief in the way of food was given to the value of 3s. 6d. a week, but that not being enough for a family of five, the youngest defied the British Const.i.tution by quietly slipping into the grave--"Died of asthenia and bronchitis," was the coroner's verdict, "due to mother's want of food, accelerated by want of proper clothing."

Shortly afterwards a married labourer in Old Ford, faced with starvation, refused to apply to the Poplar Guardians because it had become common talk among the poor of the district that the Local Government Board would no longer allow the Guardians to a.s.sist people outside the workhouse. And one morning this unemployed man had to run to the nearest doctor's because one of his children was "took queer." What followed was told by the doctor in evidence a few days later at the Poplar Coroner's Court. He related how he was knocked up in the early morning, and how, when he went to the house, he found no sign of food, no fire, and, lying on some scanty bedding, a girl-child, who had been dead about an hour. Death, he added, was due to exhaustion from want of sufficient food. He was so shocked with the poverty of the home that he gave the parents five shillings out of his own pocket, and sent them something to eat.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE

Crooks Appeals to the Public--"This Insult to the Poor"--Resentment all over the Country--A Voice from the Hungry 'Forties--Cheering Letters--A Government Department's Blunder--Poplar's Appeal to Crooks.

The day after the report of the Local Government Board Inspector was published, Crooks sent his decision upon it to the Press. He wrote from the House of Commons, where, as he stated in his letter, "the unfairness and injustice of the report in its bearings on my Poor Law policy are so far recognised that to-day I have been told by members of all parties that the report is not only wicked but brutal." He further stated in his letter to the Press:--

"Will you permit me to make it public through your columns that I accept the challenge thrown down in the Local Government Board report? Against all its strictures I intend to maintain my stand on that policy of humanising the Poor Law, to which I have given the greater part of my life. And in doing so I propose to appeal from the Local Government Board to the public.

"If the public upholds this insult to the poor I shall be painfully surprised. After twenty days of a searching inquiry, and after twice twenty pages of a strained attack on Mr. Lansbury and myself, there is nothing to show that we have done anything against the actual orders and regulations of the very Board that now rises in mock-heroic wrath to slay us. Our only crime is that we have humanised a system framed in 1834, when the voteless working cla.s.ses were dragooned by a middle-cla.s.s majority....

"My present duty is clear. The public may remember that at Mr. Chaplin's request I went as a nominee of the Local Government Board on the Metropolitan Asylums Board. It may remember that I was co-opted on the Central Unemployed Body on the suggestion of Mr. Walter Long. Now that the Local Government Board, under the new Government, has seen fit to attack me and my Labour colleagues, and to flout the poor as I venture to say they have never been flouted by that Department before, I can no longer hold those two positions. I propose to resign. Nor until its att.i.tude towards the poor and the unemployed changes will I ever consent to represent the Local Government Board on any public body again. I prefer to represent the people....

"The faults of administration at Poplar, so grossly magnified in this report, are common to all such bodies, and Poplar will do its best to avoid them. But the policy will not change. By that we stand or fall."

The reason for that policy was briefly explained in a special report issued by the Poplar Guardians and signed by Crooks as Chairman. It formed part of the Board's reply to the Inspector's report. Thus:--

This policy was never put in force with the idea that it would lead to a reduction in rates or in the number applying for relief. No one imagines that decent treatment of the poor will choke off applicants in the manner that harsh treatment will, but we claim that under the Act of Elizabeth, the poor (not merely the dest.i.tute, but the poor) are ent.i.tled to come to society in time of need.

The State provides all kinds of services for the community, such as roads, sewers, light, police, army, navy, education, etc., and we all enjoy those privileges. The State pensions its well-paid Cabinet Ministers and officials; and we claim that the poor, whose charter is the 43rd of Elizabeth, instead of being penalised when needing help, should receive such help in an ungrudging measure and in a manner which would most effectively preserve their self-respect.

Finally, we would again repeat that our pauperism is due to our poverty, that our policy is based on the claims recognised by statute as the due right of the poor. We neither palliate nor excuse any lapses either on the part of members or officers of the Board, but we claim that as a Board we have carried out our duties as efficiently and as economically as we were able, that we have never given indiscriminate relief either in or out of the workhouse, and in the main have usefully tried to do our duty both to the poor, who have our first claim, and to the ratepayers.

We have never ceased to urge for the past ten years that the poor are a metropolitan charge, that unemployment is a national question, that the Poor Law should be reformed. We are glad to know that our work, despite this present attack, has been successful, and that the poor of Poplar are better cared for, and not only the poor of Poplar, but the poor of the United Kingdom generally, as a result of our effort.

His appeal to the public won an inspiring response. b.u.mbledom was against him, but the people were with him. While a section of the Press was attacking him, it was so far ignorant of what the people of England were thinking as to know nothing at all of the tremendous meetings he was addressing all over the country.

His meetings in Poplar and Woolwich, where he was supported with rousing enthusiasm, were the largest he had ever had in those boroughs. At Chesterfield he addressed an open-air meeting of nearly twenty thousand Midland miners, when his reference to his Poor Law policy was cheered to the echo. The Cleveland miners were equally enthusiastic when he went up to their annual gathering. It was the same at public meetings in Newcastle, Burton, Huddersfield, Rossendale, Stockport, Batley, Sunderland, Penarth--the man who had stood out against one of b.u.mbledom's fiercest onslaughts had the good-will and confidence of the working people of England. At his indoor meetings there were rarely fewer than two thousand people present. Often he had audiences of four and five thousand.

It looked as though a recurrence of his old illness would prevent him from keeping an appointment to speak on his Poor Law policy at Bradford.

Such was the strength of the appeal sent to him, however, that he determined to risk it. He had to be helped by his wife on the journey, and when at the meeting it was found he was unable to stand there was a unanimous call that he be allowed to keep his chair while speaking.

Seated in the middle of the platform, he held an audience of two or three thousand people for upwards of an hour. The response he wrung from the crowded hall moved him deeply. b.u.mbledom never had a worse hour.

Of course his first public meeting after the publication of the Local Government Board's report took place at the Dock Gates in Poplar.

"We never had a better meeting," he wrote to me the next day. "The audience backed me to a man and woman--and, by the way, we never had so many women present before. It did me good."

At some of his provincial meetings there were people who well-nigh worshipped him. Old men in particular who had known the Hungry 'Forties would come up to him after the meeting and say:--

"Let me shake you by the hand, Mr. Crooks. We read about it in the papers, but the papers don't understand. We've been through it, and know. Don't be down-hearted, Mr. Crooks. G.o.d bless you!"

At a small country town a bed had been reserved for him at the little hotel outside the railway station. He arrived about midnight, and found the place in darkness. He knocked loudly for some time. At last a man's voice was heard from the railway line.

"Is that Mr. Crooks? Lord love yer, we knew you'd be late, and gone again early in the morning, and so that I shouldn't miss seeing you I told the hotel-keeper to go to bed and let me have the keys, so that you couldn't get in without me shaking you by the hand."

His first public meeting in Woolwich after the Local Government Board Inquiry drew an audience of over five thousand people to the Drill Hall.

His colleague Lansbury shared in the inspiring reception and addressed the meeting.

Crooks told the audience it was no wonder that Lansbury and he got angry at times over our iniquitous Poor Law system. Such was the injustice of the rating system in London that Poplar--which was spending out of the rates per head of population less than half what West-End districts like Kensington and Marylebone were spending--appeared to outsiders to be extravagant. If those West-End Boroughs had Poplar's poor to look after, their rates, instead of being about 7s., would be about 15s. in the pound. The poor of Poplar were London's poor; yet the cost of looking after them was borne mainly by the people of Poplar. London was the only city in the world where those who grew rich on the labour of the poor were able to segregate themselves in favoured quarters, and escape their obligation to help the aged poor unable to work longer.

He went on to show the iniquities of our Poor Law system from a national standpoint. About 28,000,000 a year was raised in the name of the Poor Law. Of this only 14,000,000 had any connection with the Poor Law at all. And how were the fourteen millions spent? The poor got seven and a half millions, while the remaining six and a half millions were spent in administrative charges. That meant that every 5s. given to the poor out of the rates cost the ratepayers another 4s. 9d. to give it. No wonder that b.u.mbledom became nervous when Guardians urged that the poor rather than officials should receive more of this money raised for the poor. The Local Government Board Inspector, when deploring that Poplar's expenditure on the poor had gone up during the last ten years, might have added that during the same period the cost of collecting rates in the City had gone up from 11,000 to 23,000. It seemed to be all right when officials got the money, but all wrong when the poor got it.

"I believe in being a true Guardian of the poor, and not merely a Guardian of the Poor Rate. We in Poplar have preferred to save the lives of the poor rather than the rates. Even then we have administered with remarkable economy; for Poplar's rates would not be high if London as a whole paid its proper share towards maintaining London's poor. We in Poplar, however, have not allowed an unjust rating system to prevent us from doing our duty to broken-down old people, to the starving and to the unemployed. We agree with Carlyle that 'to believe practically, that the poor and luckless are here only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissible manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith. To say to the poor: Ye shall eat the bread of affliction and drink the water of affliction and be very miserable while here, requires not so much a stretch of heroic faculty in any sense as due toughness of bowels.'"

From Stockport, where he had been addressing one of a series of public meetings in the Midlands, he wrote:--

"How good the people are! Whenever I mention Poplar, it is truly inspiring to hear the magnificent response. Last night the moment the word pa.s.sed my lips an audience of two thousand cheered like one man. It sometimes overwhelms me almost. Who am I to deserve it?...

"I am sometimes told that I affect to despise my critics. You know better, of course. But, really, after such experiences as these, I can't help laughing at them when I think of their ponderous official p.r.o.nouncements against my policy and of the equally ponderous lectures read to me by certain sections of the Press and the Church. When will the Press and the Church, and 'all who are put in authority over us,'

come to learn what the mind of the people really is, and begin to interpret it rightly? I know the heart of the people to be true. That is why I laugh and go on my way confident that the little piece of well-doing I have aimed at on behalf of the poor and the unemployed will in the end put to 'silence the ignorance of foolish men.'"

If his meetings were inspiring, the same can be said of his correspondence. Public men, in various parts of the country, including Guardians, wrote to congratulate him on the brave stand he had made against the forces of b.u.mbledom. From other quarters he had many encouraging letters.

Canon Scott Holland wrote: "You know how your friends feel for you in this cruel trouble. We need not tell you how we trust you, and believe in you, and stand by you."

"You have made many lives happier and better by your work on behalf of the poor," wrote a high official from a central Poor Law establishment.