From Workhouse to Westminster Part 6

"What's your name?"

"Crooks."

"Of Poplar?"

"That's me."

"We don't want anyone."

From several of these places he heard afterwards that the instant he was gone other men were taken on.

Since London was a closed door to him, he turned his back upon it, and set out tramping the country in search of work. With a fully-paid-up trade union card, he knew he could count on an occasional half-crown to help him on the way at those towns where his society had branches.

His home had to be broken up. His wife with their child went to her mother's, there to await for weary weeks the result of her husband's first quest into the country.

The only piece of good news came from Liverpool. Not until he reached that city did he get a job. He tramped into Liverpool from Burton-on-Trent. Never in his life, either before or since, did a silver coin mean so much to him as the half-crown given by a member of his own trade to help him on the road as he set out from Burton for Liverpool.

Twenty-nine years later Crooks was speaking at a meeting of co-operators in Burton when he recognised his former benefactor on the platform. He told the audience of his last visit to their town, remarking how on that occasion no one but this man offered him hospitality, whereas now, if he lived to be a hundred and fifty years of age, he would not be able to accept all the invitations he had received from friends and would-be friends to spend week-ends with them. His regret was, he told the meeting, that those good people did not begin to ask him earlier and that they did not think of asking other poor men in a similar plight to his when he first entered Burton.

By the time he dragged himself into Liverpool he was without a sole to his boots. The journey was completed on the uppers of his boots, with the aid of string, a device he had learnt from friendly tramps on the road. Having got what looked like a promising job, he invited his wife to join him with their child, enclosing the fare from his first week's wages.

This work in Liverpool had not been obtained without much weary searching. A good friend to the young fellow in his distress was the Y.M.C.A. in that city. Nearly thirty years later he addressed a crowded public meeting in the large hall of the Liverpool Y.M.C.A. He had an enthusiastic welcome when he rose to speak.

I am very grateful to you for your kind welcome of me to-night.

This hall has carried my memory back to 1876 when I first visited Liverpool. I was then looking for work, knowing what it was to want a meal many a day. I don't know what I should have done without the many kindnesses I met with from Liverpool people, and from none more hearty and truly helpful than I received here in this building.

But Liverpool is a.s.sociated with one of the saddest memories in his life. This is how he refers to it:--

"My wife joined me, bringing our little girl, a bonny child of whom we were immensely proud. The little one pined from the day it reached Liverpool and died within a month. I thought my wife would have followed the child to the grave within a day or two. I never saw her so much affected in all my life. She pleaded to be taken away from that place.

'Anywhere,' she said, 'only let's get away.' So we buried our little girl in Liverpool one rainy Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and came back to London to seek work the same night."

It was the most miserable railway journey of his life. If anything, the misery was increased when as the dull dawn crept over London he and his wife stepped out of the train and walked the seven miles of silent streets between Euston and Poplar.

No better fortune awaited them in London. The young husband sought work with no success. News reached him that his trade was thriving again in Liverpool, so he set out to tramp there a second time.

"It is a weird experience, this, of wandering through England in search of a job," he says. "You keep your heart up so long as you have something in your stomach, but when hunger steals upon you, then you despair. Footsore and listless at the same time, you simply lose all interest in the future.

"I have always been drawn towards Canon Liddon since reading an address of his in which he said that the roughest tramp upon the road was, in his eyes, one who might come to be numbered among those favoured by Christ, and that the most brilliant and distinguished guest he had ever met had no higher possibility than that.

"Nothing wearies one more than walking about hunting for employment which is not to be had. It is far harder than real work. The uncertainty, the despair, when you reach a place only to discover that your journey is fruitless, are frightful. I've known a man say, 'Which way shall I go to-day?' Having no earthly idea which way to take, he tosses up a b.u.t.ton. If the b.u.t.ton comes down on one side he treks east; if on the other, he treks west.

"You can imagine the feeling when, after walking your boots off, a man says to you, as he jingles sovereigns in his pocket, 'Why don't you work?' That is what happened to me as I scoured the country between London and Liverpool, asking all the way for any kind of work to help me along."

I remember Crooks recalling his experience at a dinner-party given by the Hon. Maud Stanley at her Westminster house. Crooks was then a fellow-member with Miss Stanley of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, and she invited us on that occasion to meet her friend Professor Wyckoff, the American author, who wrote "The Workers." In "The Workers" the author tells the story of how for a time he turned his back upon his usual well-to-do haunts in order to find out what earning one's own living by tramping from place to place doing manual work was actually like.

Crooks, who, perhaps unconsciously to himself, had become the chief entertainer at table, showed Mr. Wyckoff in a moment that, realistic though his experiences had been, he could not possibly enter into the feelings of the real out-of-work who had nothing but sixpence between him and starvation. However hard up Mr. Wyckoff might have been at times, he always had the consolation that if the worst came to the worst, funds awaited him at home. The ordinary workman tramping the country, said Crooks, had no such feeling of a sure foundation somewhere, and it was only when you felt--as he had often felt when tramping for work--the utter hopelessness and loneliness of things, made doubly worse by the knowledge that wife and children were suffering too, that you could enter fully into the feelings of an out-of-work.

Evidently Mr. Wyckoff had not thought of this view before, but it seemed to me to mark the all-important difference between the amateur and the real sufferer. There are some things no man can play at, and the game Mr. Wyckoff, with the best intentions in the world, and with a good deal of self-imposed suffering, tried to play was one of them. There are some experiences of life which no one can ever have for the seeking only.

They come; they can never be commanded.

CHAPTER VII

ONE OF LONDON'S UNEMPLOYED

A Casual Labourer at the Docks--A Typical Day's Tramping for Work in London--Demoralising Effects of being Out of a Job--Emptying the Cupboard for a Starving Family--Work found at last--Doing the "Railway Tavern" a Bad Turn.

In Liverpool again the prospect was not what he had been led to believe.

An odd job here and an odd job there still left him in want. At last, in response to the earnest entreaties of his wife, whom nothing could persuade to revisit Liverpool, he returned to take his chance again in London.

This time Crooks determined to try to find work outside his own trade.

He went down to the Docks, where, by the aid of a friendly foreman, he got occasional jobs as a casual labourer.

The sight of so many other poor fellows struggling at the Dock Gates proved more than he could bear. He turned away from the eager ma.s.s of men one morning, resolved never to join in the demoralising scrimmage again. With a trade of his own he felt he had no right to take a job for which so many men, more helpless than himself, were daily striving.

The morning he turned away finally from the Docks was the very one on which his friend the foreman had promised him a job if he turned up at the gates by noon. The piteous appeals of the hundreds of other men for the half-dozen places offered so affected him that he hung back and sat down out of sight. He saw the foreman scan the crowd, looking for him, and then engage the number of men he wanted and go inside. Crooks went off to seek work in other quarters.

One typical day of tramping for work in London he described to me thus:--

"I first went down to the river-side at Shadwell. No work was to be had there. Then I called at another place in Limehouse. No hands wanted. So I looked in at home and got two slices of bread in paper and walked eight miles to a cooper's yard in Tottenham. All in vain. I dragged myself back to Clerkenwell. Still no luck. Then I turned towards home in despair. By the time I reached Stepney I was dead beat, so I called at a friend's in Commercial Road for a little rest. They gave me some Irish stew and twopence to ride home. I managed to walk home and gave the twopence to my wife. She needed it badly.

"That year I know I walked London until my limbs ached again. I remember returning home once by way of Tidal Basin, and turning into the Victoria Docks so utterly exhausted that I sank down on a coil of rope and slept for hours.

"Another day I tramped as far as Beckton, again to no purpose. I must have expressed keen disappointment in my face, for the good fellows in the cooperage there made a collection for me, and I came home that night with one and sevenpence.

"There are few things more demoralising to a man than to have a long spell of unemployment with day after day of fruitless searching for work. It turns scores of decent men into loafers. Many a confirmed loafer to-day is simply what he is because our present social system takes no account of a man being out of work. No one cares whether he gets a job or goes to the dogs. If he goes to the dogs the nation is the loser in a double sense. It has lost a worker, and therefore a wealth-maker. Secondly, it has to spend public money in maintaining him or his family in some kind of way, whether in workhouse, infirmary, prison or asylum.

"A man who is out of work for long nearly always degenerates. For example, if a decent fellow falls out in October and fails to get a job say by March, he loses his anxiety to work. The exposure, the insufficient food, his half-starved condition, have such a deteriorating effect upon him that he becomes indifferent whether he gets work or not.

He thus pa.s.ses from the unemployed state to the unemployable state. It ought to be a duty of the nation to see that a man does not become degenerate."

In his own unemployed days, he awoke every morning with the half-suppressed prayer: "G.o.d help me to-day. Where shall I look for work to-day? Where can I earn a bob?"

Actual starvation was only kept away by occasional help from his own and his wife's people and by the few shillings out-of-work pay which his Trade Union allowed him every week. Even in those days he was never so hard up as not to be ready to help others in greater privation. He was out one morning when he met a man whom he knew slightly near his own house. He could see that he looked ill and that he wanted to speak. So he went up to him and said:

"Well, mate, what's amiss?"

With tears in his eyes the man told his tale--his tale of starvation. He was afraid or ashamed to ask for relief, and there had been no food in his house for over twenty-four hours.

Crooks told the man to go home, promising to come to him presently. He himself went back to his own home and told his wife.

"Let's see what we've got," she said.

All she found was a portion of a packet of cocoa and a loaf of bread.