FROM WORKHOUSE TO WESTMINSTER
[Illustration: WILL CROOKS, M.P.
_Photo: G. Dendry._]
FROM WORKHOUSE TO WESTMINSTER
The Life Story of WILL CROOKS, M.P.
By
GEORGE HAW
WITH INTRODUCTION BY G. K. CHESTERTON
FOUR FULL-PAGE PLATES
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
MCMIX
First Edition _February 1907_.
Reprinted _March, June and August 1908_.
_January and November 1909._
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
MRS. WILL CROOKS
THIS SLIGHT RECORD OF HER HUSBAND'S CAREER
IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
This record of the career of a man whom I have known intimately in his
public and private life for over a dozen years can claim at least one
distinction. It is the first biography of a working man who has
deliberately chosen to remain in the ranks of working men as well as in
their service. From the day in the early 'nineties when he was called
upon to decide between a prospective partnership in a prosperous
business and the hard, joyless life of a Labour representative, with
poverty for his lot and slander for his reward, he has adhered to the
principle he then laid down, consistently refusing ever since the many
invitations received from various quarters to come up higher. There have
been endless biographies of men who have risen from the ranks of Labour
and then deserted those ranks for wealthy circles. Will Crooks, in his
own words, has not risen from the ranks; he is still in the ranks,
standing four-square with the working classes against monopoly and
privilege.
This book would have been an autobiography rather than a biography could
I have had my way. Nor was I alone in urging Crooks to write the story
of his life, as strenuous in its poverty as it has been in its public
service. He always argued that that was not in his way at all--that, in
fact, he did not believe in men sitting down to write about themselves
any more than he believed in men getting up to talk about themselves.
So I have done the next best thing. Since the interpretation depends
upon the interpreter, I have tried, in writing this account of his life,
to make him the narrator as often as I could. Most of the incidents in
his career I have given in his own words, mainly from personal talks we
have had together during our years of friendship, sometimes by our own
firesides, sometimes amid the stress of public life, sometimes during
long walks in the streets of London. Nor do any of the incidents lose in
detail or in verity by reason of many of those cherished conversations
having taken place long before either of us ever dreamed they would
afterwards be pieced together in book form.
Not to Crooks alone am I indebted for help in compiling this book. I owe
much to members of his family, to my wife, and to other friends of his.
GEORGE HAW.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION xiii
CHAPTER I.
EARLIEST YEARS IN A ONE-ROOMED HOME 1
CHAPTER II.
AS A CHILD IN THE WORKHOUSE 8
CHAPTER III.
SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS 16
CHAPTER IV.
ROUND THE HAUNTS OF HIS BOYHOOD 25
CHAPTER V.
IN TRAINING FOR A CRAFTSMAN 33
CHAPTER VI.
TRAMPING THE COUNTRY FOR WORK 43
CHAPTER VII.
ONE OF LONDON'S UNEMPLOYED 50
CHAPTER VIII.
THE COLLEGE AT THE DOCK GATES 57
CHAPTER IX.
FROM THE CHEERING MULTITUDE TO A SORROW-LADEN HOME 67
CHAPTER X.
A LABOUR MEMBER'S WAGES 75
CHAPTER XI.
ON THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL 85
CHAPTER XII.
TWO OF HIS MONUMENTS 96
CHAPTER XIII.
THE TASK OF HIS LIFE BEGINS 105
CHAPTER XIV.
THE MAN WHO FED THE POOR 112
CHAPTER XV.
TURNING WORKHOUSE CHILDREN INTO USEFUL CITIZENS 119
CHAPTER XVI.
ON THE METROPOLITAN ASYLUMS BOARD 128
CHAPTER XVII.
A BAD BOYS' ADVOCATE 134
CHAPTER XVIII.
PROUD OF THE POOR 144
CHAPTER XIX.
THE FIRST WORKING-MAN MAYOR IN LONDON 154
CHAPTER XX.
THE KING'S DINNER--AND OTHERS 166
CHAPTER XXI.
THE MAN WHO PAID OLD-AGE PENSIONS 175
CHAPTER XXII.
ELECTION TO PARLIAMENT 186
CHAPTER XXIII.
ADVENT OF THE POLITICAL LABOUR PARTY 195
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE LIVING WAGE FOR MEN AND WOMEN 202
CHAPTER XXV.
FREE TRADE IN THE NAME OF THE POOR 210
CHAPTER XXVI.
PREPARING FOR THE UNEMPLOYED ACT 219
CHAPTER XXVII.
AGITATION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 227
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE QUEEN INTERVENES 241
CHAPTER XXIX.
HOME LIFE AND SOME ENGAGEMENTS 252
CHAPTER XXX.
COLONISING ENGLAND 264
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE REVIVAL OF BUMBLEDOM 271
CHAPTER XXXII.
APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE 280
CHAPTER XXXIII.
"THE HAPPY WARRIOR" 296
INDEX 303
* * * * *
LIST OF PLATES
WILL CROOKS, M.P. _Frontispiece_
THE CROOKS FAMILY _Facing p._ 18
WILL CROOKS ADDRESSING AN OPEN-AIR
MEETING AT WOOLWICH " 192
MR. AND MRS. WILL CROOKS " 248
INTRODUCTION
Mr. Will Crooks, as I know him in his own house at Poplar and in that
other House at Westminster, always seems to me to be something far
greater than a Labour Member of Parliament. He stands out as the supreme
type of the English working classes, who have chosen him as one of their
representatives.
Representative government, a mystical institution, is said to have
originated in some of the monastic orders. In any case, it is evident
that the character of it is symbolic, and that it is subject to all the
advantages and all the disadvantages of a symbol. Just exactly as a
religious ritual may for a time represent a real emotion, and then for a
time cease to represent anything, so representative government may for a
time represent the people, and for a time cease to represent anything.
But the peculiar difficulties attaching to the thing called
representative government have not been fully appreciated. The great
difficulty of representative governments is simply this: that the
representative is supposed to discharge two quite definite and distinct
functions. There is in his position the idea of being a picture or copy
of the thing he represents. There is also the idea of being an
instrument of the thing he represents, or a message from the thing he
represents. The first is like the shadow a man throws on the wall; the
second is like the stone that he throws over the wall. In the first
sense, it is supposed that the representative is like the thing he
represents. In the second case it is only supposed that the
representative is useful to the thing he represents. In the first case,
a parliamentary representative is used strictly as a parliamentary
representative. In the second case a parliamentary representative is
used as a weapon. He is used as a missile. He is used as something to be
merely thrown against the enemy; and those who merely throw something
against the enemy do not ask especially that the thing they throw shall
be a particular copy of themselves. To send one's challenge is not to
send one's photograph. When Ajax hurled a stone at his enemy, it was not
a stone carved in the image of Ajax. When a modern general causes a
cannon-ball to be fired, he is not understood to indicate that the
contours of the cannon-ball represent in any exact way the curves of his
own person. In short, we can in modern representative politics use a
politician as a missile without using him, in the fullest sense of the
word, as a symbol.
In this sense most of our representatives in modern representative
government are merely used as missiles. Mr. Balfour is a missile. Mr.
Balfour is hurled at the heads of his enemies like a boomerang or a
javelin. He is flung by the great mass of mediocre Tory squires. He is
flung, not because he is at all like them, for that he obviously is not.
He is flung because he is a particularly bright and sharp missile; that
is to say, because he is so very unlike the men who fling him. Here,
then, is the primary paradox of representative government. Men elect a
representative half because he is like themselves and half because he is
not like themselves. They elect a representative half because he
represents them and half because he misrepresents them. They choose Mr.
Balfour (let us say) half because he does what they would do and half
because he does what they could never do at all.
We are told that the Labour movement will be an exception to all
previous rules. The Labour movement has been no exception to this
previous rule. The Labour Members, as a class, are not representatives,
but missiles. Poor men elect them, not because they are like poor men,
but because they are likely to damage rich men: an excellent reason.
Labour Members are the exceptions among Labour men. As I have said, they
are weapons, missiles, things thrown. Working-men are not at all like
Mr. Keir Hardie. If it comes to likeness, working-men are rather more
like the Duke of Devonshire. But they throw Mr. Keir Hardie at the Duke
of Devonshire, knowing that he is so curiously shaped as to hurt
anything at which he is thrown. Unless this is thoroughly understood,
great injustice will necessarily be done to the Labour movement; for it
is obvious on the face of it that Labour Members do not represent the
average of labouring men. A man like Mr. J. R. Macdonald no more
suggests a Battersea workman than he suggests a Bedouin or a Russian
Grand Duke. These men are not the representatives of the democracy, but
the weapons of the democracy. They are intended only to fulfil the
second of those functions in the delegate which I have already defined.
They are the instruments of the people. They are not the images of the
people. They are fanatics for the things about which the people are
good-humouredly convinced. They are philosophers about the things which
are to the people an easy and commonplace religion. In a word, they are
not representatives; they are not even ambassadors. They are
declarations of war.
Such being the problem, we must reconcile ourselves to finding many of
the Labour Members men of a definite and even pedantic class; men whose
austere and lucid tone, whose elaborate economic explanations smack of
something very different from the actual streets of London. This
economic knowledge may be very necessary. It may remind us of our
duties; but it does not remind us of the Walworth Road. It may enable a
man to speak for the proletarians, but it does not enable a man to speak
with them.
Now, if a man has a good rough-and-ready knowledge of the mechanics of
Battersea and the labourers of Poplar; if the same man has a good
rough-and-ready knowledge of the men in the House of Commons (a vastly
inferior company); he will come out of both those experiences with one
quite square and solid conviction, a conviction the grounds of which,
though they may be difficult to define verbally, are as unshakable as
the ground. He will come out with the conviction that there is really
only one modern Labour Member who represents, who symbolises, or who
even remotely suggests the real labouring men of London; and that is Mr.
Will Crooks.
Mr. Crooks alone fulfils both the functions of the representative. He is
a representative who, like Mr. Keir Hardie and the others, fights,
cleaves a way, does something that only a man of talent could do,
expresses the inexpressible, sacrifices himself. But also, unlike Mr.
Keir Hardie, and the rest, he is a representative who represents. He is
a picture as well as a projectile; he is the stone carved in the image
of Ajax. He is really like the people for whom he stands. A man can
realise this fact, merely as a fact, without implying any disrespect,
for instance, to the Scotch ideality of Mr. Keir Hardie, or the Scotch
strenuousness of Mr. John Burns. They are expressive of the English
democracy, but not typical of it. The first characteristic of Mr.
Crooks, which must strike anyone who has ever had to do with him, even
for ten minutes, is this immense fact of the absolute and isolated
genuineness of his connection with the working classes. To all the other
Labour leaders we listen with respect on Labour matters, because they
have been elected by labourers. To him alone we should listen if he had
never been elected at all. Of him alone it can be said that if we did
not accept him as a representative, we should still accept him as a
type. I need not dwell, and indeed I feel no desire to dwell, on those
qualities in Mr. Crooks which express just now the popular qualities of
the populace. I feel more interest in the unpopular qualities of the
populace.
The greatness of Mr. Crooks lies not in the fact that he expresses the
claims of the populace, which twenty dons at Oxford would be ready to
express; it is that he expresses the populace: its strong tragedy and
its strong farce. He is not a demagogue. He is not even a democrat. He
is a demos; he is the real King. And his chief characteristic, as I have
suggested, is that he represents especially those popular good
qualities which are unpopular in modern discussion. Will Crooks is to
the ordinary London omnibus conductor or cabman exactly what Robert
Burns was to the ordinary puritanical but passionate peasant of the
Scotch Lowlands. He is the journeyman of genius. All that is good in
them is better in him; but it is the same thing. Walt Whitman has
perfectly expressed this attitude of the average towards the fine type.
"They see themselves in him. They hardly know themselves, they are so
grown."
In numberless points Mr. Crooks thus completes and glorifies the common
character of the poor man. Take, for instance, the deep matter of
humour: humour in which the English poor are certainly pre-eminent among
all classes of the nation and all nations of the world. By all
politicians, including Labour politicians, humour is only introduced
exceptionally and elaborately; by all politicians the comic anecdote is
led up to with dextrous prefaces and deep intonations, as if it were
something altogether unique and separate. All politicians take their own
humour very seriously. Mr. Crooks recalls the real life of the streets
in nothing so much as in the fact that humour is a constant condition.
He and the poor exist in a normal atmosphere of amiable irony. If
anything, they have to make an effort to become verbally serious:
something of the same kind of earnest that it costs an ordinary member
of Parliament to become witty. Anyone who has heard Mr. Crooks talk
knows that his permanent mood is humorous. He is never without a story,
but his face and his mind are humorous before he has even thought of the
story. He lives, so to speak, in a state of expectant reminiscence. The
man who said that "brevity was the soul of wit" told a lie; nobody
minds how long wit goes on so long as it is wit. Mr. Crooks belongs to
that strong old school of English humour in which Dickens was supreme;
that school which some moderns have called dull because it could go on
for a long time being interesting.
I have merely taken this case of popular humour as one out of a hundred.
A similar case of Mr. Crooks's popular sympathy might be found in his
pathos, which is equally uncompromising and direct. Even his political
faults, if they are faults, against which so much criticism has for a
time been raised, have still this pervading quality, that they are
essentially the popular faults. This instinct for a prompt and practical
and hand-to-mouth benevolence, this instinct for giving a very good time
to those who have had a very bad time, this is the very soul of that
immense and astonishing altruism at which all social reformers have
stood thunderstruck: the kindness of the poor to the poor. This attitude
may or may not be the great vice of the governors; there is no doubt
that it is the great virtue of the people. The charity of poor men to
poor men has always been spontaneous, irregular, individual, liable
therefore in its nature to some faults of confusion or of favouritism.
It is the misfortune of Mr. Crooks that alone among modern
philanthropists and social reformers he has really been the typical poor
man giving to poor men. This quality which has been seen and condemned
in him is simply the quality which is the common and working morality of
the London streets. You may like it; you may dislike it. But if you
dislike it you are simply disliking the English people. You have seen
English people perhaps for a moment in omnibuses, in streets on Saturday
nights, in third-class carriages, or even in Bank Holiday waggonettes.
You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not yet
entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not represent
it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less than Tories
or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with it a trail of
all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as against
hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for
respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the family
which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If ever that
people enters politics it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as
mere pedants. It will be able to point only to one figure, powerful,
pathetic, humorous, and very humble, who bore in any way upon his face
the sign and star of its authority.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
FROM WORKHOUSE TO WESTMINSTER
CHAPTER I
EARLIEST YEARS IN A ONE-ROOMED HOME
Difference between "Will" and "William"--Early Memories--Crying for
Bread--An Aspersion Resented--A Prophecy that has been
Fulfilled--Will earns his First Half-Sovereign.
Will Crooks!
In the little one-roomed home where he was born at No. 2, Shirbutt
Street, down by the Docks at Poplar, it was the earnest desire of all
whom it concerned that he should be known to the world as William
Crooks. The desire found practical expression in the register of Trinity
Congregational Church in East India Dock Road close by. Thither, within
a few weeks of his birth, in the year 1852, he was carried with modest
ceremony and solemnly christened by a name which everybody ever since
has refused to give to him.
For somehow "William Crooks" does not sound like the man at all. Looking
at it gives you no suggestion of the good-humoured, hard-headed Labour
man, known as familiarly to his colleagues in the House of Commons as
he is to the great world of wage-earners outside by the shorter and more
expressive name of Will Crooks.
Born in poverty, the third of seven children, Will Crooks, who is
blessed with keen powers of observation and a good memory, can carry his
mind back to the days before he was put into breeches.
"I remember before my fourth year was out," I have heard him tell,
"something of the public rejoicings on the declaration of peace after
the Crimean War. The following year was also memorable to me as the time
I witnessed troops of soldiers marching to the East India Docks on the
outbreak of the Mutiny."
Those were days of want and sorrow, as were many days that followed, in
the little one-roomed home in East London. His father was a ship's
stoker, who lost an arm by the starting of the engines one day when he
was oiling the machinery as his vessel lay in the Thames.
"My very earliest recollections are associated with mother dressing
father's arm day after day. I was only three years old at the time, but
I know that all our privations dated from the day of this accident to my
father, because he was forced to give up his work.
"It must have been with the aid of some good friends that at last my
father got an old horse, hoping to earn a little by leading and carting;
but nothing came of this small venture, and in time the horse had to be
sold to pay the rent. Almost the only work of any kind that father,
being thus disabled, could get to do was an odd job as watchman.
"Those were very lean years indeed, and I don't know what we should have
done but for mother. She used to toil with the needle far into the night
and often all night long, slaving as hard as any poor sweated woman I
have ever known, and I have known hundreds of such poor creatures. Many
a time as a lad have I helped mother to carry the clothes she had made
to Houndsditch. There were no trams running then, and the 'bus fare from
Poplar to Aldgate was fourpence, a sum we never dared think of spending
on a ride.
"My elder brother was as clever with the needle as many a woman, and
often he would stay up all through the night with mother, helping her to
make oil-skin coats."
One night, as the mother worked alone, young Will woke up in the little
orange-box bedstead by the wall where he slept with a younger brother.
Silently he watched her plying the needle at the table until he noticed
tears trickling down her cheeks.
"What are you crying for, mother?"
"Never mind, Will, my boy. You go to sleep."
"But you must be crying about something, mother."
And then, in a doleful tone, she said, "It's through wondering where the
next meal is coming from, my boy."
The little chap pretended to go to sleep soon after; but now and again
he would peep cautiously over the side of the box at his mother silently
crying over her work at the table. And he puzzled his young head as to
what it all meant.
"My mother crying because she can't get bread for us! Why can't she get
bread? I saw plenty of bread in the shops yesterday. Do all mothers have
to cry before they can get bread for their children?"
It was the first incident that made him think.
There was one morning, the morning after a Christmas Day of all times in
the year, when his mother refused to let him or the others get up, even
when she left the house. It was not until she returned after what seemed
a long time, bringing with her a portion of a loaf, that she allowed
them to get out of bed.
"It was many years afterwards before I learnt the reason for her strange
conduct that Boxing Day morning. Then I found out that she had made a
vow that her children should never get up unless there was some
breakfast for them.
"We were so poor that we children never got a drop of tea for months
together. It used to be bread and treacle for breakfast, bread and
treacle for dinner, bread and treacle for tea, washed down with a cup of
cold water. Sometimes there was a little variation in the form of
dripping. At other times the variety was secured by there being neither
treacle nor dripping. The very bread was so scarce that mother could not
afford to allow the three eldest, of whom I was one, more than three
slices apiece at a meal, while the four youngest got two and a half
slices. Whenever we could afford to buy tea or butter, it was only in
ounces. Once my brother and I were sent to buy a whole quarter of a
pound of butter--it turned out that auntie was coming to tea--and on the
way we speculated seriously whether mother was going to open a shop."
Perhaps the first occasion upon which Crooks as a lad showed something
of that spirited resentment at aspersions on the poor which ultimately
led him into public life was one that arose in a cobbler's shop. He was
about eight years old, when his father sent him back with a pair of
boots that had been repaired to ask that a little more be done to them
for the money.
"I don't know what he wants for his ninepence," said the cobbler,
referring to the lad's father; "but, there!"--throwing the boots to his
man--"put another patch on. He's only a poor beggar."
There was an angry cry from the other side, of the counter. "My father's
not a poor beggar!" shouted the boy. "He's as good a man as you, and
only wants what he has paid for."
If the boy thought much of the father the father thought much of the
boy. It had often been his boast that "Our Will will do things some
day."
One little fancy of the old man's was brought to my notice the morning
after Crooks was first returned to Parliament for Woolwich. His elder
brother told me then of a little incident that took place over
forty-five years before.
"We children were playing in the home together when young Will said
something which made the dad look up surprised. And I heard him say to
mother, 'That lad'll live to be either Lord Mayor of London or a Member
of Parliament.'"
The poverty deepened and darkened in the little one-roomed home during
Will's boyhood. It soon became impossible even to spend an odd ninepence
on boot repairs. The mother met this emergency as she met nearly all the
others. She became the family cobbler, as she had all along been the
family tailor. Often would she go on her knees, hammer in hand, mending
the boots. The children could not remember the time when she did not
make all their clothes.
"God only knows, God only will know, how my mother worked and wept,"
says Crooks. "With it all she brought up seven of us to be decent and
useful men and women. She was everything to us. I owe to her what little
schooling I got, for, though she could neither read nor write herself,
she would often remark that that should never be said of any of her
children. I owe to her wise training that I have been a teetotaller all
my life. I owe it to her that I was saved from becoming a little wastrel
of the streets, for, as a Christian woman, she kept me at the Sunday
School and took me regularly to the Congregational Church where I had
been baptised.
"I can picture her now as I used to see her when I awoke in the night
making oil-skin coats by candle-light in our single room. Youngster
though I was, I meant it from the very bottom of my heart when I used to
whisper to myself, as I peeped at her from the little box-bedstead by
the wall, 'Wait till I'm a man! Won't I work for my mother when I'm a
man!'"
He thought he was a man at thirteen, when he could bring home to her
proudly five shillings every week, his wages in the blacksmith's shop.
There came a memorable Saturday night when, having worked overtime all
the week and earned an extra five shillings, he was paid his first
half-sovereign. He threw on his coat and cap excitedly and ran all the
way home from Limehouse Causeway, the half-sovereign clenched tightly in
his hand, until he burst breathlessly into the little room, exclaiming:
"Mother, mother, I've earned half a sovereign, all of it myself, and
it's yours, all yours, every bit yours!"