AS A CHILD IN THE WORKHOUSE
With an Idiot Boy in the Workhouse--Life in the Poor Law School at
Sutton--At Home Once More--A Fashionable Knock for the Casual
Ward--A Bread Riot.
But we must go back a few years--to the evil day when, the father being
a cripple, the family have to enter the workhouse.
The mother had before this been forced to ask for parish relief. For a
time the Guardians paid her two or three shillings a week and gave her a
little bread. Suddenly these scanty supplies were stopped. The mother
was told to come before the Board and bring her children.
Six of them, clinging timidly to her skirt, were taken into the terrible
presence. The Chairman singled out Will, then eight years of age, and,
pointing his finger at him, remarked solemnly:
"It's time that boy was getting his own living."
"He is at work, sir," was the mother's timid apology. "He gets up at a
quarter to five every morning and goes round with the milkman for
sixpence a week."
"Can't he earn more than that?"
"Well, sir, the milkman says he's a very willing boy and always
punctual, but he's so little that he doesn't think he can pay him more
than sixpence yet."
And the little boy looked furtively at the great man in the great chair,
never dreaming that the time would come when he would occupy that chair
himself, and that almost the first order he would issue from it would be
one putting an end to the bad practice of making mothers drag their
young children before the Board.
On that unhappy afternoon the Guardians, firm in their resolve not to
renew the out-relief, offered to take the children into the workhouse.
The mother said 'No' at first, marching them all bravely home again.
Stern want forced her to yield at last. The day came when she saw the
five youngest, including Will, taken from home to the big poorhouse down
by the Millwall Docks. The crippled father was admitted into the House
at the same time.
They were put into a bare room like a vault, the father and two sons,
while the three sisters were taken they knew not where. There the lads
and their dad spent the night and the next day until the doctor saw them
and passed them into the main workhouse building. Then Will lost sight
of his father, though he was permitted to remain with his young brother
and share with him the same bed.
In the dormitory was an idiot boy, who used to ramble in his talk all
through the night, keeping the others awake. Sometimes Will succeeded in
coaxing his young brother off to sleep, but as for himself, he would
lie awake for hours listening to the strange talk of the idiot boy, and
thinking of his mother. Often in the night the idiot boy would cry out
for his own mother, leaving Will wondering who she was and where she
was, and whether the plaintive cry of her imbecile child ever reached
her ears in the night's stillness.
The lad was ravenously hungry all the time he spent in the workhouse. He
often felt at times as though he could eat leather; yet every morning,
when the "skilly" was served for breakfast, he could not touch it.
Morning after morning, spurred on by hunger, he forced the spoon into
his mouth, but the stomach revolted, and he always felt as though the
first spoonful would turn him sick.
Somehow his father, away in the men's ward, got to know that young Will,
who he knew could relish dry crusts at home with the best of them, was
not able to eat the fare provided in the workhouse. The men occasionally
got suet pudding, and one dinner-time the old man secretly smuggled his
portion into his pocket. In the afternoon he made over to the children's
quarters, hoping to hand it to Will. The pudding was produced, the lad's
hungry eyes lighted up, when, behold! it was snatched away, almost from
his very grasp. The burly figure of the labour master interposed between
father and son. This was a breach of discipline not to be tolerated in
the workhouse.
"But the boy's hungry, and this is what I've saved from my own dinner,"
argued the father (all in vain). "You don't know how that boy likes
suet pudding."
For two or three weeks the Crooks children were kept in the workhouse,
before being taken away in an omnibus with other boys and girls to the
Poor Law School at Sutton. Then came the most agonising experience of
all to Will. They parted him from his young brother. In the great hall
of the school he would strain his eyes, hoping to get a glimpse of the
lone little fellow among the other lads, but he never set eyes on him
again until the afternoon they went home together.
"Every day I spent in that school is burnt into my soul," he has often
declared since.
He could not sleep at night nor play with the other boys, haunted as he
was by the strange dread that he must have committed some unknown crime
to be taken from home, torn from his young brother, and made a little
captive in what seemed a fearful prison. The nights seemed endless, and
were always awful. He whispered his fears on the fourth day to another
Poplar boy who was there.
"Ah! you just wait until Sunday," said the other lad. "Every Sunday's
like a fortnight."
When Sunday did come it proved to be one lasting agony. He thought time
could not be made more terrible to children anywhere. They had dinner at
twelve and tea at six, confined during the yawning interval in the dull
day-room with nothing to do but to look at the clock, and then out of
the window, and then back at the clock again.
During the week, after school hours, he hung about in abject misery all
the time. From the day he went in to the day he left he never smiled.
One afternoon he was loitering in the playground as the matron showed
some visitors round.
"Who is that sad-faced boy?" he heard one of them ask.
"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 pass 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.