TRAMPING THE COUNTRY FOR WORK
Marriage--Dismissed as an Agitator--Home broken up--"On the
Road"--Timely Help at Burton--Finding Work at
Liverpool--Bereavement--Back in London--A Second Tramp to
Liverpool--Feelings of an "Out-of-Work."
On a grey morning in the December of 1871 two young people came out of
St. Thomas's Church, Bethnal Green, man and wife. Both were only
nineteen years of age. The husband was Will Crooks; his wife the
daughter of an East London shipwright named South.
They set up their home in Poplar, near the coopering yard where Will was
employed. At first they had to be content with apartments; then came a
small tenement; soon after a little house of their own.
It was fair and pleasant sailing for the first two or three years. He
got a journeyman's full wages the first week he was out of his
apprenticeship. It seemed as though he were to have an unbroken run of
good fortune. The bright hopes soon collapsed.
Good craftsmanship and trade unionism, blended as they were in Crooks,
made him rebel against certain conditions of his work. Finally he
refused to use inferior timber on a job, and objected to excessive
overtime. Although the youngest among them, he addressed the workmen on
the subject. A few days afterwards he was dismissed.
He took his notice lightly enough, confident that as master of his trade
he could soon secure work again.
It was not to be. Every shop and yard in London was closed to him. Word
had gone round that he was an agitator.
Try as he did, he could not break through the barrier that had been
raised against him. Wherever he applied, whether in Rotherhithe,
Battersea, Hackney, or Clerkenwell, he was known as the young fellow who
would not work with shoddy material and talked other men into the same
view.
The experience was the same at every place of call.
"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 associated 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 Saturday 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 button. If the button 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.