TWO OF HIS MONUMENTS
Testimony from Sir John McDougall and Lord Welby--Declining the
Vice-chairmanship of the L.C.C.--How Crooks Lost His Overcoat--Work
on the Technical Education Board--The Blackwall Tunnel--Chairman of
the Bridges Committee.
From the first, Crooks has shared the representation of Poplar on the
London County Council with Sir John McDougall. The retired merchant was
at the top of the poll in 1892, while the Labour man found himself
elected as the second member with a thousand majority over the two
Moderate candidates. At every L.C.C. election since Crooks has headed
the poll.
Two such men, of course, differ in their public policy widely. This
notwithstanding, Sir John paid his Labour colleague a striking tribute
during the parliamentary by-election in Woolwich. Sir John was Chairman
of the London County Council at the time. This is what he wrote to the
Woolwich electors a few days before the poll:--
Mr. Crooks has been my colleague on the London County Council for
the last twelve years, and during the whole of that time he has
worked with great zeal and ability for the good of London.... His
zeal is great, and his wisdom is as great as his zeal. I doubt
whether anyone in London has done so much as he in all the
measures which tend to the uplifting and the good of the people.
Lord Welby, another of his colleagues on the County Council, seized the
same opportunity to tell the electors what he thought of their Labour
candidate. The two opinions, coming from men who had often opposed his
policy, and whose walks of life lay so widely apart from his own, form
no small tribute to the worth of his municipal work. Said Lord Welby:--
Mr. Crooks's knowledge, his experience, his courage, his readiness
of humour, his good temper, and, above all, his devotion to the
work he has undertaken have made him one of the most useful, as
well as one of the most popular, members of the London County
Council.
His devotion was shown by his attendance. For thirteen years in
succession he never missed a single Council meeting. Until Parliament
began to claim his time his record of attendance every year, both at
Council and Committee meetings, stood among the half-dozen highest.
After such a long unbroken service, it was bitter to be kept at home by
an illness one Tuesday, the day the L.C.C. meets. Only one other
councillor--Sir William Collins--had kept pace with him during those
thirteen years. Crooks wrote to his friendly rival from a sick bed:--
"To-day you go ahead in this long and pleasant competition between us. I
cannot help thinking that after all it is a case of the survival of the
fittest, for I cannot leave my room."
"I hate to win under such conditions," said Sir William in his cheering
reply.
At one time the Progressive party proposed to nominate him as
vice-chairman, a position entitling the holder to the L.C.C.
chairmanship in the year following. The honour was declined. He believed
he could be more useful as an independent member.
So the sequel proved. As a member of the Parks Committee he never
wearied in working for more open spaces and children's play-places in
the poorer parts of London. It had long been a grievance to the working
classes of London that nearly all the parks lay in the West End and the
suburbs. Since the poor districts were now too thickly covered with
houses ever to permit of spacious parks being provided in their midst,
Crooks was one of the most earnest in pleading that the Council should
make amends by rescuing every vacant plot of land that remained and
converting it into a recreation ground, no matter how small.
His strenuous plea secured for the East-End alone three splendid open
spaces. These are the Bromley Recreation Ground, the Tunnel Gardens at
Poplar, and the Island Gardens that take their name from the Isle of
Dogs. To visit any one of these, and see therein children playing and
tired people finding rest, is to feel deeply what a benign influence has
fallen over these poor neighbourhoods.
Crooks obtained this recreation ground for Bromley at the cost of his
overcoat. The open space was formed out of something like a morass by
the banks of the Lea. It lay hidden away in that labyrinth of sterile
streets stretching southwards from Bow Bridge to the spot where the
lesser river loses itself in the Thames.
He had persuaded a party of his County Council colleagues to go with him
to the neighbourhood. They all left their overcoats in the private
omnibus that took them down from the County Hall, while he showed them
over the unwholesome little waste, as it then was, and pointed out its
possibilities as a recreation ground. When they returned they learnt
that one of the overcoats had been stolen.
"I see it's not mine," said Lord Monkswell, pointing to his astrachan.
"Nor mine," added the Hon. Lionel Holland, then M.P. for the division,
as he picked up one lined with fur.
"No," said Crooks; "people about here daren't wear overcoats like those.
If there's one missing, it's bound to be mine worse luck."
He laughed at the loss then and many times afterwards, though he had a
private reason for lamenting it; it was a recent gift from half a dozen
working-men admirers. He laughed because he found he was able to make
use of the incident in his long agitation on the L.C.C. to get the waste
reclaimed.
Whenever his colleagues inquired where was this mysterious outlandish
place he was so anxious to convert into a recreation ground, he would
make reply:--
"It's the place where they preferred my coat to Lord Monkswell's."
It came to be so well known on the County Council as the place where
Crooks lost his overcoat, that when finally he got a definite proposal
to buy the ground brought forward there was nothing but a good-natured
acquiescence from every member.
On the formation of the L.C.C. Technical Education Board, he pleaded the
cause of good craftsmanship with some effect. He carried a resolution
conferring special facilities for technical instruction upon
working-class districts.
Long after he retired from the Board he received from a working-man's
son a little proof of the practical results of his efforts. It came in
the following letter:--
You will probably remember how some years ago you pleaded my case
on the L.C.C., and how, through your influence, I was enabled to
complete my studies in naval architecture at Greenwich College.
I am sure you will be glad to know that I have now passed my final
examination and have just been admitted a member of the Royal Corps
of Naval Constructors. My official appointment is that of Assistant
Constructor in one of the principal Government Dockyards, where I
have been on probation for the last twelve months or more. The
final examinations were held last July in London and occupied more
than three weeks, with an exam, almost daily.
I feel that I owe you a debt of gratitude for pleading my cause at
the time. My father had spent his all on me while I was at the
college, and he being a toolsmith with seven children, you can well
understand that what he had by him he could ill afford on me.
My father and the others of the family desire to join with me in
this letter of thanks and gratitude to you.
Mention has already been made of how Crooks and the Poplar Labour League
originated at the Dock Gate meetings the scheme for a technical
institute for his native borough. So many times was this project delayed
that he often told his Poplar audiences he feared he would go down to
posterity as the man who talked of an institute that never came. It was
not until the early part of 1906 that the institute was opened. There is
a reference to it in the annual report of the Poplar Labour League for
that year:--
Some years ago the League mooted the idea of a technical institute
for Poplar. Mr. Crooks took it up and carried it to official
quarters, never letting the subject drop, until it stands at last
an accomplished fact. A School of Marine Engineering and Nautical
Academy has recently been opened in Poplar.
A handsome building has been erected in High Street, and in it will
be taught seamanship and navigation, marine engineering and naval
architecture and propulsion, general mechanical engineering,
electrical engineering, pattern making, carpentry and woodwork, and
theoretical and practical chemistry, physics, and mechanics.
Nothing more appropriate could have been built in Poplar. It is
mainly due to the tireless efforts of Mr. Crooks that it exists,
and it will stand as a monument to him.
But Poplar boasts a greater monument to its Labour Councillor. He was on
the L.C.C. Bridges Committee during the making of Blackwall Tunnel. In
its day the largest subaqueous tunnel in the world, its construction
involved years of anxious labour.
The tunnel carries vehicular and passenger traffic under the Thames
between Poplar and Greenwich, five miles below the nearest bridge, that
at the Tower. Before it was made the two million Londoners living east
of the bridges were without any public means of crossing the river. To
build an ordinary bridge was impossible with so many ships passing night
and day to and from the London Pool. It was decided to take the traffic
under the Thames by descending roadways leading to a tunnel some seventy
feet below high-water mark.
From the time he joined the Council to that day in May, 1897, when the
King as Prince of Wales went down to Poplar to open the tunnel, on
behalf of Queen Victoria, Crooks was among the keenest of the public men
engaged in carrying that great engineering feat through. He made himself
so thoroughly master of the details that he was in great demand all over
London as a lecturer on the tunnel. The chief engineers on the works who
heard the lecture congratulated him on the way he made intelligible and
interesting the complicated system by which the tunnel was bored through
the clay within a foot or two of the river bed.
So satisfied were his fellow County Councillors with the practical work
he did at Blackwall that on its completion they elected him Chairman of
the Bridges Committee. In that capacity he steered through the Council
and through a Committee of the House of Commons two other schemes for
tunnels under the Thames, one for foot passengers only between Greenwich
and the Isle of Dogs, and the other for general traffic between Shadwell
and Rotherhithe, designed on a larger scale than the tunnel at
Blackwall. Interest in these schemes, however, can never be so great as
it was in the Blackwall experiment, the first of its kind attempted.
In the special Blackwall Tunnel number issued by the _Municipal
Journal_, Crooks figures among those described as "the men who made the
tunnel." Following sketches and portraits of Sir Alexander Binnie (then
the L.C.C. engineer, who designed the tunnel), of Sir Weetman Pearson,
M.P. (the contractor who executed the work), of Sir William Bull, M.P.
(who was then chairman of the Bridges Committee), is a reference to
other members of the Committee who took a prominent part in the work.
The first place after the chairman is given to Crooks. The _Municipal
Journal_ says:--
Mr. Will Crooks, more than any other man, has made Londoners
acquainted with the tunnel. His popular lecture on Blackwall Tunnel
has been given in all parts of London to all kinds of audiences,
and everywhere the clear, picturesque description Mr. Crooks has
given, aided by the lantern and his own genial wit, has made
intelligible to Londoners, old, young, rich, and poor, what is,
after all, a somewhat dry and difficult subject.
This only goes to show how closely Mr. Crooks himself has been
identified with the construction of the tunnel. As one of the
representatives of the Poplar district, he has turned his
membership of the Bridges Committee to good account by giving to
the tunnel his special attention. No Councillor has been so
frequent a visitor to the various works, and it is doubtful
whether any outsider went so many times into the compressed air.
The workmen had just cause to bless the Poplar County Councillor.
It was owing to Mr. Crooks's efforts that a revised schedule of
wages was adopted. The result of this was that the contractors paid
an additional £26,000 in wages. With all his zeal for the workmen,
Mr. Crooks never once came in conflict with either the contractors
or the engineers. Men and masters at Blackwall have all held the
worthy Labour Councillor in the highest regard, and both are sorry
that their long and cheerful connection must now be severed.
The same number of the _Municipal Journal_ contained an article by
Crooks himself, entitled, "A Labour View of the Blackwall Tunnel." The
article displayed with what tact and modesty the Labour member had
safeguarded the interests of his own class without neglecting the
interests of the people of London. It bore out the statement made in his
first speech to the Council, that no contractor ever lost by paying the
trade union rate of wages.