A BAD BOYS' ADVOCATE
Efforts on behalf of Diseased and Mentally-deficient
Children--Altering the Law in Six Weeks--Establishing Remand Homes
for First Offenders--London's Vagrant Child-Life--Reformatory and
Industrial Schools--The Boy who Sat on the Fence--Theft of a Donkey
and Barrow--Lads who want Mothering.
Soon the call of the children reached his ears again.
He had barely finished reorganising the labour conditions on the Asylums
Board when he undertook a great task in the interests of the two
thousand children who had just been placed under the Board's care. These
children were all sufferers from some physical or mental trouble, and it
was because they required special treatment that a Parliamentary
Committee had recommended that they be transferred from the London
Guardians to the Asylums Board.
A comprehensive scheme had to be framed by the Board for looking after
its new charges. Crooks gave three hard years to these children's
well-being. During that time, as Chairman of the Children's Committee,
he wrought some remarkable changes in the lot of the diseased and
mentally-deficient little people handed over to the Board's keeping.
New homes were set up in the country and at the seaside for the
afflicted and convalescent children. The little people's meals were made
pleasant, their clothes deprived of the institutional taint. They were
free to be merry, and their laughter was better medicine than the
doctor's.
The sad lot of the mentally-deficient children, some of them little
better than imbeciles, appealed greatly to the strong, clear-brained
Labour man from Poplar. There were three or four hundred of these, all
from London workhouses, the sight of whom so often reminded Crooks of
the idiot boy who slept in his dormitory when he, as a child, was an
inmate at Poplar.
The Asylums Board was not allowed to keep these mentally-deficient boys
and girls after sixteen years of age. The children had thus to be sent
away only half trained, often direct to the workhouse again, from which
they never emerged unless to be taken to an institution more hopeless
still.
Crooks conceived the idea that if the Board kept these luckless little
people until they completed their twenty-first year it might be possible
to give them such a training as would enable them to look after
themselves outside, and live useful lives, instead of being a
life-burden to the State and of no use to anyone. The Local Government
Board agreed, and the managers now train these youthful charges till
they reach manhood and womanhood.
The experiment has already justified itself. Many a youth and maid who
would have been left in mental darkness all their lives have by this
longer period of training gained a glimmering of light. Their limited
intelligence has been sufficiently developed to enable them to assist at
earning their own living and to look after themselves.
Other children under the Board's care might be said to suffer from an
excess rather than from a lack of intelligence. On the Asylums Board
they are known as remand children. In the police courts they are known
as first offenders. They consist of boys and girls who, having been
charged before a magistrate with offences which render them liable to be
sent to an industrial or a reformatory school, get remanded for
inquiries.
At one time, pending the inquiries, these youthful offenders used to be
detained in prison. When Crooks joined the Asylums Board they had been
transferred to the workhouse. The influence for evil was little better
in the one place than in the other. The one introduced them to
criminality, the other to pauperism.
"These children want keeping as far as possible from both prison and
workhouse," argued Crooks with his colleagues. "We ought to put them in
small homes and give them school-time and playtime, like other children,
until their cases come before the magistrate again."
So two or three dwelling-houses were taken in different quarters of
London and adapted as Remand Homes. Crooks headed a deputation from the
Asylums Board to the London magistrates at Bow Street to urge them in
future to commit all remand children to the Homes. The magistrates were
sympathetic enough, but showed it was their duty to carry out the law,
and that the law clearly laid it down that youthful offenders under
remand must be sent to the workhouse.
"We'll alter the law, then," was Crooks's reply. "For I'm determined
these youngsters shall no longer be sent to the workhouse."
In the record time of six weeks the law was altered. It sounds
miraculous to those who know the ways of Whitehall. Crooks's resource
proved more than equal to red-tapeism.
First the Asylums Board wrote to the Home Office. Then the Home Office
sent the usual evasive reply. The correspondence would have gone on
indefinitely had not Crooks waited on the Home Secretary in person.
As the Labour man expected, Mr. Ritchie knew nothing about the matter,
the Home Office officials having settled it without consulting the
Secretary of State. Always willing to co-operate in anything that
promised to keep children away from the workhouse, Mr. Ritchie asked
Crooks what he had to suggest. The visitor pointed out that the Juvenile
Offenders' Bill was at that very moment before Parliament, and that the
insertion in that measure of an additional clause of half a dozen lines
only would keep remand children away from the workhouse for all time.
The Home Secretary seized the idea at once, and Crooks's suggestion
became law the following month.
The first of the Remand Homes was opened at Pentonville Road for the
convenience of children charged at the police courts of North London and
the East-End. Sometimes as many as fifty young offenders, boys and
girls, can be seen there at the same time.
Instead of loafing about the workhouse, as before, and becoming inured
to pauper surroundings, they are now taught as in a day school. They
have play in the open air and recreation indoors in the way of games and
books. Moreover, the girls are taught to sew and knit, the boys
instructed in manual work. Though seldom there more than a fortnight
before being taken back to the police court, they go away cleaner,
better informed, not without hope. And the magistrates now feel
justified in sending about 80 per cent. of them back to their parents.
A visit to this Remand Home at Pentonville will teach you disquieting
truths about the vagrant child-life of London. These wayward youngsters
tell their tales with startling frankness.
That bright-faced lad of twelve--why is he here?
"Stealing," he answers us.
"What did you steal?"
"Some stockings outside a shop."
"Why?"
"To get money for sweets."
"Where did you sell the stockings?"
"In a pub."
"Have you ever stolen before?"
"Yes."
"How often?"
"A good many times, but never been caught before."
Two of the oldest lads approached, and we questioned them.
"I was took up for begging," said No. 1. "But I weren't begging--on'y
looking for work."
"Where?"
"At King's Cross--me and him," pointing to his neighbour. "We was
offering to carry people's bags when the copper come and took us up."
The teacher explained that boys soliciting passengers around the big
railway stations were becoming such a nuisance that the police sometimes
had to take them into custody.
"We didn't get hold of a man's arm and say, 'Give us threepence,' as the
copper said," the youthful informant went on. "We was on'y looking for
work."
"How long have you been looking for this kind of work?"
"We goes an' looks for it every day," said No. 2 (in shirt sleeves, like
his pal). "And sometimes we makes half a crown, and sometimes three
shillings a day, carrying gentlemen's bags. I've been a-doing of it five
months. It pays better than reg'lar work, where I used to make ten
shillings a week."
No. 1 could not forget his grievance against the police.
"Puts us in the cell all night," he interposed, "and gives us coffee and
two thick slices of bread for supper. And takes us in a bumpy ole van
to the police court in the morning along of a lot of others. Then we was
sent here, where we has to write and read--just like going back to
school again."
Another lad was there for "stopping out all night," according to his own
rendering. When we asked "Why?" the answer came prompt enough, "'Cos I
likes it."
"How many nights did you stay out?"
"Me and them," indicating others higher up the room, "we slept behind
the fire station four nights and then went home."
"What happened then?"
"Mother said nofink, but she got a stick----"
He paused sufficiently long for us to take the sequel for granted, then
added quietly:--
"So I stopped out the next night."
"And then?"
"Then the copper came."
Yes, they need "homes," indeed, these wayward youngsters, ensnared by
the temptations of London's streets. Some are here for gambling in the
gutter, many for playing truant, some for sleeping out, and others for
felony. Generally they are sent home if it be a first offence, or to a
reformatory if the case be a bad one.
There are girls here, too. What of them?
"Me and my sister was taken up by the police for sleeping on a
doorstep," said one sad-eyed little maid in a blue frock.
"Why on a doorstep?"
"Father left us, and when mother died the landlord turned us out."
True enough, and the sisters will be sent to a girls' home shortly.
That is the best that can be done for the girls, especially the large
number that are brought away from houses of ill-repute.
The boys who get committed to reformatories still find themselves under
Crooks's eye. While the Asylums Board looks after them when under
remand, the London County Council becomes responsible once the lads are
committed. This dual control Crooks is trying to get rid of, in the hope
that the duty will be given wholly into the hands of one authority.
For several years he was a member and at one time Chairman of the L.C.C.
Committee that looks after the industrial and reformatory schools. The
committee meets at Feltham, where is the largest of the institutions
under its charge. It was rare for Crooks to be absent during his
membership of the committee.
He and Colonel Rotton, who was also Chairman for a period, could
generally make the lads on arrival understand them without much
parleying. Every lad, on being committed to the school by a magistrate,
had to appear before the committee. Here are some characteristic
dialogues:--
"Well, my boy, what are you here for?"
"Burglary." The burglar was nine years of age.
"Well, you can't be a burglar here, but you can be a good lad. Everyone
can be a good lad here if he likes. If he doesn't like we make him. What
will you do?"
"I fink I'll like, sir."
Generally the lads do not admit their offence so readily. They are not
always so frank as you find them in the Remand Homes. Most of them, when
before the Committee, find excuses, like the boy who was caught with
others stealing in a railway goods yard.
"Please, sir, it weren't me at all."
"We always get the wrong boy. What are you supposed to be here for?"
"Fieving, sir. But I didn't do it. I were on'y sitting on the fence."
"Then let this be a lesson to you. Never sit on the fence. Do you know
the Ten Commandments?"
"No, sir."
"Can you say the Lord's Prayer?"
"No; we wasn't taught it at the school wot I used to go to."
"But you didn't go to school."
"The boy wot did go told me."
"Well, we'll see to it that you do go to school now."
Another new-comer excused himself more ingeniously:--"Me and my mate we
found a donkey and barrer at Covent Garden. We saw a man's name on the
barrer, and fought if we went off wif the donkey we would git a shilling
the next day for taking it back to him. But a copper stopped us as we
was leading the donkey over Waterloo Bridge. So we hadn't a chance to
take it back, as we was going to."
"Very well, you must stay with us until you learn that donkeys in
barrows are not necessarily lost."
Crooks believed in giving the boys plenty of play and plenty of work.
Nearly all their offences he believed to be due to excess of vitality.
They had never had a chance of working it off in a proper way before.
Besides, many of the lads needed mothering. It was always his regret
that he could not persuade his colleagues on the Committee to adopt a
system he found in vogue in the Moss Hill industrial school in Glasgow.
When visiting that institution he was agreeably surprised to find about
a dozen "mothers" on the staff. If a lad tore his coat or pulled off a
button, he knew which particular "mother" to run to in order to be
patched up.
"I have always said, and shall always continue to say," he states, "that
reformatory schools ought to be made a State charge entirely. If there
is any part of the community that can be called a national debt, it is
this class of poor, misguided lads who, if they were properly cared for,
would soon become a valuable national asset."