THE FIRST WORKING-MAN MAYOR IN LONDON
Elected Mayor of Poplar--"No Better than a Working-man"--Shouted
Down at the Mansion House--The Lord Mayor Defends Him--Refusing a
Salary--Slums and Fair Rent Courts--Fighting the Public-House
Interests--Crying not for the Moon, but for the Sun.
In November, 1901, Crooks was chosen to be Mayor of Poplar. In this, as
in all his public offices, he was not the seeker, but the sought-after.
Of the many public positions he has filled, not one has come of his own
seeking. It has always been at the earnest solicitation of others that
he has gone into office. Moreover, the request in every instance but one
has come from working-men.
The proposal to put him forward for Mayor was made to him before he had
been a member of the Poplar Borough Council many months. The Labour
Party was barely half a dozen strong on the Council, so that even with
the support of the Progressives it was extremely doubtful whether he
could command a majority of votes. This he pointed out in reply to his
party's entreaties. Since his arguments were all unavailing, he agreed
at last to be nominated, making one very emphatic condition. That
condition was, that were he elected there should be no talk of paying
the Mayor a salary.
Any of the London Borough Councils can vote a salary to the Mayor, and
in some of the boroughs £300 and £500 a year was being paid. Crooks felt
he could better retain the confidence of his neighbours, and better meet
the criticisms of opponents, by refusing a Mayoral grant entirely.
Besides making this the condition of his nomination, he influenced the
Borough Council, some few days before the Mayor was to be elected, to
pass a resolution declining to pay a salary.
On the night the new Mayor was elected there were some curious scenes
both inside and outside the Municipal Buildings. To be Mayor in
Coronation Year seemed to be the desire of half the public men in the
kingdom. There were several aspirants in Poplar, and when the number was
reduced to two, Crooks's name was one of them.
Twice amid the greatest tension in the crowded Council Chamber the
voting on the two names resulted in a tie. Twice the retiring Mayor
appealed to the Council to come to a decision without his casting vote.
Since nothing would alter the equality of the votes, the Mayor finally
hit upon the device of writing both names on separate slips of paper and
drawing one at random from a covered bowl.
Meanwhile, the tension had become too much for some burly working-men in
the public gallery. They could be heard blubbering. When you looked up
you saw them mopping their grimy faces with red-spotted handkerchiefs
or the ends of their scarfs.
These men, with many of their mates, had crowded into the Council
Chamber on their way home from the engineering yards and railway goods
sidings in Millwall and from all the neighbouring docks. Those who could
not get inside formed a dense crowd in the streets below. As the news
was brought out from time to time, how two ballots had been taken and
the votes were still equal, a silence strange and solemn fell upon the
massed crowds surging round the Municipal Buildings in the lamp-lighted
streets.
Soon the silence gave way to a roar of working-men's voices.
"Crooks has got it!"
"Our Will's made Mayor!"
"God bless the Mayor!"
Among that rough-jacketed company could be seen men falling on each
other's necks. And as they streamed homeward in all directions the
streets of Poplar echoed with the cry that lingered far into the night,
"Will Crooks is Mayor!"
He was the first Labour Mayor in London. As such he did not make the
mistake of trying to fill the office like the ordinary middle-class man.
He faced all the world essentially as a working-man Mayor. He showed how
well a workman can carry out the administrative and ceremonial duties
inseparable from the office. In doing that he dispelled for ever the old
illusion that only men of means can become mayors.
"What d'yer think?" he overheard a tradesman's wife ask another in
disgust. "They've made that common fellow Crooks Mayor! And he no better
than a working-man."
"Quite right, madam," he interposed, raising his hat as she turned
round, crimson, and recognised him. "No better than a working-man!"
It was evident, too, that at first certain of the other metropolitan
mayors thought him a common fellow, far beneath their notice. The first
occasion that saw him in their midst was a conference of mayors at the
Mansion House. It was convened by the Lord Mayor to consider
arrangements for the Coronation Dinner to the Poor. Crooks listened for
an hour to all kinds of suggestions put forward by men who knew little
about the poor before rising at last to make a proposal of his own.
The instant he rose there was a howl of disapproval.
"Sit down--sit down!" "Who are you?" "We want none of your opinions."
"Sit down--sit down!"
The wrath of some of these funny little functionaries at the idea of a
Labour man daring to address them was something he laughed at for a long
time after. Several of them had lost their heads entirely at being
invited to discuss a matter which so closely concerned the King and
Queen. The very presence of a Labour man at such an august gathering was
felt to be an insult.
They drowned his voice each time he attempted to speak, until it began
to dawn upon them that instead of gaining favour with the Lord Mayor,
who was in the chair, they were incurring his displeasure.
"Gentlemen," he cried, "I protest against this conduct. I call upon _my
friend_, Mr. Crooks, to speak."
You should have seen their faces then! They had forgotten that the Lord
Mayor (Sir Joseph Dimsdale) and Crooks had been colleagues together for
years on the County Council.
Having got a hearing, the Labour man spoke evidently very much to the
point. Sir Thomas Lipton, who represented the King at that and the
subsequent conferences, declared afterwards that the one mayor in London
who seemed to know what was wanted was the working-man Mayor of Poplar.
At any rate, the final arrangements for the King's Dinner were left to a
small sub-committee, of which Crooks was unanimously elected one by the
body that first tried to howl him down.
The illusion that working-men cannot make mayors died hard. It lingered
last in the columns of the _Times_. Crooks had been in office several
months when that journal called public attention to the fact that the
Mayor of Poplar lived in a house "only rated at £11 a year." From this
circumstance the _Times_ drew the rash conclusion that a man so poor
could not necessarily fill the office of mayor properly.
After this, nobody could be surprised at the wild mis-statements that
followed. The _Times_ went on to say that before Crooks's election the
Labour Party of Poplar seemed to think his income of £3 10s. a week
insufficient for the mayoralty, and that they started a movement "in
favour of paying future mayors of the borough a salary at the rate of
from £500 to £1,000 a year."
How completely the facts tell a different story has already appeared.
What movement there was in Poplar for paying a salary originated with
the previous mayor, Mr. R. H. Green, a large employer of labour. Mr.
Green did not wish for a salary himself, being a man of means; he was
only anxious that his colleagues should understand that he favoured the
principle. His successor, the Labour man, was equally anxious his
colleagues should understand that he did not favour payment.
The real facts were placed before the _Times_, but although its original
mis-statements were copied into several other newspapers and led the
_St. James's Gazette_ to publish a foolish leader on the subject, the
_Times_ offered neither an explanation as to how it fell into its
culpable error nor an apology for its amazing exhibition of bad taste.
In reality, his position as Mayor was strengthened by his refusal to
take a salary. He stated in an interview in the _Daily Telegraph_
towards the end of his year of office:--
I have only had to do what I have done in every other position I
have held--let people understand that I have nothing to give away.
Since my position has become generally known people have let me
alone, except when I get an appeal like this one--to support a
football club as a lover of British sports and pastimes. Nobody
seems to think the worse of me for refusing.
To the last, however, he was not forgiven by many people for daring to
be poor. A worthy lady at a church sewing-party in a London suburb
became very indignant at the mention of the name of the Labour Mayor of
Poplar. One of the members present--to whom I am indebted for the
incident--happened to make an incidental reference to Crooks. "It's a
shame, I say, to let such people be made important," cried the good lady
with much feeling, stopping for a moment her work of making garments for
the church bazaar. "Look how they interfere with business. My husband
used to get fifteen per cent. from his Poplar property before they made
that man Crooks Mayor. Now, what with being compelled to spend so much
on repairs and new drains, it's as much as he can do to get ten per
cent."
When Crooks heard of the incident, he said he had little doubt the
husband was an ordinary decent man who invested in poor property,
because, as house investment agencies sometimes state in their
advertisements, it pays better than any other kind.
"Probably he is one of that large class who leave the collection of the
rents and all control to agents. That is why slum property has paid so
well in the past. It has been neglected. Nothing has been spent on
ordinary repairs. Whatever expense we as a Municipal Council may put the
owners to in order to make their property healthy, is strictly regulated
by law. We cannot go beyond the letter of the law. The reason why
investors in slum property have reaped such a rich harvest in the past
is because neither they nor the local authorities have carried out the
law.
"No man with ordinary sentiment can own slum property and collect his
own rents. A flint-hearted agent generally has control. I know such a
one well. If the tenant does not pay up by Saturday he waits and watches
round the corner on Sunday morning. As soon as he sees the wife turn out
to buy a piece of meat or a few vegetables from a coster's stall for
Sunday's dinner, he pounces down on her and demands her few pence on
account.
"It's so easy to run away from responsibility by simply saying, 'This is
a mere investment, and I am not concerned with the tenants.'
"A very wealthy man who owns a lot of small houses in Poplar had his
attention called to the hardship inflicted by the heavy increase in
rents. He was told that a widow whose rent had just been doubled would
have to seek parish relief if the new demand were enforced. 'My dear
good fellow,' said the owner, 'I leave these matters to my agent. I
don't want the woman's money. Look here,' pulling a handful of
sovereigns out of his pocket. 'Why should I care about the woman's rent?
I leave these trifles to my agent, and never interfere.'
"Can you wonder that so many of our people are driven to drink and
immorality?" Crooks went on after telling this incident. "Sweated as
they are for rent in this way, they begin to live in an unholy state of
overcrowding. House speculators, Jewish and English, gamble with the
people's homes. Nearly every time a house changes hands the rent is
raised. The overcrowding is thus made worse than ever. The family living
in three rooms takes two. The family in two rooms pushes its furniture
closer together and goes into one.
"Surely something should be done by the State to prevent this gambling
with poor people's rents. I would like to see Fair Rent Courts, where
the rents could be fixed in fair proportion to the value of the house.
Something of the kind has been done in Ireland; why not in England?
"One thing is certain: the more crowded the home is, the more convenient
becomes the public-house, with its welcome light and deceptive
cheerfulness tempting the wretched. Of course, in theory it is easy to
argue that the poorer the man the more reason there is that he should
not place in the publican's till the money that ought to be spent on
food. I fear few of us would retain the moral courage to resist if we
had to eat, live, and sleep in the same room, sometimes in the company
of a corpse for several days."
Property owners were not alone in their opposition to the Labour Mayor.
The publicans almost in a body were ranged against him. Nor was this
only because of his uncompromising attack on the drink interests as
such. It was mainly because he insisted on public-houses being rated on
the same principle as the grocer's shop or the working-man's
dwelling-house.
For several years before his mayoralty he had been Chairman of the
Poplar Assessment Committee. He found that while small tradesmen and
householders were rated to the full market value of their shops and
dwellings, public-houses were very much under-assessed. He therefore
persuaded the Committee, in face of all that the publicans said and
threatened, to raise their assessments to the proper scale. The
publicans brought the whole strength of their organisation against him,
briefing counsel in appeals and subsidising opposition candidates at the
local elections. This kind of thing had no fears for Crooks. His policy
prevailed.
Sorely though the problem of housing vexed him, he rarely came away from
a slum visit without some instance of quaint humour. On one occasion he
was called into a tenement when the woman told him to mind the hole in
the floor.
"Why don't you ask the landlord to repair it?" he asked.
"I did tell him about it," she answered in despair, "but he only said,
'What! the floor fallen in? Why, you must have been walking on it!'"
He feels keenly that we are allowing the English working-class home to
be broken up by the gambling of speculators. By the time the gamblers
are finished, it will be found they have broken more than the poor man's
home. It will be found they have broken the English race.
The cost to the municipality of preventing the existence of slums is
small, he maintains, compared with the cost to the Poor Law authority of
dealing with the human wreckage that slums create. He brought out this
fact in a striking way in a paper he read before the Central Poor Law
Conference at the Guildhall. His subject was "Pauperism and
Overcrowding." He estimated from a study of the official returns that
overcrowding and insanitation in the homes of the poor threw an
additional expenditure on the Poor Law every year in London of about
£134,000. He obtained this figure by estimating the number of people
forced into workhouse infirmaries or requiring the outside attendance of
the parish doctor owing to sickness solely caused by slumdom.
As regards the inmates of public asylums, he showed that London was
involved in a still heavier yearly outlay. The number of such inmates
per thousand inhabitants of London varied from 1.9 in the healthy
districts to 10.1 in the overcrowded districts. The mean rate was 4.7.
The numbers above this mean rate were all found in the slum quarters. By
adding them up he arrived at a total of 2,700 people who were forced
into asylums as the results of ill-housing. It cost London £70,000 a
year to maintain this number in asylums. He further argued that an
additional sum of half a million sterling must be put down as
representing the cost of providing the necessary asylum accommodation
for these 2,700 inmates, the creation of our slums.
"So if the public refuse to spend a few hundreds on improving the homes
and conditions of the poor, they are compelled to spend tens of
thousands after the slums have robbed their denizens of health and
reason. I know some of the poor do not live the cleanest and best lives.
They live down to their environment. And if we don't improve the
environment, then, apart from all the higher considerations, we are
penalised for our neglect by having to pay for their care and keep in
asylums and infirmaries.
"We Labour men are sometimes accused of crying for the moon. No; we are
crying for the sun, and before we are finished we mean to get a little
more sun into the homes and hearts of the people."