COLONISING ENGLAND
Signs of Progress--a Crown Farm Cut Up into Small Holdings--The
Colony Experiment at Laindon--How it was Killed by the Local
Government Board--The Hollesley Bay Farm--A Minister for Labour
Wanted.
After nearly twenty years of hard public service, Crooks saw some of the
things for which he had striven so strenuously adopted as part of the
policy of two successive Governments.
Woolwich re-elected him at the General Election with over nine thousand
votes, some three or four hundred more than it gave him at the famous
by-election three years before. He saw the new Government back up the
Unemployed Act. He saw the Poor Law Commission at work. He saw the
appointment of another Commission to consider the question of coast
erosion and the reclamation of foreshores, which makes him believe there
is still a chance for the scheme he laid before the Board of Trade in
1893.
Meanwhile, he believes he has done something practical in Parliament for
the unemployed in another direction. He discovered that of the 70,000
acres of agricultural Crown lands, about 5,000 had been lying idle for
many years. Thereupon he promptly reminded Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman's Government, in the early days of its first
Session, that at the General Election they had talked about the need for
colonising England. Here, he told the House, was a chance to give effect
to the promise. Cut up the idle land into small holdings, and it would
let at once. Make better use of the other land by dividing it into
smaller farms. Further, why not try a scheme of afforestation on some
portion of these Crown lands, which, after all, were the lands of the
people?
He exacted a promise from the Government that the question of giving the
Board of Agriculture some control of Crown lands, instead of leaving
them in the hands of the Department of Woods and Forests, would be
considered.
Something was done sooner than he expected. The President of the Local
Government Board (Mr. John Burns) informed the House that a scheme of
afforestation would be started on Crown lands the succeeding year.
Moreover, Lord Carrington, whose encouragement of small holdings on his
own estates Crooks had commended in the Commons, was added to the
Commission of Woods and Forests in his capacity as President of the
Board of Agriculture. A start was immediately made by cutting up into
small parcels a Crown farm of 916 acres at Burwell in Cambridgeshire.
This quiet little reform Crooks hails as affording further means of
solving the problem of unemployment.
"Whatever may be said to the contrary," is his way of putting it, "I
maintain that even the town wastrel takes more kindly to the land than
to anything else. Of course, I know that before he can be made of any
use on the land he must be trained; but then it is well known that I
favour farm colonies for training him."
Since he entered Parliament he had seen farm colonies for the unemployed
become realities. His own Board of Guardians was the pioneer of the
modern farm colony in this country. For nearly a dozen years the
Guardians pleaded with the Local Government Board to be allowed to take
a farm. Consent was at last obtained in 1903, when the Guardians had an
offer of 100 acres at Laindon, in Essex, rent free for three years. The
offer was made by Mr. Joseph Fels, a London manufacturer, who had been
favourably impressed by a system he had seen in Philadelphia, whereby
unemployed men were put to cultivate vacant land.
At first the Guardians' experiment was confined to able-bodied men from
the workhouse. Its scope was widened with the coming of winter. The
Poplar Unemployed Committee, which had the Mayor at its head and Crooks
and Lansbury among its members, agreed on the suggestion of these latter
to send a number of out-of-work men to this farm, meeting the expenses
by a public appeal.
The need for giving out-of-work men proper training on the land was
being urged at the same time by Mr. John Burns. That winter, as chairman
of the Unemployed Conference called by the London County Council, Mr.
Burns and Canon Escreet, the vice-chairman, signed a report urging that
every opportunity should be taken to provide such training on the land
as would fit the workers for efficient labour. The report went on:--
Efforts in this direction are already made in the case of emigrants
to the Colonies, but it does not seem altogether reasonable that
special efforts should be made which would have the effect of
providing the colonies with specially trained labour if no efforts
in this direction are made on behalf of the Home Country. It is not
suggested that training for colonial life should not be provided,
but merely that the needs of the United Kingdom should be equally
borne in mind.
"I've seen wastrels," says Crooks, "who were going from bad to worse in
our back streets in Poplar regain health and strength when sent to our
farm at Laindon, and as they felt their muscles strengthening turn to
work like men. I have seen many a decent unemployed man tided over hard
times by being sent to work on our farm. The result of our first
winter's experiment was that twenty-five of the men emigrated to Canada,
the better for the training we had given them on the land. A dozen
obtained work on their own account. And then, as the winter passed and
trade got better, we began to discharge the men gradually. Over one
hundred of the discharged men have never asked for relief from the
Guardians since. If we had taken them into the workhouse at the time of
their destitution, as the Poor Law prescribes, the greater part of them
would have become permanent charges on the rates for the rest of their
lives."
This promising experiment was killed by the Local Government Board. The
Local Government Board refused to allow the farm to be continued except
as a branch workhouse. Mr. Fels, at the end of the three years' trial,
wrote to the Guardians:--
I desire to emphasise that my offer of the farm in the first
instance was not for the purpose of establishing a branch
workhouse, and in that way perpetuating stone yards, oakum picking,
and corn grinding, and other useless tasks, which seems to be all
the Local Government Board want to do.
On the contrary, I hoped that your Board would be allowed to try to
re-establish men who were down on their luck. I never for one
moment dreamed that your Board would be forced by the Local
Government Board to keep 150 men on one hundred acres of land, it
being obvious to me then, as now, that neither men nor staff could
have a chance in such conditions. Although the Local Government
Board has stifled this experiment, I am convinced that some such
Poor Law reform is bound to come.
The Poplar experiment certainly satisfied Mr. Long when he was at the
Local Government Board. He expressly stated, when suggesting the
formation of his Central Unemployed Committee, that farm colonies
represented one means by which the Committee could assist men out of
work.
One of the first things the Committee did was to take the Hollesley Bay
Farm, where both Crooks and Lansbury as active members of the Committee
helped to develop the work. Mr. Fels again assisted, this time building
a number of cottages with a view to drafting off some of the colonists
into a position of independence, joined by their wives and families
from London. The hope is entertained that some proportion of them may
become small holders. Hollesley Bay Farm, which had been an agricultural
training college for the sons of rich men going to the colonies, thus
became a centre for training poor men to colonise their own country.
All these practical schemes for helping the unemployed and saving the
cities from recurring periods of distress, which Crooks had done so much
to set going, lend colour to his claim that the time has come for the
addition to all future Cabinets of a new member to be styled the
Minister for Labour. For nearly twenty years we have seen this labouring
man, content with his three or four pounds a week, in a working-man's
house in a working-man's neighbourhood, devising and carrying out social
measures for the well-being of the nation that ought rightly to have
come from the Government.
"The first thing a Labour Minister would do," he says, "would be to take
over the Labour Department and other more or less allied departments of
the Board of Trade. The present Labour returns of the Board of Trade are
no good to anybody. I would have the Labour Minister obtain from all the
local authorities a statement of what they regard as useful public works
for their own districts. As soon as a spell of bad trade set in in any
particular district our Minister of Industry would turn up the
suggestions that had reached him from the affected quarter and make a
national grant towards starting the local works.
"Then again I should leave to his Department rather than to the Local
Government Board the duty of controlling farm colonies. I want to see
the Government responsible for three separate kinds of labour colonies.
First I want a farm colony for the habitual able-bodied pauper. He needs
to have his muscles hardened and to be trained to work. The tasks set
such a man in the workhouse are wasteful, and do him no good. You might
have a combination of Poor Law Unions interested in such a colony. The
second class of farm colony would be for habitual tramps. These men need
to be kept entirely separate from able-bodied paupers. The third class
would be voluntary colonies, to which unemployed men could be sent and
trained in market gardening and farming.
"In fact, the practical work a Minister of Labour could do is endless.
He could settle differences between masters and men before a strike was
thought of. To him could be referred disputes as to machinery, questions
as to safeguards, matters affecting hours, meal-times, overtime, and
women's work. He would be the most useful Minister in the Cabinet."