CHAPTER III SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS
The School of Life—Borrowed Magazines—Reading Dickens—Crooks's Humour and Story-Telling Faculty—Discovering Scott—Declaiming Shakespeare—Books that influenced him.
Little education of the ordinary kind came into Will's life as a lad. We have seen that he turned out before five o'clock every morning at eight years of age to take milk round for a wage of sixpence a week. Soon after coming out of the workhouse he got a job as errand boy at a grocer's at two shillings a week. At eleven he was in a blacksmith's shop, where he stayed until at fourteen he was apprenticed to the trade of cooper.
"In a sense, my training for becoming a servant of the people has been better than a University training," he tells you. "My University has been the common people—the common people whom Christ loved, and loved so well that He needs must make so many of us. The man trained as I have been amid the poor streets and homes of London, who knows where the shoe pinches and where there are no shoes at all, has more practical knowledge of the needs and sufferings of the people than the man who has been to the recognised Universities.
"I am the last to despise education. I have felt the need of more education all my life. But I do protest against the idea that only those who have been through the Universities or public schools are fit to be the nation's rulers and servants. Legislation by the intellectuals is the last thing we want. See to what extremes it sometimes leads. There was a case under the Workmen's Compensation Act when eight leading lawyers argued for hours whether a well thirty feet deep was a building thirty feet high. Finally they decided solemnly that it was not. That was legislation by the intellectuals being carried out by the intellectuals."
He once complained in the House of Commons that Mr. Balfour—then Prime Minister—was using a dead language in answering a Labour Member's question. He had asked whether the Aliens Bill would take precedence over Redistribution. Mr. Balfour replied that the two things were not at all in pari materia.
"Will the right hon. gentleman please speak in English?" pleaded the questioner. "It is well known both inside and outside this House that I do not know Latin."
Mr. Balfour said that what he meant to convey was that you could not compare resolutions with a Bill, because a Bill involved a number of different stages, while the other dealt with the matter as one substantive question.
"A very loose translation," remarked a Member, amid the laughter of the House.
Crooks was learning life at the time other lads are usually learning Latin. And his knowledge of life, carrying with it an unbounded sympathy with suffering, an intense love of truth and justice, has proved more useful to him and to the class he serves than any knowledge of a dead language would.
Yet it was a pleasure to him to go down to Oxford in the early part of 1906 to speak on the need for University men taking up social work. It was a greater pleasure to receive on his return the following letter from one in authority at Christ Church College:—
I am writing a line thanking you again for your kindness in coming and speaking here on Saturday. From all sides I hear nothing but commendation of your speech. There was a considerable number of our men present, and as I surveyed them I was glad to see that some who are really thinking about things were impressed.
Crooks always tells you that his best "schoolmaster" was his mother, the righteous working woman who could not read a line or write a word.
She and one of her boys spent nearly three hours one evening preparing a letter to a far-away sister, the mother painfully composing the sentences, the lad painfully writing them down. The glorious epistle was at last complete, the first great triumph of a combined intellectual effort between mother and son. Proudly they held the letter to the candle-light to dry the ink, when the flame caught it, and behold! the work of three laborious hours destroyed in three seconds. It was more than they could bear. Mother and son sat down and cried together.
THE CROOKS FAMILY.
(Will is the second child from the right, looking over his father's left shoulder.)
"I have nothing but praise for my other schoolmaster," says Crooks. "I mean the schoolmaster at the old George Green schools in East India Dock Road. They were elementary schools then, and we paid a penny a week, though even that small sum for all of us meant a sacrifice for mother. The schoolmaster there was essentially a kind man. He had me under his teaching in the Sunday school as well as in the day school. During the few years I was with him prior to my workhouse days I learnt much that has been of service to me ever since."
Neither books nor papers found their way into Shirbutt Street. The first paper he remembers reading was The British Workman, brought occasionally to the little house in High Street just after the workhouse days. Then came a short spell of penny dreadfuls, from among which "Alone in a Pirate's Lair" stands out in memory riotous and reeking to this day.
Though the mother could not read herself, she encouraged her children by borrowing occasional magazines and inviting them to read the contents to her and her neighbours.
"I was about ten or eleven when The Leisure Hour and The Sunday at Home were started, and mother and the neighbours used to get these and ask us boys to read the stories to them.
"I owe something to an old man who went round the poor people's houses selling books. From him I got some of Dickens's novels. I suddenly found myself in a new and delightful world. Having been in the workhouse myself, how I revelled in Oliver Twist! How I laughed at Bumble and the gentleman in the white waistcoat! I have seen that white waistcoat, pompous and truculent, administering the Poor Law many times since.
"After the unceasing hunger I experienced in the workhouse, you can guess how I sympathised with Oliver in his demand for more. I thought that a delightful touch in one of our L.C.C. day schools the other day. The teacher asked a class what books they liked best.
"'Oliver Twist,' came one little chap's answer.
"'Why?'
"'Because he asked for more.'"
This early reading of Dickens may have helped to develop his own quaint, rich humour. Will Crooks often reminds one of Charles Dickens. He knows the Londoner of to-day, his oddities, whimsicalities, his trials, humours, and sorrows, as thoroughly as Dickens knew the Londoner of fifty years ago. Many a time I have journeyed with him down to his home in East London, after he had finished a hard day's work in Parliament or on the London County Council, possibly having been defeated on some public question in a way that would make many men despair; and yet how easily he has put aside all the worries and work, and made the journey delightful by his unfailing fund of Cockney anecdotes. He is one of the rare story-tellers you meet with in a lifetime. The charm, too, of all his stories is that they never relate to what he has read, but always to what he has heard or observed himself.
Some unknown friend at Yarmouth, who doubtless had heard him speak, seems to have been impressed by this ready way he has of taking his illustrations from the common things around him. Under the initials A. H. S. he sent the following "Limerick" to London Opinion:—
We smile when he's funny, or witty,
We yawn when he's wise: more's the pity,
For this best of the "Crooks"
Draws from life, not from books,
When he pleads for the people or city.
After Dickens the lad discovered Scott. "It was an event in my life when, in an old Scotch magazine, I read a fascinating criticism of 'Ivanhoe.' Nothing would satisfy me until I had got the book; and then Scott took a front place among my favourite authors.
"I was in my teens then, reading everything I could lay hands on. I used to follow closely public events in the newspapers. Not long ago I met a man in a car with whom I remonstrated for some rude behaviour to the passengers. He looked at me in amazement when I called him by his name.
"'Why,' he said, 'you must be that boy Will Crooks I knew long ago. Do you know what I remember about you? I can see you now tossing your apron off in the dinner-hour and squatting down in the workshop with a paper in your hand.'"
Crooks was still an apprentice when, as he describes it, the great literary event of his life occurred.
"On my way home from work one Saturday afternoon I was lucky enough to pick up Homer's 'Iliad' for twopence at an old bookstall. After dinner I took it upstairs—we were able to afford an upstairs room by that time—and read it lying on the bed. What a revelation it was to me! Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land. It was a rare luxury to a working lad like me just home from work to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs and gods of ancient Greece."
The lad's imagination was also fired by "The Pilgrim's Progress."
"I often think of that splendid passage describing the passing over the river and the entry into Heaven of Christian and Faithful. I can sympathise with Arnold of Rugby when he said, 'I never dare trust myself to read that passage aloud.'"
While in the blacksmith's shop he learnt many portions of Shakespeare, with a decided preference for Hamlet. Often in the little forge the men would say, "Give us a bit of Shakespeare, Will." The lad, nothing loath, would declaim before them, more often than not in a mock heroic strain that greatly delighted his grimy workmates.
Like many other members of the Labour Party, he was greatly influenced in his youth by the principles of "Unto this Last" and "Alton Locke." Later in life he was set thinking seriously by a course of University Lectures on Political Economy delivered in Poplar by Mr. G. Armitage Smith.
Quietly he began building up a little library of his own, supplemented in later years by an occasional autograph copy from authors whose friendship he had made. Father Dolling, for instance, sent him a copy of his "Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum," inscribed:—
Will Crooks.—The story of a kind of trying to do in a different way what he is doing.—With the author's best Christmas wishes, 1898.
In the flyleaf of this book Crooks keeps the following letter, received after his election to Parliament from the author's sister:—
Dear Mr. Crooks,—I have just seen the papers, and must send you a word of congratulation on your success. If, as I believe, the blessed dead are allowed to watch over and help us, I am sure my dear brother is thinking of you and praying that in your new sphere of usefulness you may be helped to do God's will.—Truly yours, Geraldine Dolling.
The book that he values most to-day is a pleasant little story for boys called "Joe the Giant Killer." It was given to him by the author, Dr. Chandler, Bishop of Bloemfontein, when rector of Poplar. The reason he values it so is because the printed dedication reads:—
"To WILL CROOKS, L.C.C.
In memory of many years
Of delightful comradeship in Poplar."
When, after the big victory in Woolwich, Crooks was able to add M.P. as well as L.C.C. after his name, there came among hundreds of other congratulations a cabled cheer from South Africa. It was signed "Chandler."