CHAPTER XVII 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."