CHAPTER XXX 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."