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.