While deprecating the standard of comfort in the workhouse, the Inspector made no reference to the doctor's statement that he did not think the inmates were too well fed or clad. Rather, he tried to undermine Crooks's policy by remarks of this kind:—
Mr. Crooks in his evidence admitted that the dietary in the workhouse was better than could be obtained by the independent labourer in the borough with a wife and two children to keep who received anything under 30s. a week.
The evidence gives a different version. What Crooks said (page 389) was:—
"A man with 30s. a week with a wife and two children can only just keep himself in decency. When he gets below that he gets below the Local Government Board diet.... The men in the workhouse get a bare subsistence, and no man outside ought to be paid wages less than enable him to get that kind of living. What you have to prove is that we are giving the people in the workhouse such luxury as a man in ordinary work at from thirty to forty shillings a week could not get at home. But what he" [the legal representative of the Municipal Alliance] "does not say is that we are dealing with the very aged in the workhouse—the able-bodied, as you know, are exceedingly limited in number—but he does not appreciate for a moment that after all a man's liberty is worth something. Liberty has not fallen in value. It is a priceless something. A man will die for it. And our people will die—a good many of them—rather than go into the workhouse."
It happened that the people of Poplar were dying for it about that very time. While the Local Government Board was harassing Crooks for his efforts to save the poor from starvation, another Department of the State was in correspondence with the Guardians over two cases of people who had died from starvation in Poplar. This was the Home Office.
It is a theory of the British Constitution that no person in the kingdom should die of starvation. Yet in London alone forty-eight people died of starvation in the winter of 1905-6. Whitechapel, which gives no out-relief, and is held up as a model by the Inspector who conducted the Poplar inquiry, had ten deaths from starvation within its borders during the year. Poplar, where the Guardians are said to be too generous in their treatment of the poor, was unable, with all its zeal, to prevent two people dying from want of food.
One of the victims was a child whose father refused to go into Poplar workhouse—this so-called "palace of luxury"—because he thought he might still be able to earn a trifle outside. Out-relief in the way of food was given to the value of 3s. 6d. a week, but that not being enough for a family of five, the youngest defied the British Constitution by quietly slipping into the grave—"Died of asthenia and bronchitis," was the coroner's verdict, "due to mother's want of food, accelerated by want of proper clothing."
Shortly afterwards a married labourer in Old Ford, faced with starvation, refused to apply to the Poplar Guardians because it had become common talk among the poor of the district that the Local Government Board would no longer allow the Guardians to assist people outside the workhouse. And one morning this unemployed man had to run to the nearest doctor's because one of his children was "took queer." What followed was told by the doctor in evidence a few days later at the Poplar Coroner's Court. He related how he was knocked up in the early morning, and how, when he went to the house, he found no sign of food, no fire, and, lying on some scanty bedding, a girl-child, who had been dead about an hour. Death, he added, was due to exhaustion from want of sufficient food. He was so shocked with the poverty of the home that he gave the parents five shillings out of his own pocket, and sent them something to eat.