From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, M.P.

by George Haw

It happened that these ladies were presenting their yearly report on Poplar Workhouse about the same time the Local Government Board attack took place. These good women are not influenced by the Local Government Board or by Municipal Alliances or by the party differences among the Guardians. Their opinion is that of a quiet body of independent, intelligent women. In their report on Poplar Workhouse they say:—

During the year forty-six meetings have been held, and at each some part of the House has been visited. The year has been singularly free from complaints, all the inmates seeming happy and contented.

The nurses in charge are kindness itself, and are uniformly good-tempered and active. The whole House is kept beautifully clean, and each ward is a picture of cosiness and comfort.

Every useful aid is procured for the infirm, to help them to move about easily. The sick are kindly tended, and the little children's health and comfort carefully supervised.

Observe, in connection with this three months' audit, that not a penny was surcharged in respect to the out-relief grants. Notwithstanding all the wild charges that had been made, not a single case could be found where Crooks's policy of helping the poor could be proved to be illegal. After all the hubbub, a three months' scrutiny under the eye of a capable Government auditor proved that Poplar had simply been carrying out the law relating to the poor.

The Local Government Board was badly beaten in its attempt to discredit Crooks's policy. Finally, it was argued on the Board's behalf, as though in a last grasp at a straw, that the decrease in the amount of out-relief during the year of the Inquiry was in itself a justification of the Local Government Board's action. Everybody outside the Board knows differently. The year referred to (1906) was the most prosperous this country has ever experienced. If anything, the industries of Poplar shared in that prosperity to a larger extent than other parts of the country. The primary cause of the decrease was not the Inquiry, but the lessening of want brought about by an extraordinary trade revival.

"Give us," Crooks has repeatedly stated in public, "the same terrible state of things that we had in some of the previous winters, and I shall apply the same remedy again. The law is there for the sake of the poor, not for the sake of officials. My policy is not a haphazard one. It is the outcome of years of experience. It is fundamentally sound, and will one day become a national policy."

Crooks had indeed played a part for the poor of the whole nation. Before the echoes of the Bumbledom agitation had died away the very Government which allowed one of its Departments to be made an instrument in that agitation was promising to carry out the very reforms for which Crooks had striven and suffered—Old Age Pensions, Amendment of the Poor Law, and Equalisation of London Rates.

The Government, however, shirked a discussion of the Poplar Report in the House of Commons. The Labour Party, backed by Conservative Members, pressed the Prime Minister for an opportunity to discuss the report. Mr. Keir Hardie and Crooks pointed out that, as the report stood, an injustice was done to a popularly elected body, the effect of which would be to deter other Boards of Guardians from carrying out the Poor Law in a humane spirit. They further maintained that the country was now without guidance as to how to treat poor people out of work and in need of food.

But the Government had learnt by this time that a departmental blunder had been committed by associating the Poor Law policy of Crooks with the faulty administration of some of his colleagues. The Prime Minister got out of the difficulty by informing the House that the report was not made by the Local Government Board, but to that Board by one of their officers, "and," he added, "I don't understand that it is proposed to call in question any action of my right hon. friend the President in regard to the report."

Indeed, the President of the Local Government Board assured a friend of Crooks in a conversation in the Lobby that there had been a misunderstanding somewhere. He sought an early opportunity of giving Crooks a similar assurance.

It was said of Crooks in Poplar about that time that he was going to leave the neighbourhood never to return. Working-men came round to him in solemn deputation, and women and children stopped him in the street, in order to hear from his own lips that the bodeful rumour bore no meaning. The rumour, which never had the smallest basis of truth, reached the workhouse, where he had not been seen for two or three weeks, weighed down as he was by a hundred public attacks, his own wearing illness and a heavy domestic trouble. But one afternoon he found time to go and see the inmates again. And old men hobbled towards him and clutched his arm and hand as they broke down in their efforts to tell him what was in their hearts. When he entered the women's wards there was a chorus of almost tearful appeals. "Say it isn't true, Mr. Crooks." "Don't go away and leave us, Mr. Crooks."