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

by George Haw

Once back at work again, Crooks threw all the time and energy he could spare from Parliament and his Labour meetings into a campaign for feeding starving school children. Perhaps the best instance of the people's trust in him was supplied by what happened in consequence of a powerful plea for hungry children he made on the London County Council. The Moderates were then in power, and he pleaded with them to persist no longer in their policy of refusing to exercise their powers under the Necessitous School Children's Act, which enables them to spend public money on food for starving scholars.

It was nigh on midnight before he got an opportunity of raising the question, and then—according to the Daily Mail, which had often been one of his bitterest opponents—he "electrified his sleepy colleagues as he expressed the agony of hungry children and the despair of parents unable to satisfy their cravings. The speech was spoken without a single note; it came from his heart. When Mr. Crooks sat down, exhausted by the effort—he was far from well—there was a moment of dead silence. Then there broke out the applause which relieved the tension. There was scarcely a dry eye in the Council chamber."

In the course of his speech to the Council Crooks said:—

There are no hard-hearted men and there are no hard-hearted women; there are only men and women ignorant of the need. Only the other day a teacher in one of our schools showed me a letter from a mother of three fatherless girls. It ran:—

Dear Teacher,—Will you allow my little girls to come home at half-past three? I shall have earned sixpence by then, and shall be able to give them something warm to eat. They have had nothing all day.

Here are we, satisfied after a good dinner. Yet I know that this very night hundreds of little children have gone to bed with nothing but a cup of cold water for their supper, and that in the morning they will have nothing but water for their breakfasts. What do you expect them to become? What sort of citizens of this great Empire City will they make?

I have seen the poor as they live, and I tell you that, much as they may forgive you for many things, they will never forgive you for neglecting the children—the children stunted in body and mind for want of food, old before their time, with the souls, not of children, but of old men and women.

A nation which neglects its children is damned. You are neglecting London's hungry children by leaving the provision of meals to private subscriptions which all over London have failed to meet the little people's need. You never talk of running the Army and Navy and the defence of the Empire generally by means of private subscriptions and charitable doles. Yet the thing that is of greater importance at the present moment than the Army and Navy to us, as an Imperial people, is that the children who are going to inherit the responsibility of the government of our vast Empire should be properly fed and clothed now.

What have you to say to facts like these? A woman, early the other morning, as soon as the shutters were down, entered a pawnbroker's shop, and took from under her shawl, in a shamefaced manner, a small bundle. The pawnbroker's assistant unrolled the bundle, and there, clean washed and scarcely dry, was the woman's chemise. She had taken it off her body, washed and partly dried it, and to the pawnbroker's assistant she said:

"For the love of God, lend me sixpence on this."

"I cannot," said the assistant. "It's not worth it."

"Then give me threepence," pleaded the woman. "I must give my children a mouthful before they go to school this morning."

You object to feed the children because it would increase the rates. Yes, it would increase the rates by a farthing. But indirectly you are increasing the rates to a far greater extent by starving the children. By neglecting them now you will be compelled to feed and shelter them later in life in workhouses and infirmaries.

I appeal to you to rise to a sense of your responsibilities, and see that these children are fed. If it meant that I should be driven out of public life by feeding starving children out of the rates, I should feed them out of the rates. I should then have done my duty.

Dear Teacher,—Will you allow my little girls to come home at half-past three? I shall have earned sixpence by then, and shall be able to give them something warm to eat. They have had nothing all day.

The appeal moved the Council deeply, but on a party vote he was defeated, many of the Councillors who voted against him crowding round him afterwards to assure him of their individual sympathy.

The sequel came the day after his speech was reported in the Press. From all parts of London he and his wife had cheques and postal orders showered upon them from people in all walks of life, from little children to old people. Nearly £200 in all came to hand, together with huge parcels of boots and clothing, every donor leaving it entirely in Crooks's hands as to how the money and the things were distributed, so long as the needy children got them.

This is just the kind of thing that he deprecates, but, public bodies having failed to meet the need, he and his wife set to work, and did their best to meet it in their own neighbourhood. With the aid of a few friends they got in touch with some of the poorest schools in the East End, and soon thousands of hungry school children were fed and hundreds of the naked clothed.

Crooks gave the London County Council no rest on this subject. He went on agitating until the Moderate majority in the succeeding winter at last gave in and agreed to make the feeding of necessitous scholars a public charge.

Thus we leave him, still in the ranks fighting. We must part from him with a smile, since that is how he likes best to leave both friend and enemy. And those who heard him speak in the winter of 1908 at the City Temple smile every time they think of the occasion—a mass meeting of the London Federation of Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Brotherhoods.