But Liverpool is associated with one of the saddest memories in his life. This is how he refers to it:—
"My wife joined me, bringing our little girl, a bonny child of whom we were immensely proud. The little one pined from the day it reached Liverpool and died within a month. I thought my wife would have followed the child to the grave within a day or two. I never saw her so much affected in all my life. She pleaded to be taken away from that place. 'Anywhere,' she said, 'only let's get away.' So we buried our little girl in Liverpool one rainy Saturday afternoon, and came back to London to seek work the same night."
It was the most miserable railway journey of his life. If anything, the misery was increased when as the dull dawn crept over London he and his wife stepped out of the train and walked the seven miles of silent streets between Euston and Poplar.
No better fortune awaited them in London. The young husband sought work with no success. News reached him that his trade was thriving again in Liverpool, so he set out to tramp there a second time.
"It is a weird experience, this, of wandering through England in search of a job," he says. "You keep your heart up so long as you have something in your stomach, but when hunger steals upon you, then you despair. Footsore and listless at the same time, you simply lose all interest in the future.
"I have always been drawn towards Canon Liddon since reading an address of his in which he said that the roughest tramp upon the road was, in his eyes, one who might come to be numbered among those favoured by Christ, and that the most brilliant and distinguished guest he had ever met had no higher possibility than that.
"Nothing wearies one more than walking about hunting for employment which is not to be had. It is far harder than real work. The uncertainty, the despair, when you reach a place only to discover that your journey is fruitless, are frightful. I've known a man say, 'Which way shall I go to-day?' Having no earthly idea which way to take, he tosses up a button. If the button comes down on one side he treks east; if on the other, he treks west.
"You can imagine the feeling when, after walking your boots off, a man says to you, as he jingles sovereigns in his pocket, 'Why don't you work?' That is what happened to me as I scoured the country between London and Liverpool, asking all the way for any kind of work to help me along."
I remember Crooks recalling his experience at a dinner-party given by the Hon. Maud Stanley at her Westminster house. Crooks was then a fellow-member with Miss Stanley of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, and she invited us on that occasion to meet her friend Professor Wyckoff, the American author, who wrote "The Workers." In "The Workers" the author tells the story of how for a time he turned his back upon his usual well-to-do haunts in order to find out what earning one's own living by tramping from place to place doing manual work was actually like.