"My wife heard of it before I got home, and she said to those who told her, 'Well, if the woman didn't thank him, I shall when he comes home.'
"Perhaps you thought I looked a fool clambering up the stairs with a baby in long clothes. I don't think so. I satisfied myself by doing what evidently wanted doing."
He hurried away from his college by the Dock Gates one Sunday morning to keep an appointment to address the Isle of Dogs Progressive Club. He found less than a dozen men in the lecture hall, while the bar and the billiard room were crowded. He walked out without a word and sat down in the club garden.
"This is all right. I'm enjoying myself perfectly here," he told the bewildered secretary. "If they prefer to play at billiards and to drink beer, let them. I am quite content to enjoy this garden."
In ten minutes time not a man remained in the bar or billiard room. The lecture hall was filled.
"We deserve your reproach, Will," shouted someone from the audience when at last he stepped on to the platform.
If he was severe on drink he was more severe on betting.
"Many a man here," he told one of his Sunday morning audiences at the Dock Gates, "can tell me the pedigree of half-a-dozen race-horses. It shows you can think if you like. But that kind of thinking is what I call thinking off-side."
Crooks had a hundred happy illustrations for urging upon his working-class hearers the duty of citizenship and co-operation.
"We chaps are like the old lady's cow that gave a good pail of milk regular, but often kicked it over. We have built up trade unions and friendly societies and co-operative societies that stand for the best working class organisations in the world. But we have a weakness for kicking the pail over. How? Because we are constantly spoiling our own good work by allowing other classes to do all the governing of the country.