Long after he retired from the Board he received from a working-man's son a little proof of the practical results of his efforts. It came in the following letter:—
You will probably remember how some years ago you pleaded my case on the L.C.C., and how, through your influence, I was enabled to complete my studies in naval architecture at Greenwich College.
I am sure you will be glad to know that I have now passed my final examination and have just been admitted a member of the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors. My official appointment is that of Assistant Constructor in one of the principal Government Dockyards, where I have been on probation for the last twelve months or more. The final examinations were held last July in London and occupied more than three weeks, with an exam, almost daily.
I feel that I owe you a debt of gratitude for pleading my cause at the time. My father had spent his all on me while I was at the college, and he being a toolsmith with seven children, you can well understand that what he had by him he could ill afford on me.
My father and the others of the family desire to join with me in this letter of thanks and gratitude to you.
Mention has already been made of how Crooks and the Poplar Labour League originated at the Dock Gate meetings the scheme for a technical institute for his native borough. So many times was this project delayed that he often told his Poplar audiences he feared he would go down to posterity as the man who talked of an institute that never came. It was not until the early part of 1906 that the institute was opened. There is a reference to it in the annual report of the Poplar Labour League for that year:—
Some years ago the League mooted the idea of a technical institute for Poplar. Mr. Crooks took it up and carried it to official quarters, never letting the subject drop, until it stands at last an accomplished fact. A School of Marine Engineering and Nautical Academy has recently been opened in Poplar.
A handsome building has been erected in High Street, and in it will be taught seamanship and navigation, marine engineering and naval architecture and propulsion, general mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, pattern making, carpentry and woodwork, and theoretical and practical chemistry, physics, and mechanics. Nothing more appropriate could have been built in Poplar. It is mainly due to the tireless efforts of Mr. Crooks that it exists, and it will stand as a monument to him.
But Poplar boasts a greater monument to its Labour Councillor. He was on the L.C.C. Bridges Committee during the making of Blackwall Tunnel. In its day the largest subaqueous tunnel in the world, its construction involved years of anxious labour.
The tunnel carries vehicular and passenger traffic under the Thames between Poplar and Greenwich, five miles below the nearest bridge, that at the Tower. Before it was made the two million Londoners living east of the bridges were without any public means of crossing the river. To build an ordinary bridge was impossible with so many ships passing night and day to and from the London Pool. It was decided to take the traffic under the Thames by descending roadways leading to a tunnel some seventy feet below high-water mark.
From the time he joined the Council to that day in May, 1897, when the King as Prince of Wales went down to Poplar to open the tunnel, on behalf of Queen Victoria, Crooks was among the keenest of the public men engaged in carrying that great engineering feat through. He made himself so thoroughly master of the details that he was in great demand all over London as a lecturer on the tunnel. The chief engineers on the works who heard the lecture congratulated him on the way he made intelligible and interesting the complicated system by which the tunnel was bored through the clay within a foot or two of the river bed.
So satisfied were his fellow County Councillors with the practical work he did at Blackwall that on its completion they elected him Chairman of the Bridges Committee. In that capacity he steered through the Council and through a Committee of the House of Commons two other schemes for tunnels under the Thames, one for foot passengers only between Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs, and the other for general traffic between Shadwell and Rotherhithe, designed on a larger scale than the tunnel at Blackwall. Interest in these schemes, however, can never be so great as it was in the Blackwall experiment, the first of its kind attempted.
In the special Blackwall Tunnel number issued by the Municipal Journal, Crooks figures among those described as "the men who made the tunnel." Following sketches and portraits of Sir Alexander Binnie (then the L.C.C. engineer, who designed the tunnel), of Sir Weetman Pearson, M.P. (the contractor who executed the work), of Sir William Bull, M.P. (who was then chairman of the Bridges Committee), is a reference to other members of the Committee who took a prominent part in the work. The first place after the chairman is given to Crooks. The Municipal Journal says:—