When Crooks proposed the simple expedient of sending these children to the surrounding day-schools everybody seemed amazed.
The idea had never been heard of before. The London School Board of the day did not take kindly to it at all. It poured cold water on the project at first. The neighbouring schools were nearly all full, and the Board thought it would hear no more of the matter by suggesting that if the Guardians could find vacant places they were at liberty of course to send the children.
Crooks framed an answering letter that it was the School Board's duty to find the places, and that, come what would, the Guardians were determined to send the children to the day schools.
Soon places were found for all. The little people who, through neglect and idleness in the workhouse, had been getting steeped in pauperism, were now dressed in non-institution clothes, and they went to and from the neighbouring schools, playing on the way like any other children.
That was the beginning of a system destined to have a far-reaching effect on Poor Law children all over the country. Other Unions, faced with the same problem, seeing how well it had been dealt with at Poplar, went and did likewise.
The Labour Guardian did not rest there. The children were a great deal better for coming in daily contact with the outside world, but much of the good work was undone by their having to spend every night in the workhouse. He wanted to keep them away altogether from its contaminating influence. He persuaded the Guardians to purchase a large dwelling house about a quarter of a mile away from the workhouse. This became a real home for the children. There they are brought up and regularly sent to the public day schools outside, entirely free from workhouse surroundings.
So long as the mark of the workhouse clings to children, so long, says Crooks, will children cling to the workhouse. That is what makes him so keen in getting rid of the institution dress and of everything else likely to brand a child.
He helped to banish all that suggested pauperism from the Forest Gate School. The children were educated and grew up, not like workhouse children, as before, but like the children of working parents. With what result? Marked out in their childhood as being "from the workhouse," they often bore the stamp all their life and ended up as workhouse inmates in their manhood and womanhood. Under the new system, they were made to feel like ordinary working-class children. They grew up like them, becoming ordinary working-men and working-women themselves; so that the Poor Law knew them no longer.
"If I can't appeal to your moral sense, let me appeal to your pocket," Crooks once remarked at a Guildhall Poor Law Conference. "Surely it is far cheaper to be generous in training Poor Law children to take their place in life as useful citizens than it is to give the children a niggardly training and a branded career. This latter way soon lands them in the workhouse again, to be kept out of the rates for the rest of their lives."