From Workhouse to Westminster Part 1

From Workhouse to Westminster.

by George Haw.

PREFACE

This record of the career of a man whom I have known intimately in his public and private life for over a dozen years can claim at least one distinction. It is the first biography of a working man who has deliberately chosen to remain in the ranks of working men as well as in their service. From the day in the early 'nineties when he was called upon to decide between a prospective partners.h.i.+p in a prosperous business and the hard, joyless life of a Labour representative, with poverty for his lot and slander for his reward, he has adhered to the principle he then laid down, consistently refusing ever since the many invitations received from various quarters to come up higher. There have been endless biographies of men who have risen from the ranks of Labour and then deserted those ranks for wealthy circles. Will Crooks, in his own words, has not risen from the ranks; he is still in the ranks, standing four-square with the working cla.s.ses against monopoly and privilege.

This book would have been an autobiography rather than a biography could I have had my way. Nor was I alone in urging Crooks to write the story of his life, as strenuous in its poverty as it has been in its public service. He always argued that that was not in his way at all--that, in fact, he did not believe in men sitting down to write about themselves any more than he believed in men getting up to talk about themselves.

So I have done the next best thing. Since the interpretation depends upon the interpreter, I have tried, in writing this account of his life, to make him the narrator as often as I could. Most of the incidents in his career I have given in his own words, mainly from personal talks we have had together during our years of friends.h.i.+p, sometimes by our own firesides, sometimes amid the stress of public life, sometimes during long walks in the streets of London. Nor do any of the incidents lose in detail or in verity by reason of many of those cherished conversations having taken place long before either of us ever dreamed they would afterwards be pieced together in book form.

Not to Crooks alone am I indebted for help in compiling this book. I owe much to members of his family, to my wife, and to other friends of his.

GEORGE HAW.

INTRODUCTION

Mr. Will Crooks, as I know him in his own house at Poplar and in that other House at Westminster, always seems to me to be something far greater than a Labour Member of Parliament. He stands out as the supreme type of the English working cla.s.ses, who have chosen him as one of their representatives.

Representative government, a mystical inst.i.tution, is said to have originated in some of the monastic orders. In any case, it is evident that the character of it is symbolic, and that it is subject to all the advantages and all the disadvantages of a symbol. Just exactly as a religious ritual may for a time represent a real emotion, and then for a time cease to represent anything, so representative government may for a time represent the people, and for a time cease to represent anything.

But the peculiar difficulties attaching to the thing called representative government have not been fully appreciated. The great difficulty of representative governments is simply this: that the representative is supposed to discharge two quite definite and distinct functions. There is in his position the idea of being a picture or copy of the thing he represents. There is also the idea of being an instrument of the thing he represents, or a message from the thing he represents. The first is like the shadow a man throws on the wall; the second is like the stone that he throws over the wall. In the first sense, it is supposed that the representative is like the thing he represents. In the second case it is only supposed that the representative is useful to the thing he represents. In the first case, a parliamentary representative is used strictly as a parliamentary representative. In the second case a parliamentary representative is used as a weapon. He is used as a missile. He is used as something to be merely thrown against the enemy; and those who merely throw something against the enemy do not ask especially that the thing they throw shall be a particular copy of themselves. To send one's challenge is not to send one's photograph. When Ajax hurled a stone at his enemy, it was not a stone carved in the image of Ajax. When a modern general causes a cannon-ball to be fired, he is not understood to indicate that the contours of the cannon-ball represent in any exact way the curves of his own person. In short, we can in modern representative politics use a politician as a missile without using him, in the fullest sense of the word, as a symbol.

In this sense most of our representatives in modern representative government are merely used as missiles. Mr. Balfour is a missile. Mr.

Balfour is hurled at the heads of his enemies like a boomerang or a javelin. He is flung by the great ma.s.s of mediocre Tory squires. He is flung, not because he is at all like them, for that he obviously is not.

He is flung because he is a particularly bright and sharp missile; that is to say, because he is so very unlike the men who fling him. Here, then, is the primary paradox of representative government. Men elect a representative half because he is like themselves and half because he is not like themselves. They elect a representative half because he represents them and half because he misrepresents them. They choose Mr.

Balfour (let us say) half because he does what they would do and half because he does what they could never do at all.

We are told that the Labour movement will be an exception to all previous rules. The Labour movement has been no exception to this previous rule. The Labour Members, as a cla.s.s, are not representatives, but missiles. Poor men elect them, not because they are like poor men, but because they are likely to damage rich men: an excellent reason.

Labour Members are the exceptions among Labour men. As I have said, they are weapons, missiles, things thrown. Working-men are not at all like Mr. Keir Hardie. If it comes to likeness, working-men are rather more like the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re. But they throw Mr. Keir Hardie at the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re, knowing that he is so curiously shaped as to hurt anything at which he is thrown. Unless this is thoroughly understood, great injustice will necessarily be done to the Labour movement; for it is obvious on the face of it that Labour Members do not represent the average of labouring men. A man like Mr. J. R. Macdonald no more suggests a Battersea workman than he suggests a Bedouin or a Russian Grand Duke. These men are not the representatives of the democracy, but the weapons of the democracy. They are intended only to fulfil the second of those functions in the delegate which I have already defined.

They are the instruments of the people. They are not the images of the people. They are fanatics for the things about which the people are good-humouredly convinced. They are philosophers about the things which are to the people an easy and commonplace religion. In a word, they are not representatives; they are not even amba.s.sadors. They are declarations of war.

Such being the problem, we must reconcile ourselves to finding many of the Labour Members men of a definite and even pedantic cla.s.s; men whose austere and lucid tone, whose elaborate economic explanations smack of something very different from the actual streets of London. This economic knowledge may be very necessary. It may remind us of our duties; but it does not remind us of the Walworth Road. It may enable a man to speak for the proletarians, but it does not enable a man to speak with them.

Now, if a man has a good rough-and-ready knowledge of the mechanics of Battersea and the labourers of Poplar; if the same man has a good rough-and-ready knowledge of the men in the House of Commons (a vastly inferior company); he will come out of both those experiences with one quite square and solid conviction, a conviction the grounds of which, though they may be difficult to define verbally, are as unshakable as the ground. He will come out with the conviction that there is really only one modern Labour Member who represents, who symbolises, or who even remotely suggests the real labouring men of London; and that is Mr.

Will Crooks.

Mr. Crooks alone fulfils both the functions of the representative. He is a representative who, like Mr. Keir Hardie and the others, fights, cleaves a way, does something that only a man of talent could do, expresses the inexpressible, sacrifices himself. But also, unlike Mr.

Keir Hardie, and the rest, he is a representative who represents. He is a picture as well as a projectile; he is the stone carved in the image of Ajax. He is really like the people for whom he stands. A man can realise this fact, merely as a fact, without implying any disrespect, for instance, to the Scotch ideality of Mr. Keir Hardie, or the Scotch strenuousness of Mr. John Burns. They are expressive of the English democracy, but not typical of it. The first characteristic of Mr.

Crooks, which must strike anyone who has ever had to do with him, even for ten minutes, is this immense fact of the absolute and isolated genuineness of his connection with the working cla.s.ses. To all the other Labour leaders we listen with respect on Labour matters, because they have been elected by labourers. To him alone we should listen if he had never been elected at all. Of him alone it can be said that if we did not accept him as a representative, we should still accept him as a type. I need not dwell, and indeed I feel no desire to dwell, on those qualities in Mr. Crooks which express just now the popular qualities of the populace. I feel more interest in the unpopular qualities of the populace.

The greatness of Mr. Crooks lies not in the fact that he expresses the claims of the populace, which twenty dons at Oxford would be ready to express; it is that he expresses the populace: its strong tragedy and its strong farce. He is not a demagogue. He is not even a democrat. He is a demos; he is the real King. And his chief characteristic, as I have suggested, is that he represents especially those popular good qualities which are unpopular in modern discussion. Will Crooks is to the ordinary London omnibus conductor or cabman exactly what Robert Burns was to the ordinary puritanical but pa.s.sionate peasant of the Scotch Lowlands. He is the journeyman of genius. All that is good in them is better in him; but it is the same thing. Walt Whitman has perfectly expressed this att.i.tude of the average towards the fine type.

"They see themselves in him. They hardly know themselves, they are so grown."

In numberless points Mr. Crooks thus completes and glorifies the common character of the poor man. Take, for instance, the deep matter of humour: humour in which the English poor are certainly pre-eminent among all cla.s.ses of the nation and all nations of the world. By all politicians, including Labour politicians, humour is only introduced exceptionally and elaborately; by all politicians the comic anecdote is led up to with dextrous prefaces and deep intonations, as if it were something altogether unique and separate. All politicians take their own humour very seriously. Mr. Crooks recalls the real life of the streets in nothing so much as in the fact that humour is a constant condition.

He and the poor exist in a normal atmosphere of amiable irony. If anything, they have to make an effort to become verbally serious: something of the same kind of earnest that it costs an ordinary member of Parliament to become witty. Anyone who has heard Mr. Crooks talk knows that his permanent mood is humorous. He is never without a story, but his face and his mind are humorous before he has even thought of the story. He lives, so to speak, in a state of expectant reminiscence. The man who said that "brevity was the soul of wit" told a lie; n.o.body minds how long wit goes on so long as it is wit. Mr. Crooks belongs to that strong old school of English humour in which d.i.c.kens was supreme; that school which some moderns have called dull because it could go on for a long time being interesting.

I have merely taken this case of popular humour as one out of a hundred.

A similar case of Mr. Crooks's popular sympathy might be found in his pathos, which is equally uncompromising and direct. Even his political faults, if they are faults, against which so much criticism has for a time been raised, have still this pervading quality, that they are essentially the popular faults. This instinct for a prompt and practical and hand-to-mouth benevolence, this instinct for giving a very good time to those who have had a very bad time, this is the very soul of that immense and astonis.h.i.+ng altruism at which all social reformers have stood thunderstruck: the kindness of the poor to the poor. This att.i.tude may or may not be the great vice of the governors; there is no doubt that it is the great virtue of the people. The charity of poor men to poor men has always been spontaneous, irregular, individual, liable therefore in its nature to some faults of confusion or of favouritism.

It is the misfortune of Mr. Crooks that alone among modern philanthropists and social reformers he has really been the typical poor man giving to poor men. This quality which has been seen and condemned in him is simply the quality which is the common and working morality of the London streets. You may like it; you may dislike it. But if you dislike it you are simply disliking the English people. You have seen English people perhaps for a moment in omnibuses, in streets on Sat.u.r.day nights, in third-cla.s.s carriages, or even in Bank Holiday waggonettes.

You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not yet entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not represent it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less than Tories or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with it a trail of all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as against hospitals), superst.i.tions (as about funerals), a thirst for respectability pa.s.sing that of the middle cla.s.ses, a faith in the family which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If ever that people enters politics it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as mere pedants. It will be able to point only to one figure, powerful, pathetic, humorous, and very humble, who bore in any way upon his face the sign and star of its authority.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

FROM WORKHOUSE TO WESTMINSTER

CHAPTER I

EARLIEST YEARS IN A ONE-ROOMED HOME

Difference between "Will" and "William"--Early Memories--Crying for Bread--An Aspersion Resented--A Prophecy that has been Fulfilled--Will earns his First Half-Sovereign.

Will Crooks!

In the little one-roomed home where he was born at No. 2, s.h.i.+rb.u.t.t Street, down by the Docks at Poplar, it was the earnest desire of all whom it concerned that he should be known to the world as William Crooks. The desire found practical expression in the register of Trinity Congregational Church in East India Dock Road close by. Thither, within a few weeks of his birth, in the year 1852, he was carried with modest ceremony and solemnly christened by a name which everybody ever since has refused to give to him.

For somehow "William Crooks" does not sound like the man at all. Looking at it gives you no suggestion of the good-humoured, hard-headed Labour man, known as familiarly to his colleagues in the House of Commons as he is to the great world of wage-earners outside by the shorter and more expressive name of Will Crooks.

Born in poverty, the third of seven children, Will Crooks, who is blessed with keen powers of observation and a good memory, can carry his mind back to the days before he was put into breeches.

"I remember before my fourth year was out," I have heard him tell, "something of the public rejoicings on the declaration of peace after the Crimean War. The following year was also memorable to me as the time I witnessed troops of soldiers marching to the East India Docks on the outbreak of the Mutiny."

Those were days of want and sorrow, as were many days that followed, in the little one-roomed home in East London. His father was a s.h.i.+p's stoker, who lost an arm by the starting of the engines one day when he was oiling the machinery as his vessel lay in the Thames.

"My very earliest recollections are a.s.sociated with mother dressing father's arm day after day. I was only three years old at the time, but I know that all our privations dated from the day of this accident to my father, because he was forced to give up his work.

"It must have been with the aid of some good friends that at last my father got an old horse, hoping to earn a little by leading and carting; but nothing came of this small venture, and in time the horse had to be sold to pay the rent. Almost the only work of any kind that father, being thus disabled, could get to do was an odd job as watchman.

"Those were very lean years indeed, and I don't know what we should have done but for mother. She used to toil with the needle far into the night and often all night long, slaving as hard as any poor sweated woman I have ever known, and I have known hundreds of such poor creatures. Many a time as a lad have I helped mother to carry the clothes she had made to Houndsditch. There were no trams running then, and the 'bus fare from Poplar to Aldgate was fourpence, a sum we never dared think of spending on a ride.

"My elder brother was as clever with the needle as many a woman, and often he would stay up all through the night with mother, helping her to make oil-skin coats."

One night, as the mother worked alone, young Will woke up in the little orange-box bedstead by the wall where he slept with a younger brother.

Silently he watched her plying the needle at the table until he noticed tears trickling down her cheeks.

"What are you crying for, mother?"