From Workhouse to Westminster Part 29

AGITATION IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

How the Workless Man Degenerates--Pleading the Cause of the Unemployed in the House--Creation of the Central Unemployed Committee--Feeding the Starving out of the Rates--"Would a Hen bring 'em off?"--A Letter from the Prime Minister--Crooks's Rejoinder.

The interval was one of unwearied agitation. Of all his other pressing public duties he gave first place to this of urging the State to deal with the unemployed.

"This unemployed question is a terrible worry, Crooks," said a Conservative member, walking with him out of the House of Commons into Palace Yard one evening.

"Yes," Crooks replied as the other stepped into his motor car, "it is a terrible worry when you have it for breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper."

It was the beginning of the winter of 1904. He had spent the afternoon in one of his interminable battles in Parliament urging that preparations should be made to act wisely instead of waiting until panic-stricken, and that the usual wild schemes for helping the unemployed would once again result in waste and demoralisation.

"I stood for a minute or two interested in the hurry and scurry of people hastening to clubland, to dinner parties, and to theatres," he afterwards remarked when recalling the incident. "Then, turning my back on the West End, I wended my way eastward. Yes, a terrible worry the unemployed, and yet how few people seemed to realise it. Never-ending lines of conveyances, long queues of pleasure-seekers thronging the theatre doors, all the externals of my surroundings pointed to everything but unemployment. But straight in front of me was my home in Poplar, and I knew that in a few more minutes I should be hearing a tale of some family's misery, considering myself a lucky man if I spent a few minutes indoors without someone calling to ask, 'Can you help to get me a job?'

"Truly to some of us the unemployed are a terrible worry, not only in December, January, and February, but summer and winter, night and day, all the year round. But more terrible than the unemployed themselves is the heart-breaking carelessness of the British public, which, generous to a fault, will not make up its mind until stirred by sensational appeals.

"'Oh, but,' some of my political opponents say to me, 'the unemployed are generally such a s.h.i.+ftless, good-for-nothing cla.s.s. What good can you expect to do with such men? I quite sympathise with your keenness, but they are a very worthless, thankless lot, and you are wasting a lot of time over them.'

"Well, suppose we allow that as a cla.s.s the unemployed retain a large measure of original sin. I know other cla.s.ses possessing the same weakness, but neither cla.s.s prejudices nor racial hatreds interest me very much. So, for the sake of argument, we will say that the unemployed are very imperfect. This is one of the reasons why my Labour colleagues and I want to press home the importance of England making a praiseworthy effort to grapple with the problem. We see how quickly a workless man deteriorates. A person out of work in October, unless promptly dealt with, is in danger of becoming by the following March that social wreck known as a loafer. And I object to loafers at both ends of the scale, whether in Park Lane or in Poplar."

In the issue of _Vanity Fair_ containing "Spy's" popular cartoon of Crooks, the Labour member himself had an article on the unemployed.

"If _Vanity Fair_ will train the rich, the Labour men will guide the poor," he wrote. Further: "Old England is as dear to the Labour man with poverty for his birthright as to the hereditary legislator with a county for a heritage. But wealth, and the carelessness that wealth often induces, are blind to the causes which heap misery and discontent upon the people from generation to generation. To the wealthy the whole business is a social phenomenon, but to us it is a permanent terror.

"And so, whatever our differences may appear to be, our Labour hopes are concentrating upon sound practical methods by which the conditions and opportunities of the people shall be improved.

"You who read this are invited to remember that organised work is the first step which will separate the workman from demoralising charity, his wife from the p.a.w.nshop, and his children from the streets. Sentiment and sympathy need no longer be the prey of the fawning cadger, or the victim of hypocritical distress.

"To keep England in the forefront of the nations of the earth we must begin in the homes of our people, there to raise a truly Imperial and patriotic race of good, healthy, honest men and women. The task is admittedly a difficult one, for social reconstruction is as much moral as economic, but helping hands stretch out in every direction. The one great need is to change a national apathy into keen, sympathetic, well-balanced criticism."

His agitation for the unemployed in the House of Commons, which formed the main part of his parliamentary life for a couple of years, began with the opening of the Session of 1904. He seconded Mr. Keir Hardie's amendment to the Address, regretting, "in view of distress arising from lack of employment," that no proposal was made for helping out-of-work men.

Crooks began his speech by declaring that mere relief schemes encouraged the loafer. He knew well both the loafer and the man who was born tired.

The wife of one such got up early and wakened her husband in time for work.

"Is it raining?" the man asked from the folds of the bedclothes.

"No."

"Does it look like raining?"

"No."

"Oh, I wish it was Sunday."

With a sudden change of tone and manner, Crooks then went on to tell the House that if an able-bodied man out of a job was driven into the workhouse, he generally remained a workhouse inmate for the rest of his life. It degraded and demoralised him. It took away his muscle to stand up and fight for himself. If the Local Government Board would permit Guardians to take land, this man could be put to useful work. Even able-bodied men of the "in-and-out" type would be better for being put to work on the land under powers of compulsory detention. Of course, these men should be allowed to go out if they really desired to look for other work. What they should not be allowed to do was to drag their wives and children about the country, vagrants bringing up more vagrants. Employment on farm colonies would quickly get rid of the tramp difficulty. Such men, trained in useful agricultural work, if they felt they had little chance in this country, would then have some equipment for the colonies. A country like Canada, for instance, had no use for men who had simply been loafing about English towns, but would very quickly find work for men who had had a little training and discipline on the land. It would be better for the whole community that something of this sort should be done than that we should go on with the present system of doles and relief, whose effects, like idleness, only demoralised.

The appeal to the House on that occasion fell on deaf ears.

The winter of 1904 was made memorable to him by the creation of the Central Unemployed Committee. For several years he had urged that the Poor Law Unions of London should be empowered to form a central committee to deal with the unemployed on well-organised lines. With the several Unions acting separately, confusion and waste followed on well-meaning efforts. The genuine unemployed received little real help.

Few public men took his scheme for a central organisation seriously at first. He was well-nigh worn out with his failures when unexpectedly the then President of the Local Government Board came to his aid. Crooks, with several other Members of Parliament, had waited upon Mr. Long in deputation. The result was the calling together of the famous Unemployed Conference at the Local Government Board on October 14th, 1904.

To that Conference the Poplar Guardians sent Crooks and Lansbury, armed with a series of carefully-thought-out proposals. Some of them found a ready acceptance on the part of Mr. Long. Others were adopted by the succeeding Government.

Since those Poplar proposals have already figured prominently in unemployed schemes and promise to appear in projects yet to be framed, the substance of them is here set out:--

1. The President of the Local Government Board to combine the London Unions for the purpose of dealing with the unemployed and the unemployable.

2. Such central authority to take over the control of all able-bodied inmates in London workhouses.

3. Farm colonies to be established by the central authority for providing work.

4. Local Distress Committees to be also set up, consisting of members of Borough Councils and Boards of Guardians, to work on the lines already laid down by the Mansion House and the Poplar Distress Committees.

5. The cost to these local committees of dealing with urgent need occasioned by want of work to be a charge on the whole of London or on the National Exchequer, instead of being a charge on the locality, "always provided that the payment given be for work done on lines similar to those adopted by the Mansion House and the Poplar Distress Committees."

6. Rural District Councils to be asked to supply the Local Government Board with information when labourers are wanted on the land, such information to be sent to the Local Distress Committees.

7. Parliament to take in hand the question of afforestation, the reclamation of foresh.o.r.es, and the building of sea walls along the coast where the tide threatens encroachment.

Almost immediately after the Whitehall Conference Mr. Long formed a Central Unemployed Committee for London, personally arranging that Crooks and Lansbury should become members. He also advised the formation of local Distress Committees by the Poor Law and Munic.i.p.al authorities.

While Crooks was calling the nation's attention in Parliament and at public meetings throughout the country to the wasteful and disorganised way in which we met these recurring periods of distress, he was making reasonable use of the local machinery at his hands.

Little could be done through the newly-formed committees in the way of providing work during that winter. Want was felt keenly all over the East End. Distress brooded over West Ham, for instance, like a black cloud. To such a plight was that district reduced owing to lack of work that the _Daily Telegraph_ and the _Daily News_ between them raised 30,000 for relief.

West Ham's neighbour, Poplar, was in an equally bad plight, but there the Guardians made an attempt to deal with the distress themselves. They grappled boldly with a terrible state of things. The newspaper funds, by bringing bread to West Ham, saved that district, according to the testimony of the local police superintendent, from serious rioting.

Poplar, too, said the _Daily Mail_ at the time, was only saved from a series of bread riots by the promptness of Will Crooks.

He talked into calmness a lean and clamorous crowd of starving men who swarmed into the Guardians' offices one day. He promised that their claims should be considered and their cases investigated, and advised them to go away quietly.

Poplar fed its starving poor, and in doing so the Guardians did not hesitate to raise the rate for the time being by fourpence. In no single case, however, was money given to families where the out-of-work husband was under sixty years of age. All they got was a few s.h.i.+llings' worth of food, just enough to keep body and soul together until the husband found work again. Had food not been given in this way, scores of families would have been forced into the workhouse, where the cost of their keep would have been four or five times greater.

In the following winter, in face of similar distress, the same policy was followed. It was mainly for thus feeding the starving that the Poplar Board was afterwards so violently attacked. But, given the like distress, Crooks stoutly maintains he will apply the same remedy.

"The Poor Law is entrusted to us to prevent starvation," he holds. "My dead friend and neighbour Dolling used to say that 'the law that safeguards the poor is always in the hands of those who do not put it into force.' So long as I live that shall not be said of Poplar."

With all the pressing claims of Poplar and his daily duties in Parliament, together with the calls made upon his time by the London County Council and the Asylums Board, he was yet constant in his attendance at the Guildhall meetings of the Central Unemployed Committee. He and Lansbury spared themselves in nothing on that Committee. They believed that on its success depended the future of State-aid for the unemployed. They believed that such a crisis as they were grappling with in Poplar in the winter of 1904 would never recur once they got the State to recognise its duty to a.s.sist in organising useful work for hard times.

"The lesson of all our work on Mr. Long's Unemployed Committee was this," he told me. "The only way to deal properly with the unemployed in winter is to make your preparations in summer. The test of the Central Unemployed Committee will be the character of its organisation in good times. Only by being well organised when there is little distress will it prove a success when times are bad. It is far harder to organise useful work for the unemployed through public bodies than it is to raise money for their relief."

Crooks himself had seen the dark shadows of that winter creeping up ominously in the previous summer. Before Parliament adjourned in August he uttered a warning note in the House of Commons. He asked the Prime Minister whether the various Government Departments could not do something to prepare for the exceptional needs. Mr. Balfour's reply was to the effect that inquiries would be made.

"Ah, those inquiries!" said Crooks, recalling the promise at a public meeting in Woolwich. "I've seen a good many inquiries and Royal Commissions in my time, and they always remind me of the East Ender who went down Petticoat Lane on market day. He saw on a barrow some hard-boiled eggs which had been dyed various colours, evidently for children. He'd seen nothing like them before.

"'Wot kind of eggs is them?' says he.