William
Crooks,
the son of a ship's stoker, was born in a one-room house Poplar, East
London, on 6th April, 1852. When he was three years old, William's
father lost an arm when a ship's engine was started when he was oiling
the machinery. Unable to find regular work because of his disablement,
the family had to rely on the earnings of Mrs. Crooks work as a seamstress.
In 1861 Mr. Crooks and the five youngest children, including William,
were forced to enter the Poplar Workhouse.
Eventually Mrs. Crooks was able to find enough work and a cheaper
room and the family were reunited. These experiences had a dramatic
impact on Crooks and helped to influence his strong views on poverty
and inequality.
Mrs. Crooks, despite being illiterate herself, encouraged her children
to go to school. Although always short of money, Mrs. Crooks found
the penny a week needed to educate William at George Green School
on
the East India Dock. She was also a deeply religious woman and the
whole family attended the local Congregational
Church.
As
soon as he was old enough, William found work as a errand boy at a
grocer's for two shillings a week. This was followed by a period as
a blacksmith's labourer, but in 1866 Mrs. Crooks was able to arrange
for the fourteen year old William to be apprenticed to a copper.
Crooks
was an avid reader and as a teenager discovered the works of Charles
Dickens. He also began reading radical newspapers
and found out about the campaigns of reformers such as John
Bright and Richard Cobden.
Crooks
impressed his fellow workers were impressed with his knowledge and
asked him to speak to their boss about the excessive overtime they
had to work. Crooks agreed to do this but as a result of the meeting
he was sacked as a political agitator. Crooks, whose young wife had
just had their first child, was forced to leave the area in search
of work. Eventually Crooks found work in Liverpool.
His family joined him but within a month his child died and Crooks
and his wife returned to London.
Crooks found work as a casual labourer at East India Docks. Every
Sunday morning he gave lectures on politics at the dock gates in Popular.
Subjects of his lectures, at what became known as Crooks' College,
included trade unionism, temperance
and co-operative societies.
When the London Dock Strike started in August
1889, Crooks
used his considerable skills as an orator to help raise funds for
the dockers. Over the next few weeks Crooks emerged with Ben
Tillett, Tom Mann and John
Burns as one of the four main leaders of the strike.
The employers hoped to starve the dockers back to work but other trade
union activists such as Will Thorne, Eleanor
Marx, James Keir Hardie and Henry
Hyde Champion, gave valuable support to the 10,000 men now out
on strike. Organizations such as the Salvation
Army and the Labour Church raised money
for the strikers and their families. Trade Unions in Australia sent
over £30,000 to help the dockers to continue the struggle. After
five weeks the employers accepted defeat and granted all the dockers'
main demands.
In 1892 Crooks' wife died, leaving him with
six children. A year later he married Elizabeth
Lake, a nurse from Gloucestershire.
The London County Council (LCC) was created
as a result of the 1888 Local Government Act.
The LCC was the first metropolitan-wide form of general local government.
Crooks became Progressive Party candidate for Poplar. Elections were
held in January 1889 and the Progressive Party, won 70 of the 118
seats. Crooks won in Popular and other leaders of the labour movement
including Sidney Webb John
Burns and Ben Tillett, joined him
in the LCC.
Crooks
became chairman of the Public Control Committee and in this post promoted
fair wages for LCC employees and the Infant Life Protection Bill which
ended baby-farming in London. Crooks also became the first working-class
member of the Poplar Board of Guardians.
In 1897 Crooks became chairman of the Board of Guardians and with
the aid of his fellow member and friend, George
Lansbury, began the task of reforming how the Popular
Workhouse was run. Corrupt and uncaring officials were sacked,
and the food and education that the inmates received were improved.
Every effort was made to find homes for the young orphans in the workhouse.
Crooks and Lansbury were so successful that the Poplar
Workhouse became a model for other Poor Law authorities.
Crooks also became a member of the Poplar Borough Council and in 1901
became the first Labour mayor of London.
He also helped establish the National Committee on Old Age Pensions.
Influenced by the ideas first expressed by Tom
Paine in The
Rights of Man,
Crooks believed that pensions were the only way to keep the elderly
poor from entering the workhouse.
In 1903 the Labour Representation Committee
invited Crooks to stand as their candidate in a by-election in Woolwich.
Crooks had made many friends in the Liberal
Party during his time on the London County
Council and they withdrew their candidate from the election. During
the campaign Crooks argued against the Taff
Vale decision and the 1902 Education
Act and urged the government to take measures to help the unemployed
and those workers on low wages. Although normally a safe Conservative
seat, the support of the Liberals enabled Crooks to obtain an easy
victory.
After his election Crooks continued to live in his house in Poplar.
He argued that it was important that he continued to retain his links
with the working-class. In the House of Commons
Crooks concentrated on the issue of unemployment. He supported the
Unemployment Bill introduced by Arthur Balfour
in 1905 and controversially advocated compulsory agricultural work
for the able-bodied unemployed.
Crooks was re-elected in the 1906 General Election
and for the next four years supported the reforming Liberal
administrations led by Henry Campbell-Bannerman
(1906-1908) and Herbert Asquith (1908-1910).
Will Crooks was defeated in the January
1910 General Election but returned to the
House of Commons in the election held in
December, 1910.
Unlike most of the leaders of the Labour Party,
Crooks enthusiastically supported Britain's involvement in the First
World War. He participated in the recruiting campaign and toured
the Western Front in an effort to boost the morale of troops. In one
speech Crooks declared that he "would rather see every living
soul blotted off the face of the earth than see the Kaiser supreme
anywhere."
Crooks won the seat in the 1918
General Election but he was forced to retire from his seat in
February 1921, due to ill-health. Will Crooks, who had never moved
away from his house in Poplar, died in London Hospital, Whitechapel,
on the 5th June, 1921.
(1)
J. R. Clynes, Memoirs (1937)
Will
Crooks combined the inspiration of a great evangelist with such a
stock of comic stories, generally related as personal experiences,
that his audience alternated between tears of sympathy and tears of
laughter. I know of no stage comedian who can move his audience today
to such roars of merriment as could Will Crooks, when he related the
human incidents that formed so valuable a part of his platform stock.
I once heard him say that a non-Union workman who tried to gain personal
advancement at the expense of his mates was like a man who stole a
wreath from his neighbour's grave and won a prize with it at a flower
show!
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