From Workhouse to Westminster Part 20

On the night the new Mayor was elected there were some curious scenes both inside and outside the Munic.i.p.al Buildings. To be Mayor in Coronation Year seemed to be the desire of half the public men in the kingdom. There were several aspirants in Poplar, and when the number was reduced to two, Crooks's name was one of them.

Twice amid the greatest tension in the crowded Council Chamber the voting on the two names resulted in a tie. Twice the retiring Mayor appealed to the Council to come to a decision without his casting vote.

Since nothing would alter the equality of the votes, the Mayor finally hit upon the device of writing both names on separate slips of paper and drawing one at random from a covered bowl.

Meanwhile, the tension had become too much for some burly working-men in the public gallery. They could be heard blubbering. When you looked up you saw them mopping their grimy faces with red-spotted handkerchiefs or the ends of their scarfs.

These men, with many of their mates, had crowded into the Council Chamber on their way home from the engineering yards and railway goods sidings in Millwall and from all the neighbouring docks. Those who could not get inside formed a dense crowd in the streets below. As the news was brought out from time to time, how two ballots had been taken and the votes were still equal, a silence strange and solemn fell upon the ma.s.sed crowds surging round the Munic.i.p.al Buildings in the lamp-lighted streets.

Soon the silence gave way to a roar of working-men's voices.

"Crooks has got it!"

"Our Will's made Mayor!"

"G.o.d bless the Mayor!"

Among that rough-jacketed company could be seen men falling on each other's necks. And as they streamed homeward in all directions the streets of Poplar echoed with the cry that lingered far into the night, "Will Crooks is Mayor!"

He was the first Labour Mayor in London. As such he did not make the mistake of trying to fill the office like the ordinary middle-cla.s.s man.

He faced all the world essentially as a working-man Mayor. He showed how well a workman can carry out the administrative and ceremonial duties inseparable from the office. In doing that he dispelled for ever the old illusion that only men of means can become mayors.

"What d'yer think?" he overheard a tradesman's wife ask another in disgust. "They've made that common fellow Crooks Mayor! And he no better than a working-man."

"Quite right, madam," he interposed, raising his hat as she turned round, crimson, and recognised him. "No better than a working-man!"

It was evident, too, that at first certain of the other metropolitan mayors thought him a common fellow, far beneath their notice. The first occasion that saw him in their midst was a conference of mayors at the Mansion House. It was convened by the Lord Mayor to consider arrangements for the Coronation Dinner to the Poor. Crooks listened for an hour to all kinds of suggestions put forward by men who knew little about the poor before rising at last to make a proposal of his own.

The instant he rose there was a howl of disapproval.

"Sit down--sit down!" "Who are you?" "We want none of your opinions."

"Sit down--sit down!"

The wrath of some of these funny little functionaries at the idea of a Labour man daring to address them was something he laughed at for a long time after. Several of them had lost their heads entirely at being invited to discuss a matter which so closely concerned the King and Queen. The very presence of a Labour man at such an august gathering was felt to be an insult.

They drowned his voice each time he attempted to speak, until it began to dawn upon them that instead of gaining favour with the Lord Mayor, who was in the chair, they were incurring his displeasure.

"Gentlemen," he cried, "I protest against this conduct. I call upon _my friend_, Mr. Crooks, to speak."

You should have seen their faces then! They had forgotten that the Lord Mayor (Sir Joseph Dimsdale) and Crooks had been colleagues together for years on the County Council.

Having got a hearing, the Labour man spoke evidently very much to the point. Sir Thomas Lipton, who represented the King at that and the subsequent conferences, declared afterwards that the one mayor in London who seemed to know what was wanted was the working-man Mayor of Poplar.

At any rate, the final arrangements for the King's Dinner were left to a small sub-committee, of which Crooks was unanimously elected one by the body that first tried to howl him down.

The illusion that working-men cannot make mayors died hard. It lingered last in the columns of the _Times_. Crooks had been in office several months when that journal called public attention to the fact that the Mayor of Poplar lived in a house "only rated at 11 a year." From this circ.u.mstance the _Times_ drew the rash conclusion that a man so poor could not necessarily fill the office of mayor properly.

After this, n.o.body could be surprised at the wild mis-statements that followed. The _Times_ went on to say that before Crooks's election the Labour Party of Poplar seemed to think his income of 3 10s. a week insufficient for the mayoralty, and that they started a movement "in favour of paying future mayors of the borough a salary at the rate of from 500 to 1,000 a year."

How completely the facts tell a different story has already appeared.

What movement there was in Poplar for paying a salary originated with the previous mayor, Mr. R. H. Green, a large employer of labour. Mr.

Green did not wish for a salary himself, being a man of means; he was only anxious that his colleagues should understand that he favoured the principle. His successor, the Labour man, was equally anxious his colleagues should understand that he did not favour payment.

The real facts were placed before the _Times_, but although its original mis-statements were copied into several other newspapers and led the _St. James's Gazette_ to publish a foolish leader on the subject, the _Times_ offered neither an explanation as to how it fell into its culpable error nor an apology for its amazing exhibition of bad taste.

In reality, his position as Mayor was strengthened by his refusal to take a salary. He stated in an interview in the _Daily Telegraph_ towards the end of his year of office:--

I have only had to do what I have done in every other position I have held--let people understand that I have nothing to give away.

Since my position has become generally known people have let me alone, except when I get an appeal like this one--to support a football club as a lover of British sports and pastimes. n.o.body seems to think the worse of me for refusing.

To the last, however, he was not forgiven by many people for daring to be poor. A worthy lady at a church sewing-party in a London suburb became very indignant at the mention of the name of the Labour Mayor of Poplar. One of the members present--to whom I am indebted for the incident--happened to make an incidental reference to Crooks. "It's a shame, I say, to let such people be made important," cried the good lady with much feeling, stopping for a moment her work of making garments for the church bazaar. "Look how they interfere with business. My husband used to get fifteen per cent. from his Poplar property before they made that man Crooks Mayor. Now, what with being compelled to spend so much on repairs and new drains, it's as much as he can do to get ten per cent."

When Crooks heard of the incident, he said he had little doubt the husband was an ordinary decent man who invested in poor property, because, as house investment agencies sometimes state in their advertis.e.m.e.nts, it pays better than any other kind.

"Probably he is one of that large cla.s.s who leave the collection of the rents and all control to agents. That is why slum property has paid so well in the past. It has been neglected. Nothing has been spent on ordinary repairs. Whatever expense we as a Munic.i.p.al Council may put the owners to in order to make their property healthy, is strictly regulated by law. We cannot go beyond the letter of the law. The reason why investors in slum property have reaped such a rich harvest in the past is because neither they nor the local authorities have carried out the law.

"No man with ordinary sentiment can own slum property and collect his own rents. A flint-hearted agent generally has control. I know such a one well. If the tenant does not pay up by Sat.u.r.day he waits and watches round the corner on Sunday morning. As soon as he sees the wife turn out to buy a piece of meat or a few vegetables from a coster's stall for Sunday's dinner, he pounces down on her and demands her few pence on account.

"It's so easy to run away from responsibility by simply saying, 'This is a mere investment, and I am not concerned with the tenants.'

"A very wealthy man who owns a lot of small houses in Poplar had his attention called to the hards.h.i.+p inflicted by the heavy increase in rents. He was told that a widow whose rent had just been doubled would have to seek parish relief if the new demand were enforced. 'My dear good fellow,' said the owner, 'I leave these matters to my agent. I don't want the woman's money. Look here,' pulling a handful of sovereigns out of his pocket. 'Why should I care about the woman's rent?

I leave these trifles to my agent, and never interfere.'

"Can you wonder that so many of our people are driven to drink and immorality?" Crooks went on after telling this incident. "Sweated as they are for rent in this way, they begin to live in an unholy state of overcrowding. House speculators, Jewish and English, gamble with the people's homes. Nearly every time a house changes hands the rent is raised. The overcrowding is thus made worse than ever. The family living in three rooms takes two. The family in two rooms pushes its furniture closer together and goes into one.

"Surely something should be done by the State to prevent this gambling with poor people's rents. I would like to see Fair Rent Courts, where the rents could be fixed in fair proportion to the value of the house.

Something of the kind has been done in Ireland; why not in England?

"One thing is certain: the more crowded the home is, the more convenient becomes the public-house, with its welcome light and deceptive cheerfulness tempting the wretched. Of course, in theory it is easy to argue that the poorer the man the more reason there is that he should not place in the publican's till the money that ought to be spent on food. I fear few of us would retain the moral courage to resist if we had to eat, live, and sleep in the same room, sometimes in the company of a corpse for several days."

Property owners were not alone in their opposition to the Labour Mayor.

The publicans almost in a body were ranged against him. Nor was this only because of his uncompromising attack on the drink interests as such. It was mainly because he insisted on public-houses being rated on the same principle as the grocer's shop or the working-man's dwelling-house.

For several years before his mayoralty he had been Chairman of the Poplar a.s.sessment Committee. He found that while small tradesmen and householders were rated to the full market value of their shops and dwellings, public-houses were very much under-a.s.sessed. He therefore persuaded the Committee, in face of all that the publicans said and threatened, to raise their a.s.sessments to the proper scale. The publicans brought the whole strength of their organisation against him, briefing counsel in appeals and subsidising opposition candidates at the local elections. This kind of thing had no fears for Crooks. His policy prevailed.

Sorely though the problem of housing vexed him, he rarely came away from a slum visit without some instance of quaint humour. On one occasion he was called into a tenement when the woman told him to mind the hole in the floor.

"Why don't you ask the landlord to repair it?" he asked.

"I did tell him about it," she answered in despair, "but he only said, 'What! the floor fallen in? Why, you must have been walking on it!'"

He feels keenly that we are allowing the English working-cla.s.s home to be broken up by the gambling of speculators. By the time the gamblers are finished, it will be found they have broken more than the poor man's home. It will be found they have broken the English race.

The cost to the munic.i.p.ality of preventing the existence of slums is small, he maintains, compared with the cost to the Poor Law authority of dealing with the human wreckage that slums create. He brought out this fact in a striking way in a paper he read before the Central Poor Law Conference at the Guildhall. His subject was "Pauperism and Overcrowding." He estimated from a study of the official returns that overcrowding and insanitation in the homes of the poor threw an additional expenditure on the Poor Law every year in London of about 134,000. He obtained this figure by estimating the number of people forced into workhouse infirmaries or requiring the outside attendance of the parish doctor owing to sickness solely caused by slumdom.

As regards the inmates of public asylums, he showed that London was involved in a still heavier yearly outlay. The number of such inmates per thousand inhabitants of London varied from 1.9 in the healthy districts to 10.1 in the overcrowded districts. The mean rate was 4.7.

The numbers above this mean rate were all found in the slum quarters. By adding them up he arrived at a total of 2,700 people who were forced into asylums as the results of ill-housing. It cost London 70,000 a year to maintain this number in asylums. He further argued that an additional sum of half a million sterling must be put down as representing the cost of providing the necessary asylum accommodation for these 2,700 inmates, the creation of our slums.