Will Crooks, 'The Labourer is worthy of his hire'

Leslie Ward's caricature of Will Crooks — cooper's son, ex-workhouse boy, Labour MP for Woolwich — plants him in a battered broad-brimmed hat and an ill-fitting double-breasted suit, lapels gripped with working-class defiance. The caption, a New Testament wage-justice text (Luke 10:7), doubles as political manifesto: Crooks was the Labour movement's most popular platform orator, celebrated for turning his own poverty into argument. Ward exaggerates Crooks's stocky build and thick beard — standard 'Spy' physicality rather than ethnic targeting, since Crooks was a white English nonconformist. The caricature treats him with unusual warmth for a socialist: no sneering, just affectionate amplitude, reflecting Edwardian curiosity about the genuinely working-class man who had arrived in Parliament on his own terms.