They set up their home in Poplar, near the coopering yard where Will was employed. At first they had to be content with apartments; then came a small tenement; soon after a little house of their own. It was fair and pleasant sailing for the first two or three years. He got a journeyman's full wages the first week he was out of his apprenticeship. It seemed as though he were to have an unbroken run of good fortune. The bright hopes soon collapsed. Good craftsmanship and trade unionism, blended as they were in Crooks, made him rebel against certain conditions of his work. Finally he refused to use inferior timber on a job, and objected to excessive overtime. Although the youngest among them, he addressed the workmen on the subject. A few days afterwards he was dismissed. He took his notice lightly enough, confident that as master of his trade he could soon secure work again. It was not to be. Every shop and yard in London was closed to him. Word had gone round that he was an agitator. Try as he did, he could not break through the barrier that had been raised against him. Wherever he applied, whether in Rotherhithe, Battersea, Hackney, or Clerkenwell, he was known as the young fellow who would not work with shoddy material and talked other men into the same view. The experience was the same at every place of call. "What's your name?" "Crooks." "Of Poplar?" "That's me." "We don't want anyone." From several of these places he heard afterwards that the instant he was gone other men were taken on. Since London was a closed door to him, he turned his back upon it, and set out tramping the country in search of work. With a fully-paid-up trade union card, he knew he could count on an occasional half-crown to help him on the way at those towns where his society had branches. His home had to be broken up. His wife with their child went to her mother's, there to await for weary weeks the result of her husband's first quest into the country. The only piece of good news came from Liverpool. Not until he reached that city did he get a job. He tramped into Liverpool from Burton-on-Trent. Never in his life, either before or since, did a silver coin mean so much to him as the half-crown given by a member of his own trade to help him on the road as he set out from Burton for Liverpool. Twenty-nine years later Crooks was speaking at a meeting of co-operators in Burton when he recognised his former benefactor on the platform. He told the audience of his last visit to their town, remarking how on that occasion no one but this man offered him hospitality, whereas now, if he lived to be a hundred and fifty years of age, he would not be able to accept all the invitations he had received from friends and would-be friends to spend week-ends with them. His regret was, he told the meeting, that those good people did not begin to ask him earlier and that they did not think of asking other poor men in a similar plight to his when he first entered Burton.