Seldom, while the strike lasted, did he take his clothes off. He worked at his own trade during the day and gave nearly the whole of the night to the strikers. The outdoor meetings he addressed kept him going up to midnight. The early morning hours saw him lending a hand at the organising offices and relief stations until the dawn called him to his ordinary daily work again. There were times when he gave both day and night to the dockers, preferring to lose time at his own work rather than miss an opportunity of lending a hand to his less fortunate fellows. Sometimes he would accompany the men in their demonstrations through the City and the West-End. Those daily marches of the dock labourers opened London's eyes. The orderliness of the ragged battalions, headed by "the man in the straw hat," who was afterwards to take a seat in the Cabinet--John Burns--was as impressive as their numbers. They were forbidden to use bands of music in the City streets, so the men conceived the ingenious device of whistling. It had a curious effect, some fifty thousand men whistling the "Marseillaise" all the way from Aldgate to Temple Bar. When Crooks did get home for an hour or two in the evening it was not to rest, but to sit by the bedside of his ailing wife and tend the youngest of his children. Ill though his wife was, little though she saw of him during the strike, she urged him from her sick bed to keep on helping the dockers. "Don't mind me, Will," she told him, when he would peep in anxiously after many hours' absence. "I shall be all right if you can only pull those poor dockers through." He came in one night after nearly two days' absence, having arranged to spend the whole of that evening by her bedside. She had just given birth to a son--"our Dock Strike baby," as he came to be called for long afterwards, now a promising apprentice in a Thames shipbuilding yard. She was very happy at the good news he brought of the progress of the strike. She was happier still at the prospect of his being spared for his first evening at home. Presently the sound of hurrying footsteps was heard in the street. Something important had happened. The men wanted Will Crooks. Would he come again? He looked at his wife. She must decide. "Go, Will," she said. "Never let it be said your wife kept you from helping those in need." The reaction came after the victory. When the dockers in their thousands were back at work rejoicing at having won their sixpence an hour, Crooks lay at the point of death in the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road. It was the first time he had been ill in his life. Friends feared this first illness was to be his last. Not until after a struggle of thirteen weeks could he be pronounced out of danger. He is fond of telling this incident that occurred in the hospital:--