When Crooks entered the London County Council in 1892 he was a stranger to almost all outside the little circle of Labour men sent up from other divisions. As a pioneer in Labour representation in London he had more than the usual amount of suspicion and opposition to surmount. In those days a Labour representative was often subjected to fierce personal attacks both from the class he represented and from the better-off classes whose domains for the first time working-men were entering. His every word and act were under a double microscope. He had to be a Spartan in endurance and a saint in character. "Imagine," he once said to me during his early days on the Council, at the time when one of its members, a peer, was associated with a notorious case in the High Court, "imagine what an outcry there would have been up and down the land if that Councillor, instead of belonging to the House of Lords, had been a Labour representative." The Labour bench at the County Council set the standard for sound and steady municipal administration to the Labour Party of the entire country. John Burns sat at one end of the bench, Will Crooks at the other. Between them sat, at different times, men like Will Steadman, secretary of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress and M.P. for Stepney and later for Central Finsbury; J. Ramsay Macdonald, secretary of the Labour Party and M.P. for Leicester; Isaac Mitchell, then secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions; H. R. Taylor, of the Bricklayers' Society, at one time Mayor of Camberwell; C. W. Bowerman, of the London Society of Compositors and M.P. for Deptford; George Dew, of the Carpenters' and Joiners' Society and secretary of the Workmen's Cheap Trains Association; Harry Gosling, of the Watermen's and Lightermen's Society; and W. Sanders, of the Fabian Society and Independent Labour Party. Crooks took the minutes of the first party meeting of the Labour Bench, and he holds the document to this day. The meeting was held at the offices of the Dockers' Union in the Mile End Road on April 26th, 1892, a few weeks after the election which first made a L.C.C. Labour Party possible. A line of policy was laid down that looks quite modest to-day, now that it has become an integral part of ordinary L.C.C. administration. At the time it was regarded by people outside the Labour Movement as rank revolution.