The Booths of the Salvation Army
General William Booth (1829-1912), the founder of the Salvation Army, was one of the first to reveal the horrors of poverty in the East End, with his 1880 book In Darkest England. Booth is marked by a bronze bust in Mile End Road. Cast by GE Wade in 1927, the statue is on the spot where Booth held his first open-air services. But the story is really that of husband and wife William and Catherine Booth - for not only was she his partner in life and his work, she was very much an equal partner, and fundamentally changed the way this sometimes arrogant and autocratic man thought.
William Booth was born in Nottingham in 1829, the son of a builder - a wealthy man who had fallen on hard times. In 1842, his father could no longer afford his son’s school fees and 13-year-old William was apprenticed to a pawnbroker. By 15, he had converted to Christianity and, largely self taught in scripture, writing and speechmaking, became a Methodist lay preacher. It’s not quite as odd as it sounds to modern ears, as the nonconformist churches and sects were energetic evangelisers, encouraging even the very young to their services, and encouraging them to spread the word.
At 15, of course, William was a working man, but it was work he detested - he was seeing at first hand the misery that poverty brought. In 1849 he moved to London, working and lodging in a pawnbroker’s shop. He got few engagements as a lay preacher and took to al fresco evangelising on London’s streets and Kennington Common. During the 1850s he served as a Methodist minister, but trying to square the demands of a pastorate (effectively being a parish priest) with his urge to continue spreading the words as a travelling evangelist was a constant frustration.
In 1855 he had married, and his new wife was quite as resolute and determined as he. Catherine Mumford was born in Ashbourne, Derbyshire in 1829, the daughter of a coachbuilder. A sickly child, she developed curvature of the spine at 14 and tuberculosis four years later. Throughout her life she was struck down with ailment after ailment, a passage of misfortune that would have killed a lesser woman. Yet this frail figure would bear eight children in 10 years, while keeping up a furious pace of work and tireless campaigning - Catherine was largely responsible, with her campaign against child prostitution, in having the age of consent raised from 13 to 16.
Her indomitability unarguably came from her religious faith, and she must have been a somewhat fearsome child. She had read the Bible, in its entirety, eight times before she reached 12. She had a powerful social conscience and the bravery to go with it, berating a local constable who was too rough on a drunk he had carted off to the local police station. Her enforced months of bed rest saw her pour her energies into writing magazine articles warning of the evils of alcohol - the young Catherine was a member of the local Band of Hope temperance society.
As a couple the Booths agreed on social reform, believing that ministers should be ‘loosing the chains of injustice, freeing the captive and oppressed, sharing food and home, clothing the naked, and carrying out family responsibilities’. It was Christianity as social work, and it would form the ethos of the later Salvation Army, but there was one area where the Booths disagreed profoundly. Catherine was an early feminist, believing that women were equal, and berating William for referring to them as ‘the weaker sex’. More shockingly she believed that women should also be permitted to preach. William wasn’t happy, though agreed that he wouldn’t stop her doing so. She began in 1860, responding to an inner voice which chided ‘You will look like a fool and have nothing to say,’ by deciding that it was the Devil’s voice. She banished her fears and began giving sermons.
So impressive was she, that William was converted. Many Christians were outraged - a woman’s place was in the Victorian home. By 1864, William found it impossible to continue combining his evangelising and his role within the church. He resigned and the Booths set up the Christian Revival Society, preaching the gospel in a tent in the Friends Burial Ground, in Whitechapel’s Thomas Street. For William it was a joyful return to his early days of evangelising on the streets of Nottingham, in the Christian Mission of his late friend Will Sansom. The Booths invited the needy and dispossessed, prostitutes, alcoholics and criminals into their tent, now renamed The Christian Mission, in memory of Booth’s Nottingham days. They offered practical help as well as the good word, with soup kitchens and clothing.
On 7 August, 1878, the organisation changed name yet again, with the Salvation Army formed at a meeting held at 272 Whitechapel Road. This was a startling departure, with the organisation designed as a military unit, with uniforms suggesting the members were ’soldiers, God’s army, putting on armour for the fight’. Roy Hattersley, in his biography of the Booths (Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army), astutely saw General Booth (as he now dubbed himself) as ‘the greatest publicist of his age’. Booth had founded a movement that was hard to ignore.
Hattersley has many reservations about Booth the man, who was ‘both arrogant and autocratic in his relations with everyone except his wife’ - this was a man who founded his own army and called himself ‘General’ after all. He wonders at the fact that this soldier against poverty would happily socialise with the rich, the celebrities of his age. ‘He was no class warrior, and never used his sermons to denounce the callous rich,’ notes Hattersley. And he acknowledges some of the doubts of Booth’s contemporaries, who saw the man’s methods, and the whole presentation of the Salvation Army, uniforms and all, as ‘too music hall’, ‘intellectually absurd’, even ‘deeply embarrassing’.
But crucially ‘In an age when even radicals believed that self-help solved all problems’ Booth accepted that some people were oppressed ‘by the circumstances in which they were born and lived’. The Army preached a disciplined and (to most contemporaries then and now) puritanical lifestyle - eschewing alcohol and tobacco, praising the virtues of hard work, tithing significant portions of their earnings to the organisation. Booth certainly was asking impoverished Londoners to help themselves (and thus others), but unlike many Victorian reformers he didn’t blame the poor for their lot. In seeking to help people improve their world in that they and their fellows might also rise, the former Methodist had constructed a doctrine that ‘owed more to Marx than Methodism’.
And the position of women in the Salvation Army was nothing short of revolutionary - equal in status to men. The Church of England was extraordinary hostile, with Lord Shaftesbury, a leading politician and evangelist, describing Booth as the ‘Anti-Christ’, a deranged figure who proposed the ‘elevation of women to man’s status’. You had to be brave to be a member of the Salvation Army too. They weren’t simply jeered or mocked, but were imprisoned for open-air preaching. Preaching temperance wasn’t popular with publicans either, and the ‘Skeleton Army’ was thrown together to disrupt Sally Army meetings.
The Bethnal Green Eastern Post newspaper reported one such clash in 1882. ‘A genuine rabble of roughs pure and unadulterated has been infesting the district for several weeks past. The object of the skeleton army was to put down the Salvationists by following them about everywhere, by beating a drum and burlesquing their songs, to render the conduct of their processions and services impossible.’ The paper saw them as in the pay of the ‘disreputable class of publicans who hate the London school board, education and temperance, and who, seeing the beginning of the end of their immoral traffic, and prepared for the most desperate enterprise’. And the Bethnal Green meetings were duly pelted with rotten eggs and stones, the Salvationists beaten, while the police stood by. The Salvationists would not retaliate but nor would they cease marching. Not until several Army members were seriously injured did the police finally get involved.
It was something of a miracle the Booths’ army survived. Attacked by the established church, by politicians, by organised gangs, and without the protection of the law, the organisation struggled financially too. Yet somehow, by the 1880s, the mission had extended to France, Switzerland, America, Australia, Jamaica, South Africa and many more. The officers were energetic missionaries, and by the time of William Booth’s death in 1912,the Army was established in 58 countries. By the 1890s he was also a bestselling author, with ‘In Darkest England and the Way Out’. A blueprint for a complete system of social welfare, bringing the homeless, criminals, prostitutes, alcoholics and others back into society it would be the template for the Salvation Army’s later work.
Catherine Booth died in 1890 and William in 1912. Two of their children, Bramwell and Evangeline, were to become Generals of the Salvation Army.
Last week we saw how William and Catherine Booth created one of the most remarkable religious movements of modern times from a tent in the East End - sometimes it seemed that the job was sometimes done by faith and force of will alone.
Biographer Roy Hattersley (Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army has many reservations about Booth the man, who was ‘both arrogant and autocratic in his relations with everyone except his wife’ - this was a man who founded his own army and called himself ‘General’ after all. He wonders at the fact that this soldier against poverty would happily socialise with the rich, the celebrities of his age. ‘He was no class warrior, and never used his sermons to denounce the callous rich,’ notes Hattersley. And he acknowledges some of the doubts of Booth’s contemporaries, who saw the man’s methods, and the whole presentation of the Salvation Army, uniforms and all, as ‘too music hall’, ‘intellectually absurd’, even ‘deeply embarrassing’.
But crucially ‘in an age when even radicals believed that self-help solved all problems’ Booth accepted that some people were oppressed ‘by the circumstances in which they were born and lived’. The Army preached a disciplined and (to most contemporaries then and now) puritanical lifestyle - eschewing alcohol and tobacco, praising the virtues of hard work, tithing significant portions of their earnings to the organisation - Booth certainly was asking impoverished Londoners to help themselves (and thus others). But unlike many Victorian reformers he didn’t blame the poor for their lot. In seeking to help people improve their world in that they and their fellows might also rise, the former Methodist had constructed a doctrine that ‘owed more to Marx than Methodism’.
And the position of women in the Salvation Army was nothing short of revolutionary - equal in status to men. The Church of England was extraordinarily hostile, with Lord Shaftesbury, a leading politician and evangelist, describing Booth as the ‘Anti-Christ’, a deranged figure who proposed the ‘elevation of women to man’s status’. You had to be brave to be a member of the Salvation Army too. They weren’t simply jeered or mocked, but were imprisoned for open-air preaching. Preaching temperance wasn’t popular with publicans either, and the ‘Skeleton Army’ was thrown together to disrupt Sally Army meetings.
The Bethnal Green Eastern Post newspaper reported one such clash in 1882. ‘A genuine rabble of roughs pure and unadulterated has been infesting the district for several weeks past. The object of the skeleton army was to put down the Salvationists by following them about everywhere, by beating a drum and burlesquing their songs, to render the conduct of their processions and services impossible.’ The paper saw them as in the pay of the ‘disreputable class of publicans who hate the London school board, education and temperance, and who, seeing the beginning of the end of their immoral traffic, and prepared for the most desperate enterprise’. The Bethnal Green meetings were duly pelted with rotten eggs and stones, the Salvationists beaten, while the police stood by. The Salvationists would not retaliate but nor would they cease marching. Not until several Army members were seriously injured and at least one killed did the police finally get involved.
It was something of a miracle the Booths’ army survived. Attacked by the established church, by politicians, by organised gangs, and without the protection of the law, the organisation struggled financially too. Yet somehow, by the 1880s, the mission had extended to France, Switzerland, America, Australia, Jamaica, South Africa and many more. The officers were energetic missionaries, and by the time of William Booth’s death in 1912,the Army was established in 58 countries. By the 1890s he was also a bestselling author, with ‘In Darkest England and the Way Out’. A blueprint for a complete system of social welfare, bringing the homeless, criminals, prostitutes, alcoholics and others back into society it would be the template for the Salvation Army’s later work.
And while becoming an international force, the Booths maintained their good work in the East End. The conditions of women at the Bryant & May factory in Bow reached national prominence in 1888 with the famous strike, following Annie Besant’s newspaper article White Slavery in London. The workers got the equivalent of 8p for a 16-hour day, and were victims of ‘Phossy Jaw’ (necrosis of the bone) caused by the toxic fumes of the yellow phosphorus. When Catherine Booth said that most European countries produced matches tipped with harmless red phosphorus, Bryant & May responded that the process was too expensive. Typically, the Sally Army took practical action, opening its own match factory in Old Ford. Using harmless red phosphorus, the women were soon producing 6m boxes a year, and on twice the wages Bryant & May paid.
William Booth ran guided tours of his ‘model factory’ and then took the journalists and politicians round ’sweated factories’, where people were working 16-hour days. The arch publicist had done it again, the awful publicity forced the company to back track, and in 1901 they stopped using the toxic yellow phosphorus.
Catherine Booth died in 1890 and William in 1912. The organisation they had built from nothing would go on to become a worldwide force. Two of their children, Bramwell and Evangeline, were to become Generals of the Salvation Army; daughter Kate (Catherine Booth-Clibborn) moved to France and Switzerland, continuing the practice of open-air preaching, which frequently saw her physically attacked and (in Switzerland) thrown in jail.
* A guided tour of East End sights that played a part in the Sally Army story - including the Blind Beggar, the People’s Mission Hall and the sights of the original mission tent, is avaiable at www1.salvationarmy.org.uk.