Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Booth, William
BOOTH, WILLIAM (1829-1912), popularly known as ‘General’ Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, was born at Sneinton, a suburb of Nottingham, 10 April 1829. His father, a speculative builder, was of a dark and taciturn nature; his handsome and dignified mother (Mary Moss) was obviously of Jewish descent. The boy, who was the only son, never stayed long at any one school, and at thirteen years of age, on account of family poverty, was apprenticed to a pawnbroker in a squalid part of Nottingham. In after years he spoke of this experience with great bitterness; but it is clear that he proved himself an admirable assistant to his employer, who soon singled him out for special confidence. Before he had been a year in this shop, his father, whose business undertakings had gone from bad to worse, died rather suddenly, and Mrs. Booth and her daughters moved into a small fancy-shop in Goosegate, Nottingham, where their struggle with penury made a dark impression on William’s mind. He always spoke of his ‘blighted childhood’.
The boy drifted out of the Church of England and into Wesleyan circles, but was not at the outset affected by this change of religious atmosphere. His heart seems to have been stirred for the first time by the fervid oratory of Feargus O’Connor [q.v.], who visited Nottingham during the election of 1842. That election witnessed a collision between chartists and soldiers, and William ranged himself on the side of the chartists. He was deeply affected, he tells us, by the daily spectacle of ragged children crying for bread at that time in the streets of Nottingham. But methodism was creeping into his blood, and two years later, with his conscience tortured by a small piece of sharp-practice in which he had overreached some of his fellow assistants at the pawnbroker’s shop, he made public confession of his sin and underwent the experience of conversion (1844). Had it not been for this burden of conscience, and the lightening effect of confession, it is possible that he might have become an orator of radicalism; as it was, religion made him, from a political point of view, one of the hardest conservatives of his generation.
Two years after his conversion, on recovering from a fever which brought him to death’s door, Booth joined a group of youthful revivalists who conducted religious services in the streets of Nottingham. He was then seventeen years of age, distinguished by his height, his pale face, his black hair, and his passionate voice. In 1849 he went to London in search of better-paid work. He tried to escape from the business he hated, but no one wanted him, and he was at last obliged to go as assistant to a pawnbroker in Walworth. He took at this time several vows which witness to great earnestness of mind and a certain grimness of spiritual intention. His letters of this period are likewise full of fiery zeal. He almost starved himself in order to send money back to his mother and sisters. His scanty leisure was devoted to religion, and he began to attract the attention of some local methodists, one of whom, a rich boot-manufacturer, persuaded him to become a lay-preacher. It was this boot-manufacturer who introduced him into the family of a carriage-builder living in Clapham, where he discovered the woman who was so powerfully to influence his subsequent career.
Catherine Mumford [see Booth, Catherine], daughter of the carriage-builder, was an invalid who spent most of her life on a sofa. She had cultivated her mind to a degree unusual among people in suburban circles. She saw the greatness of Booth’s nature, but deplored his lack of culture. She criticized his sermons, recommended him books, and tried to steady the wild flame of his religious aspiration. But her religion at that time was stamped with the respectability of suburbanism. She was a true child of the dissenting chapel. Booth gave her a wider outlook and gradually weaned her mind from its subservience to public opinion. He admitted his lack of learning, but nothing, not even her persuasions, could tame his ‘love for souls’. That was the master passion of his life. The suburban blue-stocking took fire from the provincial ignoramus whose mind was as inferior to hers, as her spirit was inferior to his spirit. They became engaged, and Booth, who in 1852 had become an itinerant preacher of the Methodist New Connexion, consulted her by letter about his sermons, sent her his linen for mending, and constantly exhorted her to widen her sympathies and to approve of revivalist methods. Their love-letters must be of interest to any student of the nineteenth century who looks below the political and economic surface.
The lovers were married in 1855. Booth had then established something of a reputation as a travelling preacher of methodism, but his violent methods in the pulpit had made him powerful enemies. At the end of nine years in the ministry, rather than submit to the authority of his church, he broke with methodism, and launched out as an independent revivalist (1861). Mrs. Booth joined in this work, and it was at her suggestion that Booth came to London in 1865 and started the Christian Mission in Whitechapel. Thirteen years later, when he was nearly fifty years of age, William Booth accidentally converted his ‘Christian Mission’ into the ‘Salvation Army’ merely by the use of a metaphor (1878). One day in describing the Christian Mission in the presence of his son Bramwell, he used the phrase ‘a volunteer army’. The son objected, since the new volunteer movement was just then the subject of some ridicule, declaring that he was a ‘regular’ or he was nothing. Booth altered the offending phrase to ‘a salvation army’, and from that alteration came the military titles (against which he fought for some time) and the military uniform (which he himself only gradually and grudgingly adopted), destined to transform the Whitechapel mission into a worldwide engine of revivalism.
Almost at once public attention was drawn to a new force in the religious life of the nation. Booth became the champion of ‘the bottom dog’. He was sick of respectable people. His sympathies were genuinely on the side of the depressed, and as genuinely he believed that eternal punishment was the fate of all those who perished without the experience of conversion. But this grim theology was mitigated by a love for the degraded poor of great cities which was something new in modern England’s religious life. Booth ‘saved’ these people in battalions, and proved to all the churches that the religious instincts of the urbanized people were much the same as in Wesley’s day at the dawn of the industrial revolution. He beat his showman’s drum in what he believed to be the service of the Light of the World, and speedily became the target of ridicule and calumny, the stormy centre of much rioting. But he pushed steadily forward, helped by his wife. and children, and drew multitudes
to ‘the penitent’s form’. Deeper acquaintance with the problem he was so impulsively attacking led him to become a social reformer. In 1890 he published a book called In Darkest England and the Way Out. It was largely written by the journalist W. T. Stead [q.v.], and altogether lacking in Booth’s impressive Doric; but it created a sensation, and in spite of a very bitter and rather ridiculous attack by T. H. Huxley, Booth was liberally financed by the British public to look after the souls and bodies of ‘the dim millions’.
He always held that you cannot make a man clean by washing his shirt, and his social work was chiefly an excuse for getting at the souls of men; but he had real and deep pity for the distressed poor, and he admitted the influence of environment. He was indirectly responsible for a much more intelligent attention on the part both of the churches and the politicians to the physical conditions of human life. It is characteristic of him that he hung back from a crusade for sexual purity which his son Bramwell persuaded W. T. Stead to undertake in the Pall Mall Gazette, and that he desired the rescue work of the ‘Army’ to be solely in the hands of women. In spite of all his platform outspokenness, he was a timorous administrator of the ‘Army’, and used his autocracy chiefly to safeguard its spiritual activities. His son Bramwell was the real organizer. Booth used to call him his Melanchthon.
His days were clouded by family secessions, and almost brought to wreck by the sufferings of his wife as she lay dying from cancer. In the end he was overtaken by blindness, but continued to visit many and far countries of the world where the Salvation Army flag was flying, evoking extraordinary enthusiasm from the multitudes, receiving the hospitality of kings and ambassadors. In those days, with his strong Jewish features, his flowing white beard, his wild looks, and his tall attenuated frame, the venerable man was something of a patriarchal figure in British public life. He died in London 20 August 1912. His wife, by whom he had three sons and four daughters, had died in 1890.
Booth is much more interesting as a man than as a founder of anything new in religion or politics. He was entirely ignorant of theology, unacquainted with any language except his own, and entertained an almost savage prejudice against science and philosophy. In everything intellectual he was an obscurantist of the most pronounced type, and in everything religious a ‘hebraist’ of uncompromising narrowness. He condemned cricket and football as sharply as card-playing and horse-racing. Further there was something of the casuist in his nature which enabled him, with no shock to his conscience, to conciliate the mammon of unrighteousness in the interest of his philanthropy. He had warm friends among bookmakers, commercial millionaires and various aristocrats, who showed scant evidence in their lives of the repentance which he so sternly demanded of his converts. He never appeared before these people except as a prophet of God, but the urgent need of their money for his emigration schemes, his farm colonies, his shelters, and his halls, induced him to tone down the thunders of Sinai to the piano note of a somewhat chaffing and good-natured admonition. Once, however, he made Cecil Rhodes kneel down and pray with him in a railway carriage. Among those who applauded him were churchmen of such eminence as Lightfoot, Westcott, and Liddon, while Archbishop Benson laboured hard to bring the ‘Army’ into the orthodox fold of the Church of England. He had an interview with King Edward VII, whom he liked greatly, and he took tea with Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden. The King asked what the churches now thought of him; he replied with a grim humour, ‘Sir, they imitate me’.
His diaries reveal the secret of his attraction, if they do not account for the remarkable success of his propaganda. With a narrow and almost cunning mind, a turbulent and autocratic heart, something great yet childlike in the man’s nature was for ever at war with the universe, demanding mercy for mankind and peace for himself. The emotional side of his character was always at strife with the acute or commercial instincts of his nature, and perhaps the heart which so truly loved children and so earnestly sympathized with ‘the lowest of the low’, was never quite completely convinced of the justice of the divine ordering of this world. Every now and then there are records in his diaries, particularly at the time of his wife’s sufferings, which have something of the stark honesty and the searching realism of the Book of Job. Some aspects of his turbulent character—in particular, its wild fervour and its genius for advertisement—may probably be explained by the blend in his veins of Jewish and midland blood.
It is worth recording that this vehement person who, as it were, unroofed the slum to Victorian respectability, and spoke of himself as a moral scavenger netting the very sewers, was of a singularly delicate constitution. He had a physical horror of dirt, even of shabbiness, and from his youth up was noticeable for a meticulous attention to personal cleanliness, both of body and linen. Noxious smells made him ill. The sight of depravity tore at his heart. The sufferings of children, even the memory of them, brought tears to his eyes. It was this extreme sensitiveness to squalor and suffering which made him so effective in unveiling the dark places of civilization. He saw sharply what others scarcely saw at all, and he felt as an outrage what others considered to be natural.
That there was something in his nature which made him restless, harsh, autocratic, and sometimes even angrily explosive, he readily admitted. He called it ‘Booth blood’. In the main his higher self triumphed over these dangerous tendencies, and he probably changed more lives for the better than any other religious emotionalist for many hundreds of years. William James, the psychologist, quotes Booth as an authority for the doctrine ‘that the first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that some decent human being cares enough for them to take an interest in the question whether they are to rise or sink’.
A portrait of Booth by D. N. Ingles was placed, on loan, in the National Portrait Gallery in 1925.
[Harold Begbie, Life of William Booth, 2 vols., 1920; personal knowledge.]