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    The Salvation Army
    The Salvation Army
    The Salvation Army
    Ebook109 pages48 minutes

    The Salvation Army

    By Susan Cohen

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    About this ebook

    The Salvation Army is a byword for philanthropy and charitable work, with its brass bands and uniformed officers indelible parts of the fabric of British life – yet many may not be aware of the real extent of its work and influence. This is the story of how Reverend William Booth's East London Christian Mission of 1865 (which became the Salvation Army in 1878) has become a truly global enterprise, one that in Britain is still second only to the government in the provision of social care. It is a symbol of charity that was forged in the crucible of mid-Victorian Britain and is now known in more than 120 countries, and Susan Cohen here explains and illustrates its activities and structures, its history and present, and its very important legacy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateSep 20, 2013
    ISBN9780747814221
    The Salvation Army
    Author

    Susan Cohen

    Susan Cohen is an historian with a wide interest in twentieth-century British social history and refugee studies. She has written and lectured widely on a variety of subjects, and is the author of numerous books for Shire, including The District Nurse, 1960s Britain and The Women's Institute.

    Read more from Susan Cohen

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      Book preview

      The Salvation Army - Susan Cohen

      EARLY DAYS

      THESALVATION ARMY (SA) was established by William Booth in 1878 and has endured as a remarkable organisation, recognised across the world for its commitment to helping the poor, the friendless and the needy in society. Evangelical Christianity has always been at the heart of the Army and was the driving force behind Booth’s decision to create his own church. His mission, as Sir Henry Rider Haggard described in 1910, was ‘to try, if not to cure, at least to ameliorate the lot of the fallen or distressed millions … by ministering to their creature wants and regenerating their spirits upon the plain and simple lines of the New Testament’.

      Portrait of the Reverend William Booth by William Joseph Carroll.

      William Booth was born in Nottingham on 10 April 1829 and was brought up ‘in attendance of the services of the Church of England’. Aged thirteen, he exchanged this for Wesleyan Methodism, which he found ‘more interesting’, and also started work as an apprentice to a pawnbroker to help support the family. The abject poverty and hopelessness of those he encountered had a profound impact on the young man, and was compounded by the death of his father when William was just fifteen and his family became dependent upon him. By 1849, having been out of work for a year, William had moved to London in the hope of bettering himself, but the only place he could find work was, again, in a pawn shop. As his leaning to the Methodists, and towards radical politics, developed, he was soon spending his evenings preaching to the poor on street corners, just as he had done in Nottingham for the previous three years. On Sundays he would conduct Methodist services wherever he was invited. A chance meeting with one Edward Rabbits provided William with short-term financial support and enabled him to leave pawnbroking and seek a post as a Methodist preacher. Rabbits also introduced William to Catherine Mumford, the young woman who was to become his wife and whose religious and reformist beliefs mirrored his own. The couple became engaged in 1852 but could not afford to get married until 1855.

      Catherine Booth was born at Ashbourne, Derbyshire, on 17 January 1829 and was ‘Promoted to Glory’ (the SA’s exclusive term for the death of a Salvationist) on 4 October 1890.

      Years of hardship as an itinerant probationer and then an ordained preacher with the Methodist New Connexion Church followed, but disagreements with the church’s leaders, and William’s unwillingness to work within the constraints of the circuit system of preaching, impelled the Booths to resign formally in 1862. Unfettered by any authority, William undertook emotional evangelistic campaigns in Cornwall, Cardiff, the Midlands and elsewhere, supported by private sponsorship. The lives of the itinerant couple, who by now had established a strong reputation as revivalists, were dogged by ill health and debt, and in 1865 they moved back to London with their three sons and three daughters, having both accepted invitations to preach. It did not take them long to decide to stay in the city, for they both recognised it offered the best opportunity for reaching the unsaved.

      On 2 July 1865 William held his first open-air crusade in Whitechapel at the behest of the publishers of an evangelical weekly, The Revival. Having gathered a crowd on the streets, he then preached to them in a tent pitched on a disused Quaker burial ground. In the first two weeks alone, according to a report in The Revival, his preaching had attracted between four and five hundred people. As well as disruption caused by troublemakers who cut the ropes, the tent was blown down during a storm in the autumn of 1865, and William realised that alternative accommodation was needed for his newly established East London Christian Revival Union. In the early days, a motley range of buildings was adapted for prayer meetings, including a wool shed, a covered skittle alley known as the Alexandra Hall, and Professor Orson’s Dancing Academy in New Road, Whitechapel. Wherever meetings were held, children

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