God's apprentice

Paul Whitaker reviews

Blood & Fire: William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army, Roy Hattersley, Little Brown

William and Catherine Booth are two of the most intriguing figures of nineteenth century Britain. The Salvation Army is their enduring legacy. It is noteworthy that, whilst other religious movements which emerged in Victorian England have fallen by the wayside, their creation continues to attract new recruits and is a worldwide church with a membership of over a million people.

Roy Hattersley has produced an extremely well researched biography which is invaluable in understanding William and Catherine Booth both as individuals and as a partnership. Whereas Booth has often been idealised by past biographers as a saintly figure, Hattersley rightly chooses to paint the full portrait. Booth was not a saint and there were many failings in his character and life.

That is not to deny Booth's lasting achievements, although Hattersley clearly believes Catherine was William's equal, if not the dominant partner. The credit for the creation and development of the Salvation Army belongs to both of them. Without Catherine, William might finally have arrived at the same point but the journey would have taken him a great deal longer and it would have lacked the passion that Catherine instilled in him.

William himself is a perplexing character. Before coming to realise that God had a special task for him, he worked as a pawnbroker's clerk in Nottingham. Worshipping in the Church of England was followed by a fledgling career as a Methodist preacher. He reacted strongly against both. In his opinion the Church of England was sanctimonious and Methodists full of self-satisfied hypocrites. It required vision - some might say enormous arrogance - to found his own church and carve out his role as a 'soldier' against poverty and its associated evils. It was a difficult task but the Booths dared to be different and never flinched from the fight. They saw themselves as "active saints" and, in the face of derision, remained convinced of their vocation. William's great physical and moral courage stayed with him all his days.

Booth was a man of action rather than an intellectual and much of his theology and vision came from Catherine. She was well educated and it is clear that she was the driving force in the fight against poverty, child abuse, prostitution, and the evils of drink. She was a pioneer of the cause for women's equality in the church and was a powerful preacher. For a time it was her preaching that kept their heads above water financially. William was happy for his wife to support the family. A fervent anti-Catholic all her life, Catherine had achieved instant salvation at the same time as her husband in 1861. After this experience and their elevation to "holiness" the Booths became convinced they were instruments of God. The battle was ahead and for many years the battleground would be amongst the poor of the East End of London.

Unfortunately, it seems their domestic life was less than harmonious. At home Catherine abandoned her belief in equality and deferred to William in everything. The Booths had eight children and, whilst Catherine was happy to be known as the "mother of the Army", she was in fact a terrible mother to her own children. Preaching had priority over her children and she adopted a "hands off" approach to childcare. Unfortunately, this did not extend to a physical detachment. The Booth children were regularly and severely beaten and it is evident that the parents' elevated sense of their own piety and commitment to their work led to their mistreatment. Relations with their offspring were extremely strained. Their treatment of their eldest son was particularly harsh and it left him scarred for life. His desire to be a doctor had to be abandoned and his life sacrificed to the Army. The Booths' eldest daughter was more favoured. Hattersley contends that the children were strange, but not as strange as they should have been given their upbringing.

William Booth was a self confessed oddball. He had an intense dislike of competitive games, particularly football and cricket, both denounced as frivolous. There are many examples of Booth's peculiar behaviour as he got older. His diet consisted mostly of vegetable soup and he insisted that all members of his household took daily cold baths. Catherine too had her eccentricities. She admonished William for his lack of abstinence from mustard which she feared would lead him astray. When her mother died she insisted that her husband attend the autopsy. The Booths had a peculiar and morbid interest all matters of the flesh, especially death. William could not understand why his children were not grateful when he had the pelt of the family dog (which he had ordered to be shot for biting a servant) made into a rug.

An enduring feature of the Salvation Army is its fight against drink. It was Catherine who was the temperance stalwart. At the time of their meeting William's childhood pledge had lapsed and he continued to believe in the power of brandy and port to restore. Although she was fervently against the use of alcohol, Catherine drank a quantity of brandy during a cholera epidemic in London. When she confessed this to William he added his own admission: "I finished the bottle of wine last night and am more a teetotaler than ever."

Lapses apart, Booth strongly believed that a significant number of social evils resulted from the use of alcohol. He set about campaigning against moderate drinking by Methodists and, even more vigorously, against the licensed trade. Both campaigns led to much antagonism and resentment and even physical violence. Booth's views and activities were considered dangerous, and Salvationists often found themselves attacked in the streets and at meetings.

Violent opposition followed Booth for three decades. The brewers feared evangelical teetotallers would reduce their trade; the public were aggrieved by what they saw as a unwanted intrusion into their private lives; and the police saw the Army as the cause of the trouble rather than being its victims. It was only after an outcry in Parliament that action was taken.

Booth, surprisingly, understood the reasons why men were driven to drink. The tap room was in many cases the working man's only parlour and he saw the gin palace as "a natural outgrowth of our social conditions". The Booths fought against drink by providing an attractive alternative. Brass bands, banners, marches, and street meetings were all used successfully. The Salvation Army was a very effective marketing exercise and had a highly developed corporate identity.

By the 1880s the an alliance of bishops and brewers united against the Army and much of the establishment feared that the militaristic, banner waving movement combined with an organized and militant working class posed a real threat. There were also allegations that Booth diverted funds to fund a life of luxury. Hattersley believes that incompetence and lack of financial control left the Army vulnerable to such accusations. It may be that the worst that happened was that funds donated for welfare work were instead used for evangelical expeditions. But rumours of financial impropriety haunted Booth and the Army for many years.

Booth did not draw a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor: he sought to appeal to all people. At her death in 1890, Catherine had inspired William to write a call for social justice. In "In Darkest England and the Way Out" Booth wrote a challenging and powerful manifesto for the regeneration of the nation. Poverty would be banished and social evils eradicated in a New Jerusalem. Booth was no class warrior but believed in the Christian's duty to the disadvantaged and dispossessed and he was happy for these people to follow his banner. His Army was mainly composed of working people and often the most fervent were repentant sinners. Gradually, the Army and William Booth won acceptance. William came to be welcomed by the establishment he had so railed against. Towards the end of his long life he received numerous honours and made many overseas tours but his health was beginning to fail.

After an unsuccessful cataract operation he lost the sight in his left eye and his remaining good eye deteriorated. But he continued to work until full blindness heralded his promotion to glory in 1912.

Despite being autocratic and domineering, Booth was arguably the most successful evangelist of the 19th Century. The ideas and principles on which the Army was founded played an important role in changing the social climate and created a lasting impact on social justice and practices in Victorian Britain. Roy Hattersley tells the story extremely well.