UNESCO City of Literature: William Booth

Illustration: Alix Verity

“A vacation in a foreign land, General Booth does the best he can. You’re in the army now, oh-oo-oh-oh you’re in the army, now”

Glance through the letters to The Times during the 1880s and you’ll find ‘polite society’ mithering on about the antics of overzealous members of The Salvation Army. The converts of this intrusive, fanatical cult could think of no better way to spend their time than smugly informing commuters they’d all “rot in hell” unless they found salvation in William Booth’s self-created religion.

Formed in the East End of London in 1865, this month The Sally Army celebrates its 150th birthday and there’s plenty to celebrate. Their CV includes: providing humanitarian aid across the globe, radically transforming perceptions of the poor, and a leader with more hubris than Tony Blair.

William Booth didn’t do things by halves, believing his one purpose in life was to save the souls of the entire planet. If this meant pissing a few people off along the way, so be it. In what can only be described as a form of economic-spiritual determinism, Booth saw poverty as the thing that drove man into sin. It led to alcohol dependency, vice and violence.

Whereas other religions of the day turned their noses up at the poor, preferring to condemn salacious behaviour, Booth was completely disinterested in attributing blame. In a kind of Britain’s Got No Talent, Booth took the dregs of society – who he described as ‘the submerged tenth’ – and repackaged them as celebrities. They were then sent back out into society to preach the benefits of their conversion to other ‘sinners’. The message was simple: if I can do it, so can you.  

Poverty in the slums was horrific. On average, one child out of three survived birth and a census in the 1850s revealed that 71 people from 16 families were living in one small house. While other preachers sat on their arse waiting for a sign from God, bitching that their congregation had flocked off, Booth did something radical. He went out to them.

Although Booth was completely disinterested in social and material philosophies, he inadvertently developed a kind of religious welfare state, providing workshops, food stores, and shelters for women and workmen.

As his empire grew, he provided evening classes offering basic support in literacy and arithmetic as well as practical support in the form of food relief. Soon to follow would be a reading room, stocked high with uplifting religious verse.

To put this into context, it would take ‘polite society’ two World Wars before the Beveridge Report outlined a plan to slay the ‘Five Giants’ of problems associated with poverty (Want, Disease, Squalor, Ignorance, Idleness).

Beardo
Born 10 April 1829 at 12 Notintone Place, Sneinton, Booth learned his trade at the Wesley Chapel, opened on Broad Street in 1837. This six-pillared colonnade was an imposing structure in the local community and cost £11,000 to build – a fortune back then. It’s now better known as the Broadway Cinema, which also cost a fortune to build.

Here, Booth encountered celebrity preachers like James Caughey, who would swoop down from the pulpit in a black cloak, a bit like a religious Batman, playing on the fears of his congregation. His histrionics infuriated the more conservative members of the religious establishment, but Booth quickly realised the performance was as important as the play.

Departure from his religious peers also came through his absolute contempt for theological study. Whereas the religious hierarchy spent decades studying old texts and pondering predestination, Booth, quite remarkably, didn’t have time for reading, dismissing the intellectualisation of religion as “egotistical introspection”. As Roy Hattersley notes, “William Booth was by nature a soldier, not an intellectual. He wanted to fight the good fight, not study the battle plan.”

Not studying the battle plan meant that Booth casually flipped between Wesleyan Methodists, Wesleyan Reformers, and the Methodist New Connexion, before turning his back on the lot of them and fudging together his own religious movement. It wasn’t that he was indecisive, quite the opposite, he was searching for a religion that mirrored his own reflection and when he couldn’t find one, he smashed up all the mirrors. Like any tyrant worth his salt, he wanted to govern but didn’t want to be governed.

A preacher was expected to settle down into a comfy parish and work their magic on the locals. But Booth was a proper fidget arse who couldn’t be tied down to a postcode and instead craved the freedom of a circuit preacher, visiting towns for a few weeks at a time before moving on.

When he adapted his sermons to the language of the music hall, the puritanical traditionalists got a right cob on, accusing him of ‘selling out’ and ‘dumbing down’ the word of God. But really they were pissed off because he preached a religion that the masses could actually relate to.  

Another reason for breaking away from the traditionalists was their poor customer service. What was the point of drumming up trade on the road if the church couldn’t follow it up? Their slowness to react meant the newly converted inevitably fell back into sin.

There was only one thing for it. He needed his own gaff. This was made possible by a wealthy benefactor called Samuel Morley, whose statued noggin can be found at the Waverley entrance to the Arboretum. By 1868, Booth was holding an incredible 140 services every week at 13 preaching stations. It’s no wonder he didn’t have time to read.

Phoney Booth
Booth showed as much contempt for financial regularities as he did for reading. Consequently, he couldn’t see the contradiction in charging for spiritual gatherings, effectively placing a price on salvation. He had a get out of jail free card, as the only paymaster he was accountable to was the Lord. To be fair, though, not even his family were exempt from the God tax. In what sounds like a scene out of The Apprentice, he charged guests one shilling to witness the marriage of his son Bramwell, the eldest of his eight children.

Booth drew a wage that barely covered the family bills, with his children raised with sports denounced as frivolities and a cold bath every day apart from the Sabbath. Booth himself lived a sparse existence, eating vegetable soup every day for the last forty years of his life, avoiding guilty pleasures such as protein. Indulgence was a scattering of currants over rice pudding, but only on holiday.

Booth excelled in self-denial and quickly found a way to monetise this fetish through the aptly named Self Denial Week where staff went without a pudding and the money saved went in the kitty. With staff already being paid below modern conceptions of a living wage, it led to widespread criticisms. Another issue was appalling working conditions no better than a sweathouse. Needless to say, Booth twisted these criticisms to his advantage; blood and sweat was exactly what salvation required.

Full Metal Racket
The Christian Mission became The Salvation Army in 1878. The rebranding was largely due to Booth finding the concept of ‘volunteers’ insulting. Soldiers were a statement of intent. The military jargon appealed to the jingoism of the age and ensured God’s work was given due reverence. Uniforms ensured followers didn’t give in to puerile vices like fashion. Bands pimped up services and brought a sense of excitement. Flags enabled individual expressions of creativity and devotion. All of this was in stark contrast to the formal and unfriendly approach of the Church of England.

The Christian Mission Magazine reported the latest ‘war news’ as an assault made on sinners across the country and ‘open fire’ was declared on the devil. But the enemy also fired back and it was common for Booth to be pelted with broken bottles, particularly by large breweries who were furious at him for luring away punters.

Physical violence would put off most people but Booth smugly took it as evidence that he’d rattled Satan and chided them with the words of Matthew, chapter V, verse 12, “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you, falsely for my sake”.

For Book’s Sake
The nineteenth century was a weird period of history typified by scientific discovery, inventions, industrialisation, modesty, trade unionism and child prostitution – inevitably everyone had an opinion. Freddy Engels outlined the consequences of industrialisation on the poor in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), which was a teaser to The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Revolutionary as these texts were, they were nothing on the ideas of William Morris who advocated turning Trafalgar Square into a giant apple orchard. William Booth couldn’t even spell ‘proletariat’ and I doubt he’d have indulged in something as exotic as an apple. But he certainly had something to say.

He outlined his master plan for salvation in In Darkest England and the Way Out. Given his contempt for reading and study, it was surprising he wasted his valuable time on such an academic pursuit. But he managed to translate the vitriol of his sermons with such devastating effect, the words literally spit at you from the page:

“As we have a Lord Mayor’s Day, when all the well-heeled, furclad City Fathers go in state coaches through the town, why should we not have a Lazarus Day in which the starving, Out-of-works and sweated, half starved “in workers” of London should crawl in their tattered raggedness with their gaunt, hungry faces and emaciated wives and children in a Procession of Despair through the main thoroughfares, past the massive houses and princely palaces of luxurious London.”

Although his book made a very prescient observation that the slums of London were as equally dark as anything found in ‘primitive’ African colonies, his work wasn’t entirely original. Charles Booth – no relation – spent thirty years scientifically investigating the lives of the capital’s poor in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) and the trilogy The Life and Labour of the People of London which ran to 28 volumes.

But whereas Charles Booth’s solution to poverty was to basically remove the Class B poor (those beyond help) to the suburbs for re-educating, Booth, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of them. Religion was a truly classless society as far as he was concerned.

With the entire world to save, Booth felt obliged to ‘borrow’ ideas from other great thinkers and so wasted no time in appropriating Dante’s Inferno for his own means. But given he’d only a finite number of years in which to save the world, he downsized the nine circles of hell into the three circular kingdoms:

“The outer and widest circle is inhabited by the starving and the homeless but Honest Poor. The second by those who live by Vice and the third and innocent region at the centre is people who live by Crime. The whole of the circle is sodden with drink.”

For 200 pages Booth harps on about a way out of the darkness via farm colonies, skill sharing, self-sustaining communities and an overseas colony for those who want to gain a tan while doing JC’s work. It’s easy to mock his earnestness, but a lot of what he suggested has become popular of late.

Booth is probably the earliest advocate of ‘skipping’, in that he proposed collecting waste food from the wealthy to be distributed among the needy. Similarly, his plans for a Lost Person’s Bureau (there were roughly 18,000 missing people in London at the time) is an early forerunner of the principles of Shelter and the Big Issue.

His ideas on prisons were equally progressive, suggesting prisoners should have visits prior to release to prepare them for outside life and his belief that certain crimes were better resolved through socially useful work rather than incarceration is, in essence, ‘community service’. From here he moves on to the problem of courts and the justice system and basically gives every social structure a spring clean via religion.

The establishment didn’t take kindly to this uneducated gobshite outlining their failings and so seized any opportunity to expose Booth as a fraud. It didn’t help matters when Booth admitted that he hadn’t actually written his book himself, it had been ghostwritten by WT Stead. But, given his inability to sit still and his contempt for study, this was hardly surprising.

More problematic was his statistical analysis, which was all over the shop, leading to accusations he’d deliberately inflated figures to support his arguments. This wasn’t the case. Proper research and analysis was beneath him. He wrote from the gut.

If you lob nepotism, insanitary working conditions and autocratic financial management into the pot, you’d think he was done for. Nah! Officers of the Sally Army rose from 2,828 to 9,921 when the book came out. The only thing that would ever stop Booth was death and this happened on 20 October 1912.

William Booth featured in Issue 1 of Dawn of the Unread.

One-Eyed Willy
During his incredible life, Booth opened a session at the Senate, held court with Theodore Roosevelt, and was granted the Freedom of the City of London. He was the master of staged events, travelling the globe on his grand religious tours.

In 1904 he started the first of six annual motor tours and, at 75, travelled from Land’s End to Dundee. When he stopped over at the homes of supporters they were warned in advance of special dietary requirements, “In making the toast, the bread should be cut tolerably thin and gradually toasted until it is dry and hard but not too crisp”.

For a man with such incredible vision, it is somewhat ironic that in 1899 he was struck with blindness in both eyes but, luckily, recovered his sight after an enforced rest. Even so, ageing was one battle he was always destined to lose and in 1909 he had his right eye removed. Still, he had one left and so off he ventured again, for further campaigning in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

His success, according to Roy Hattersley, was due to Booth being ‘the greatest publicist of his age’, making him a kind of Malcolm Tucker but without the swearing. This meant family weddings and even his wife’s funeral were opportunities to coin it in for the Lord. He was, in essence, a self-indulgent bore who would absolutely hammer your timeline on Facebook if alive today, but this is exactly why he was so successful.

He was incapable of considering the possibility that he might be wrong about anything. But he was also a man who had a profound impact on everyone he encountered and arguably did more for the poor and downtrodden than his contemporaries in parliament. Such a pity, then, that there are no more Sally Army hostels left in his city of birth.

Source: Roy Hattersley, Blood and Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army.

Catherine Booth will feature in our September issue.

Nottingham City of Literature website

William Booth features in the first issue of Dawn of the Unread