Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
There was a moment in William Booth’s life when he was still a young man. This moment defined the rest of his life. If William Booth had chosen differently then the world would have been a very different place. He had to decide between becoming a political activist, or becoming an evangelist.
The young Booth was encouraged by his mentor to become an evangelist, and the rest was history. But things might have been very different. I also think that Booth’s early involvement in radical politics shaped his approach to religion. This influence colored the work of The Salvation Army throughout his lifetime.
To understand Booth, we need to understand how he grew up. He did not suddenly spring into existence middle-aged, bearded, and preaching. Like all of us, he was shaped by his upbringing. His environment and key people also influenced him, leaving a lasting impact.
Young William Booth
Booth was born on the 10th of April 1829. His parents were Samuel Booth and Mary Moss. They lived at 12 Notintone Place in Sneiton, Nottingham. At that time, Nottingham had more than 50,000 people living in a city less than 2 miles in circumference. Nottingham was a growing industrial town in the Midlands of England. It’s main industry was hosiery knitting, with an average household earning 7 shillings a week if the entire family worked. It was a place of factories and industry. But, and this is important, those factories may not be quite what you imagine them to be.
When you think of factories, you may think of massive buildings with huge chimneys belching smoke into the air. The great halls are filled with grinding machinery and clacking power-looms. Bent-backed workers laboured day and night to churn out the materials of empire. There were absolutely mills and factories like that in Nottingham. But most of the industrial labour in that city, and in most British cities, was done through piece work.
What was piece work?
Piece work meant families working in their own homes. They purchased the supplies and machines they needed. Often, these were only available through a loan. Afterward, they sold the finished articles back to the supplier. They were paid per piece they made, hence piece work. Sometimes they made enough to cover their costs. Sometimes they made enough to cover the rent and buy some food. The work was mostly done by the women and children. Some were as young as four or five. Every family member was expected to contribute to the family income and work for up to fifteen hours a day. These were the ‘factories’ of the British Empire. A home housed a family all hard at work. They worked just to survive.
Small Rooms, Big Families
Those homes were frequently barely more than a single room for the entire family. It was common for up to fifteen children to be crammed together into one of these rooms, or in a cellar dwelling, barely twelve feet square. Some might have two rooms if they were lucky. Windows were covered with waxed paper, cracks in the walls filled with scraps of cloth. Heat came from a paraffin or wood stove. These stoves caused more burns and burned down more homes than they ever provided sufficient heat. Cooking was done in a communal oven. More often, the family would buy their food from a tupp’ny-coffee-house, a char-wallah, or the pie-man. Houses shared a communal toilet and wash room, which was rarely clean and almost certainly relied on a manual water pump.
Three or four story tenements would also have two levels of cellars where families could live with the bare minimum of light and air for even cheaper rents. Yet even the bare minimum of rent was often too much. These tenements were built back to back, or arranged in courtyards reached only through narrow alleyways. The streets were pressed in together, narrow and filled with human and animal waste.
Nottingham’s social geography
Nottingham was tightly pressed because on two sides the town was hemmed in by noble estates, tresspass onto which would mean prison. The other two sides were freehold pastures where the rich and the gentry held grazing and coursing rights. The town could not expand, even though its population continued to grow with over 11,000 dwellings being squeezed together.
The 1844 Health of Towns Commission found that Nottingham was in the top ten towns in England and Wales for mortality rates with regular outbreaks of cholera being common. By 1839 over 3481 people were registered as receiving poor relief from the Nottingham Union. This does not take into account the thousands more that did not qualify for poor relief, the hundreds who were forced into the work houses, and the uncounted numbers left destitute on the streets.
Booth grew up in the poverty, filth, and despair of the industrial heart of the Empire.
Class, Empire, and Political Consciousness
Booth was born into a lower-middle class family. His father was an unsuccessful speculative builder but by his trade had managed to secure his family in a somewhat stable condition.
We cannot underestimate how important the class-structure was in Victorian Britain. It defined a person’s identity in many different ways. The explosion of the middle-class, especially in business owners, landlords, and those who made their money from capital. It also created the space for a new working-class identity to form. The British working-class developed its distinct social and political identity in the 19th century. This was different from a religious sense of poverty. It culminated in the labour movement and socialist associations.
Booth may have been born into the lower-middle-class, with it’s desperate grasp on gentility and respectability including being Anglican, but it was not to last. Nottingham, along with much of the Midlands, was struck with economic depression in the late 1830s and early 1840s. This led to riots and protests including the destruction of the new steam-powered looms. Booth’s father lost everything during that depression and turned to alcohol.
William Booth and early Poverty
With his family’s position suddenly precarious Booth was forced out of his rudimentary education and into work. On his thirteenth birthday Booth was apprenticed to Francis Eames as a Pawnbroker at the corner of Goosegate and Mill Alley. This have Booth a taste of independent work, but it also brought him into direct contact with some of the poorest members of society.
Pawnbroking an established feature of urban life. The pub and the pawnbroker were the two centres around which the denizens of the slums rotated. Millions of articles were pawned each year with interests rates on average of 25% with the standard pledge of only a shilling or two.
Monday was rent day, often called ‘Black Monday,’ when families struggled to find enough money to keep a roof over their heads. Wages were given on a Friday, unless you were a day labourer. More often than not the wages were spent before Monday came, leading to a time of panic with ques outside the local pawnshop where women waited in the hope of pawning what they could for enough money to pay the rent. For those who had nothing left to pawn, then the only other alternative was to turn to prostitution.
The death of the father
Five months after William Booth started his apprenticeship, his father Samuel Booth died leaving no assests for the family which had already been forced into the ranks of the working class. The widow and 4 surviving children moved to Holland street where Mary sold needles, cotton threads, and wool that she made at home with the help of the youngest children. William’s weekly wage of 6 shillings as an apprentice was the only stable income for the family. Booth stopped going to the Anglicans and started attending a local Methodist chapel. Part of his change of class.
The Impact of Chartism on William Booth
It was in this background that Booth’s independent political beliefs started to form. W. T. Stead (Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, ghost writer of In Darkest England, and biographor of Booth) described the young Booth’s situation:
Young William Booth grew up in an atmosphere of unrest, in a hotbed of quasi-revolutionary discontent. The poverty that he saw on every side filled him with a spirit of passionate revolt against constituted authority…He went to their [Chartist] meetings, he cheered their speeches, he subscribed to the charter, and if need had arisen he would have been disappointed if he could not have shouldered a pike or fired a musket.
The political background of Booth is fundamental to understanding his development.
In the 1880s, in a sermon in Salisbury, Booth said that as a boy he grown up in the “intensely political town” of Nottingham where he had initially been influenced by his father’s politics. He had marched in processions “carrying a Tory flag and singing a Conservative song.” But when Chartism was at its highest ebb, he had left his father’s politics to go another way. He joined the Chartists.
Who were the Chartists
The Chartists were a proto-revolutionary political organisation made up of working and middle class people advocating for societal change. The working class element wanted land reform, changes to taxation, and increased representation. The middle class group wanted reform of the corn laws, and reformation of parliament. The Chartists were so called because they campaigned and petitioned for the People’s Charter which wanted to abolish the property restrictions on becoming an MP (at the time to become an MP you need to own property worth a certain value), to have MPs receive a salary, the vote for every adult male, secret elections, and yearly parliaments.
The Chartist leader was the Irish lawyer Feargus O’Connor who had been elected as a Member of Parliament and frequently spoke in Nottingham. At thirteen years old, Booth had heary O’Connor speak and had been highly influenced by O’Connor’s rhetoric. Booth was always influenced by people who could speak well in public. Later in his life in 1886 when visiting Nottingham Booth remarked:
“I was a Chartist then – boy as I was – but I have another sort of politics now. My heart went out to the poor wretched people. The Chartists said that they wanted to raise and help the poor, and so I had sympathy with them. They showed me the Chartist ladder, up which they said the people could climb to happiness. I said, ‘let us try it.’ And we did, but that bubble burst. I have seen many a plan since that which had read well on paper, but when it had been got to work it had proved of no use. However for forty years I have tried my plans, and have found it always successful when honestly acted upon. Any plan is to lift society by lifting the individual.”
William Booth Chooses Religion
Booth was dissuaded from his allegiance to Chartism by James Caughey, a popular American evangelist who had captured Booth’s imagination, who denounced Chartism as destructive of social order and argued that the wrongs of the world needed to be righted by Individual Conversion. Caughey regarded Chartism as a ‘conspiracy’ and he opposed the ‘secret combinations of workmen and the collapse of social order.’ Which perhaps displays his American influence. It was Caughey who persuaded Booth to put aside Chartism and to take up religion instead.
There came a moment when William Booth had to make a choice. He was equipped and passionate enough to become a leader in the Chartists. Or, he could take on the role of a full time evangelist. Even though Methodists made up the majority of Chartists, and the Labour Church was just forming, for Booth, this was an either/or question. He would not do things by half. He would be an activist or an evangelist. Not both.
Ironically of course, he actually ended up doing both.
William Booth Chooses Religion and Politics
When Booth was eighteen he finished his apprenticeship and unfortunately was not offered further employment as that would have meant increasing his pay. He spent a year unemployed before manageing to secure a new role as a pawnbroker in London. However, he was encouraged and influenced by a local reformer called Mr. E. Rabbits, and again by Caughey, to resign from this position and become a preacher in the Methodist Reform Movement on 10th April 1852. In May that year he got engaged to Catherine Mumford.
He had already undertaken street preaching as a teenager and this now formalised what before had been a passion he undertook on the side. William Booth decided to commit himself fully to Church work. He said that God would have all there was of William Booth. Booth’s future was set and sealed and because of the moment, a series of events was set in motion which eventually led to The Salvation Army being created.
What would have happened if William Booth had not gone down this route? What if he had chosen Chartism? Booth would almost certainly have been a significant member of the Labour movement and could well have ended up being elected to parliament. However, his temper and dislike of being constrained by an organisation is likely to have driven him away from the mainstream left-wing parties and into more revolutionary movements. He almost certainly would not have married Catherine, and it is likely that he would not be as well remembered today.
However, Booth’s politics and the background of his youth provided a foundation from which his faith grew.
Radical Faith
Booth’s religion was influenced by the radical and revolutionary background he gained in Chartism. He believed that society needed to change, not just individuals. He believed that radical and public action could bring about good results. This was joined with his reading of Finney and Palmer and the influence of revivalists like Caughey. Revivalist methods and a commitment to radical holiness theology joined with the foundations of revolutionary social politics to form the Army.
Booth’s love of the poor came from his own experiences in Nottingham and growing up in poverty where every meal had to be counted and his wage had to support a family who were already working. In the early decades of the Army Booth once wrote that only the Salvationist is a true socialist.
It was not until the Army started gaining popularity and seeking government approval that the conservative politics of his father reappeared. Booth’s increasing autocracy and social conservatism after his years of being a radical are a consequence of his discovery that he liked being respected and his increasing fear of chaos and disorder in his Army.
Salvationism was originally revolutionary. It wanted to change the entire world, not just get some people into heaven but to make heaven on earth today. This is something we forget today, and something we must reclaim.
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