A LIFE OF STRUGGLE

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 148, 25 June 1934, Page 13

A LIFE OF STRUGGLE

SALVATION ARMY PIONEER

One of the pioneers of the Salvation Army, Mrs. Commissioner Mary BoothTucker, died at her. home in Lordship Road, Stoke Newington, N., at the age of eighty, states an exchange.

Officially she retired some years ago, but only a week before her death she warto a speech at a big meeting in Yorkshire.

It was in 1906 that Lieut-Colonel Mary Reid (as she then was) married the late Commissioner Booth-Tucker. His first wife, daughter of General Booth, the army's founder, had been killed three years earlier in a train crash in America. • ■ . ■

Mary Reid, at the age of twenty-two ran away from her home in Scotland to join the Salvation Army—much to her family's dismay. .

For her folllowed years of struggle. Many times she met with dangerously hostile mobs. On more than one occasion, at south coast towns, they tried to throw her into the sea. /

She was the youngest of seventeen children. Her father, Mr. Lestock Beid, was at one time acting Governor of Bombay. One of her sisters married Sir Frederick Cunningham. . Captain Cunningham-Reid, M.P. for Marylebone, is a c'ousin.

Her husband, too, had sacrificed much. He had thrown up a judgeship in India to join the Salvationists. He toured that country, preaching, and became known as "The White Fakir." It was he who established the arniy in India.

When Mary Reid married 'she went back to India with her husband; wore native dress; adopted native ways; and greatly helped him.

The two, of them left India to live in London" in 1919.