An Army In Dark Places

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32322, 13 June 1970, Page 4

An Army In Dark Places

Catherine Booth. By Catherine Bram-well-Booth. Hodder and Stoughton. 477 pp. (Illustrated).

The eldest grand-daughter of Catherine Booth has written this warmly emotional biography of “the Mother of the Salvation Army,” wife of General Booth. Catherine Booth made an inimitable individual contribution to the founding of this powerful movement for moral and social betterment. William Booth was a gifted evangelist and energetic organiser: his wife, herself a very moving preacher, had a deeper nature and perhaps greater human insight. “She had the analytical mind . . . and further, she enchanced the reasonableness and beauty and value of the work we were doing in our own eyes,” her eldest son, Bramwell, wrote of her. William Booth was a Methodist minister who suffered much from the niggling spirit of the authorities in either the older church or the New Connexion, both of which ousted him—partly through imaginative failure to realise the special gifts of William, partly through disapproval of Catherine preaching. The wilderness to which the Booths had been consigned offered independent evangelical work which, in spite of its precarious material basis, prospered and expanded. Husband and wife operated independently on wide-

ranging preaching circuits which settled down soon to work in the poorer quarters of London, where in 1865 the

need was indeed great, with two-thirds of the working class never entering church or chapel, a class brutalised by poverty and the indifference of its "betters.” Catherine might well cry out with uncharacteristic scorn: "What have you been doing, you genteel people?” To the needs of a family of eight children were added the needs of the mass of derelict humanity. “If you can only resuscitate and energise the moral sense in man he will soon rectify himself in all the relations of life.” The burdens of the Salvationists (the Army organisation was adopted in 1878, some years after its methods had been instituted) were somehow carried, and went on increasing, till, in spite of a good deal of brutal treatment in the streets (at least as bad as anything the Suffragettes had to contend with 25 years later), the movement became by the 1880’s an accepted part of the national life and was exported to many other countries. In this epic expansion the firm spirit of Catherine was vital. When she died at 61, her children were deeply engaged in the work she had fostered. The author, herself now in her eighties, provides a very complete picture of the enormous tasks the Booths undertook.