“What a horror!” Florence exclaimed. “How awful it must be for those girls to wake up in a strange country, not knowing the language and having little hope of escape.”
“Yes,” W. T. replied, “I haven’t unearthed any numbers yet, but I bet the suicide rate is very high.”
“Small wonder,” William agreed. “I have no doubt you’ve done your homework, W. T., but people are going to mock us for exaggerating a ‘small’ problem. Can we prove everything you say is true?”
W. T. nodded. “I have met with my old friend Detective Howard Vincent. He was the director of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department, and he confirmed all the facts I’ve found. But this is not what’s going to convince people to take notice. My reporter’s instincts tell me we are going to have to put a girl as a plant in one of these institutions to expose the whole system. If it’s written well, her story would cause a sensation. Even Parliament couldn’t ignore it.”
The group talked on through the morning until a plan was hatched. Bramwell and W. T. would find a poor family and “buy” one of their young daughters. Then they would sell the girl, rescue her before anything bad happened to her, and expose the whole sad practice of forcing young girls into a life of ruin.
To make sure the plan was legal, W. T. ran it past his lawyer, while William and Bramwell presented it to three powerful churchmen: the archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Catholic Church in England, and the bishop of London. The bishop and the cardinal thought it was a grand scheme to expose evil, while the archbishop was less supportive because he believed that W. T. would be killed during the scheme.
Finally, on Tuesday, June 2, the plan went into action. A thirteen-year-old girl named Eliza Armstrong was bought from her mother for one pound. Then Bramwell and W. T. offered Eliza for sale, making sure she was “rescued” from the buyer before anything bad happened to her. Now W. T. had the face he needed to make the grim reality of London’s worst trade come alive. He wrote a series of articles for the Pall Mall Gazette on the whole problem, and when the first article was published, it created an uproar. Many powerful men, including the queen’s cousin and members of Parliament, secretly supported this terrible business, and they did not want any publicity of their secrets. The fate of the Salvation Army hung in the balance. Would thugs be allowed to harass it once again, or would the police continue to protect it, even when it exposed terrible things going on right under their noses?
The City of London sided with the powerful men and against the Salvation Army and the Pall Mall Gazette. W. T. Stead’s articles were declared indecent, and policemen immediately arrested twelve paperboys for selling them. But others took up the challenge. Famous playwright George Bernard Shaw took many copies of the gazette and sold them on the Strand. By that evening every newspaper was sold out, and they were being resold on the black market for two and a half shillings apiece.
With the horrors of the trade now public knowledge in London, William Booth did everything he could to stir up enough indignation to change the law. He led huge rallies all over the country. Salvation Army officers everywhere collected signatures on a petition asking Parliament to raise the age of consent from thirteen years old to sixteen and give police the right to make inspections to see if any girls were being held captive.
Seventeen days later, nearly 400,000 signatures had been gathered. When the signatures were all glued onto a scroll, the scroll was over two and a half miles long! The people of England had spoken, but would the government hear them? William planned to make sure it did. He assembled a brass band and a legion of soldiers to accompany the petition to Parliament. They made such a fanfare that no one could claim the government had not noticed.
The public outcry forced the government to act, and on August 14, 1885, a bill was passed raising the age of consent from thirteen years old to sixteen and allowing police to perform inspections to look for girls who were held against their will.
A great victory had been won, although there was a price to pay for it. Some spiteful men, including the attorney general, had been greatly embarrassed by the scandal. They found a way to charge W. T. Stead and Bramwell Booth with kidnapping, and the two men stood trial. Bramwell was acquitted, but W. T. was sentenced to six months in Millbank Prison. He did not flinch as the punishment was read. He later told William that rescuing so many girls made it all worthwhile.
Australia soon followed with a similar law, as did many of the states in the United States. The Salvation Army had changed the first of many laws in favor of protecting the most vulnerable people in society.
All of this activity and publicity brought the Salvation Army into the national spotlight as never before.
Chapter 12
In Darkest England
Fifty-seven-year-old William Booth stepped onto New York’s Cunard Pier on September 23, 1886. By now the Salvation Army boasted one hundred corps in North America manned by three hundred officers and over five thousand soldiers and cadets. William launched straight into a whirlwind tour that took him as far west as Kansas City. During the two-and-a-half-month visit, he spoke almost two hundred times, and nearly two hundred thousand Americans flocked to hear him.
By the time William climbed back aboard the ship for the trip home, he was exhausted. He was glad of the restful voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to England because there was much for him to do when he got home. The family was moving into a new house at Hadley Wood, and on February 8, 1887, daughter Kate was going to marry Arthur Clibborn, who served as her chief of staff. In what was to become a family tradition, they decided that instead of Kate changing her last name to Clibborn, both she and Arthur would change their names to Booth-Clibborn. William would perform the marriage ceremony for them.
After William’s return to England, at about the time of the wedding, the Salvation Army ”invaded” Germany, and William sent Ballington to take charge of the work in North America. Ballington was given the title “Marshal” to go with the new position.
Ballington and his wife, Maud, wrote many letters to William explaining what they were doing and why. One letter in particular touched William. It told how one of the New York officers had found a tiny, filthy baby dying in an otherwise empty tenement room. When the officer made inquiries about the whereabouts of the mother, he found that she had been on a five-day drinking spree and forgotten all about her baby. Ballington and Maud wrote that this spurred them to action.
As he read their letter, William remembered back to his early work in Nottingham, where he had seen mothers dose their babies with opium so that they could leave them alone all day. The mothers did not have the money to pay someone to look after their babies and needed to work for money to pay their rent. Even though the case in New York was a little different, it pointed to the need for someone to step in and take care of children whose mothers, for whatever reason, could not take care of them. And that is what the Salvation Army did in New York. It opened a daycare center for small children, and within weeks eight hundred cradles were rocking twenty-four hours a day.
Other news from America challenged William’s thinking. The Salvation Army was working alongside the court system, so that when a prisoner from San Quentin was released, a Salvation Army officer was appointed as his probation officer. Sometimes the prisoners were also mandated to attend Salvation Army meetings for a week. “We see a need and we meet it,” Ballington wrote, ending one of his letters.
This statement played on William’s mind. Up until now he had believed in preaching the gospel anywhere and in any way possible. What he had not put much emphasis on was trying to change the social conditions of those they reached out to. But was it really the role of the Salvation Army to see a need—any need—and meet it? William answered that question for himself in the early hours of the cold, clear morning of December 1, 1887.
William was returning from Whitstable, in Kent, where he had been opening a new corps hall. As the carriage carrying him rattled across London Bridge, over the River Thames, William peered out into the dark. To his surprise he saw dozens of homeless men huddled in the nooks and crannies of the bridge and covered with scraps of newspaper to try to keep warm. But the newspaper was useless against the relentless cold, and the men shivered violently as they tried to keep their freezing fingers warm by blowing on them. Despite having spent most of his life working with people in the slums, William was shocked by the sight of these men, homeless and out in the open, and he decided something had to be done about it.
William diverted his carriage to Bramwell’s house and dragged his son out of bed in the early hours of the morning. “Did you know that men sleep out in the open all night on the bridges?” he asked his bleary-eyed son.
“Well, yes. You mean you did not know?” Bramwell replied.
“You mean you knew, and yet you didn’t do anything about it?” William snapped indignantly. “Well, go and do something! We have to do something. Rent a warehouse and warm it up. And find some blankets, and give those men a warm place to stay.”
It was the beginning of a new facet of the work of the Salvation Army.
As William was working out what to do about the plight of the homeless, he received some devastating news. Catherine was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her Harley Street surgeon urged her to have an operation right away, but he conceded that even such a drastic step was unlikely to stop the cancer’s progress.
While Catherine pondered the best treatment for her cancer, April 10, 1888, William’s fifty-ninth birthday, rolled around. It was also the day that Emma Booth married Fredrick Tucker. Fredrick had started the work of the Salvation Army in India. After the death of his first wife, he had returned to England to attend a conference about the future of the Salvation Army in India. While he was visiting the Booth family, he and Emma had fallen in love. And now they stood together at the altar exchanging marriage vows. For the wedding, to identify with the people of India, Fredrick dressed as a beggar. He wore a ragged turban and no shoes, and he symbolically placed a beggar’s bowl on the altar. After the wedding the new Mr. and Mrs. Booth-Tucker planned to return to India and the work of the Salvation Army there.
At the wedding reception, William answered many questions about how the Salvation Army was helping the homeless through various social programs. Yet as he answered these questions, he was dissatisfied with what the army was doing.
“We have to do more,” William told Bramwell as he paced the floor at Salvation Army headquarters. “We must find a way to demonstrate that God offers everyone a way out of poverty.”
Bramwell nodded in agreement. “What we need is a coordinated effort to feed the poor—all of the poor. It’s nearly impossible for a person to maintain a godly disposition when he is starving to death.”
“I quite agree,” William replied. “I’ll talk to your mother about it, but I have an idea for cheap food depots. I know we have dabbled in soup kitchens, but this would be different. The depots would be set up all over England, and we would sell all sorts of different foods at wholesale prices in them. I think the West India Dock would be an ideal place to start. There’s a lot of starving people down there.”
“I agree,” Bramwell said. “I’ll get someone onto it right away.”
“Commissary Flawn would be a good man to head it up,” William said, thinking back to his old friend and one of his earliest converts in the East End. “He used to set up the chairs for my tent meetings, and he was in the food business. Talk to him and see what he has to suggest. Maybe there’s more we can do than just offer food.”
