Huxley’s letters stirred up an incredible amount of hatred from people in a city that had just rallied around as the Army Mother was buried. William could hardly believe the change of heart. The magazine Punch began mocking William, calling him “Field Marshal von Booth,” and he was accused of being everything from a pious rogue to a hypocritical scoundrel.
William Booth’s ideas gained supporters as well as detractors. Winston Churchill, the Undersecretary of State, vigorously agreed with William, and Cardinal Manning, the head of the Catholic Church in Britain, stated publicly that he thought the Salvation Army was doing just what Jesus and the apostles would have done had they encountered the poor of Victorian England. Charles Spurgeon, the famous Baptist evangelist, added his stamp of approval. He wrote, “Five thousand extra policemen could not fill [the Salvation Army’s] place in the repression of crime and disorder.”
All of this controversy sold more books, and by the end of the month, ninety thousand copies had been sold and William was the most famous author in England. It seemed as if everyone was talking about him. Regrettably, much of the talk was negative. Some called him a childish idealist, a socialist, and a dangerous man bent on destroying the class structure that made the British empire all that it was.
There were many times when Bramwell stormed into his father’s office, newspaper in hand. “Look at this!” he would say, his face flushed and his palms sweaty. “This is the last straw. You really must do something to combat this awful gossip.”
William always gave him the same answer. “Bramwell, fifty years from now it will matter very little indeed how these people treated us. It will matter a great deal how we dealt with the work of God.”
Now that William had published his plan of action—the way out—it was time to put it into practice. “We shall start with the matchmaking industry,” he declared.
This was not a random choice. In his investigations of London’s underbelly, the matchmaking industry had often come up. William had discovered that four thousand people were employed in the city making matches and matchboxes. The conditions they worked under were as bad as anything found in the British empire’s most “heathen” outpost. Whole families, mostly made up of widows and small children, worked in factories for sixteen hours a day, six days a week. The children never attended school. In fact, most of them were too tired at the end of the day to eat the slices of stale bread their mothers put in front of them.
As bad as the shift work was, William found something even worse—the matches themselves. To cut the prices to a bare minimum, the factory owners rejected red phosphorous match heads in favor of the cheaper yellow phosphorous. There was just one problem: The red chemicals were harmless, and the yellow ones, deadly. And it was a slow death. The yellow phosphorous attacked the worker’s jaws, mimicking a bad toothache. There was one sure way to tell whether it was a toothache or “phossy jaw.” All a worker had to do was to stand in a lighted room at night, then after a couple of minutes snuff out the light. If the worker did have phosphorous poisoning, the unfortunate person’s jaw would glow white in the darkness. Often the person’s hands and clothes would also glow with eerie luminescence. Once phossy jaw set in, the side of the victim’s face turned green, then black, then it filled up with pockets of puss, rotting from the inside out. Unable to eat and in excruciating pain, the worker starved to death.
William got to work setting an example as to how a matchmaking factory should be run. He drew up plans for a spacious and well-lit factory that would employ 120 workers. Donations started to arrive as sympathetic people read his book, and by May 1891 enough money had come in to get the factory up and running. He called the matches Lights in Darkest England, and of course no yellow phosphorous was ever used.
Within a year the factory was turning out more than a million boxes of matches. Better still, many members of Parliament and newspaper reporters toured the facility. As they did so, seeds were planted that would eventually lead to laws governing conditions in the workplace.
By the end of the year, In Darkest England and the Way Out had sold over 200,000 copies. All over England citizens continued to be at first scandalized by the revelations in the book and then drawn into debates about William Booth’s “way out.” Many were moved to give money, and the million pounds William planned to raise to help the poor swiftly flowed in.
Emboldened by the success of the match factory, William and the Salvation Army set about putting into practice a whole range of solutions he had outlined in the book. Work programs for the unemployed were started, and soon men were providing firewood for English hearths and making shaving mugs and tea caddies and cutlery with the Salvation Army’s Blood and Fire crest on it. Others made clothing to sell, and in Essex, by the Thames estuary, a farm colony was established. Here 260 men farmed three thousand acres of land. They raised stock, grew vegetables, and tended a kiln that turned out two million bricks a year.
Other countries were experimenting with William’s ideas, many of which the government of the state of Victoria in Australia implemented. And in Europe city officials donated buildings in the poorest slums to the Salvation Army with the mandate to house the unemployed and create work for them. The unofficial Salvation Army slogan became “Soup, Soap, and Salvation!” and much to William’s delight, their work continued to grow.
Chapter 14
Everything the Salvation Army Was About
After a year of turmoil and mourning, William Booth was ready for a new challenge. He wrote to a friend, “It is a curious piece of comfort that anything is better than stagnation and being left alone.”
William did not intend to be left alone. Ten thousand Salvation Army officers were now serving in twenty-six countries, and he intended to visit them all with encouraging words and evangelistic rallies. As 1891 rolled on, he handed over the daily running of the Salvation Army to Chief of Staff Bramwell, whom he had chosen years ago to become his successor. One of William’s last orders before he left was to recall Emma Booth-Tucker from India, where she had become very ill living among the lowest Indian caste. He sent twenty-three-year-old Lucy to India to replace her. Lucy had a respiratory disease, and the doctor recommended a warmer climate to help her breathing.
William chose America as his first port of call, and on July 25, 1891, he set sail from Southampton. Just as he had on his previous visit, William pushed himself at a punishing pace. He returned to England, and then it was off to Germany for a whirlwind tour. Seventy-two-year-old William Booth had never allowed ill health to stop him from preaching, and now he refused to allow age to do that either. Over the next four years, he continued to hold mass rallies around Europe and England.
In 1894 Lucy married a Swedish officer she had met in India. Like the rest of William’s sons-in-law, Lucy’s husband continued the tradition of adding Booth to his name, becoming Emmanuel Booth-Hellborg. After their wedding the couple returned to India to continue their harrowing work there, and in 1895 William went to visit them.
It was his first trip to Asia, and William was particularly impressed with the Salvation Army workers in India. Their work among one very violent group aptly called the “Crims” reminded him of the early days when Hallelujah Lassies with tambourines had faced down Skeleton Army thugs.
The Crims were a lawless lot. They did not believe in washing, and when their clothes wore out, they simply stole new ones to replace their rags. In fact, stealing occupied much of their time. It was said that thieving was so inbred in them that when Crim parents gave birth, the new baby’s name was registered straightaway in the police register of felons. The Crims were also brutal with each other. If a man was arrested and put in jail, his wife would take a new husband. When the old husband was released from jail, a fight to the death with the new husband would follow. For the Crims heaven was a place where there were no police stations and where they could gamble all day long. When a Crim man died, a tiny wedge of gold was placed in his mouth at the funeral so that he would have money to place his first bet in the afterlife.
The Crims also had a reputation for being uncontrollable. When they were put in jail for their crimes, they simply kept escaping, and outside of jail they had nothing but contempt for the police and the rule of law.
The government had become so frustrated with the Crims that several years before, Sir John Hewett, lieutenant governor of the United Provinces, challenged the fledgling Salvation Army corps in India to work with these people. The Salvation Army accepted the challenge and established a village where Crims could live and work. Indeed, the government compelled many of them to live in the Salvation Army’s village. On one occasion fifty Crims were brought to the village to live. The men were roped together, and because of their reputation for making trouble and escaping, 140 heavily armed policemen accompanied them. They released the fifty men into the custody of the five Salvation Army officers overseeing the village, who already had 250 other incorrigible Crims to watch over.
At first it was slow going. The Crims could see no reason why they should change their lifestyle. They argued, why work when you can steal? Still the Salvation Army officers were equally determined to proclaim the gospel to them and see their lives and the lives of their families and friends changed. Over time it began to dawn on the Crims that the Salvation Army officers were not like the police or the government, who simply wanted to control them and keep them away from the rest of society. Salvation Army officers cared about what happened to them. They took time to be with them, talk to them, and understand them. As a result trust was slowly built. The Crims began opening themselves to the message the officers had to give and began taking their advice. Work schemes started to spring up, and before long many of the men and women were making hessian bags for, of all places, the local government treasury.
By the time William arrived to observe the work of the Salvation Army among the Crims, they had become hardworking, self-reliant people. Indeed, William found it hard to believe they were the same notorious people he had heard so much about. At a church meeting he watched as Crims took turns reading verses from the Bible and praying fervently for the conversion of their family and friends. One old Crim woman came up to William and confided, “To think of God as One instead of millions of gods and spirits is so restful.”
A smile of satisfaction spread across William’s face. Restfulness, yes. He had seen that same restfulness in the lives of other poor and downtrodden people in England and America as they had embraced the gospel and allowed God to change their lives. And that, after all, was what the Salvation Army was all about.
While William was overseas, Bramwell did something drastic that eventually split the Booth family in two. As chief of staff he had the right to move officers anywhere in the world, and he chose William’s absence as a time to reshuffle several top-ranking Army officers—his brothers and sisters. Without any warning or consultation, he ordered Herbert in Canada to take command of the Salvation Army in Australia, while Eva, who served in London, was ordered to take command in Canada. Meanwhile Kate and Arthur Booth-Clibborn were moved from France to Holland, and Lucy and Emmanuel Booth-Hellborg were brought back from India to take over Kate and Arthur’s old command. Ballington and Maud Booth were ordered to return to England from the United States, where they would trade posts with Emma and Frederick Booth-Tucker, who were serving as joint foreign secretaries of the Salvation Army.
