William decided that he and Catherine would continue their preaching with or without the backing of the Methodists, or anyone else for that matter. In January 1863 they left the children once again in the care of Catherine’s mother and went to Wales. As expected, the doors to all the major churches were closed to them. Instead of holding the revival meetings in churches, William hired a circus tent for the purpose and advertised the gathering. Many people came, including drunks, pickpockets, and bookies. William immediately saw the advantage of holding such meetings outside of established churches. “Godless surroundings attract godless people,” he told Catherine joyfully.
During these meetings William also discovered that although the people in the tent listened to him as he preached, they paid rapt attention when one of their own stood and told the audience his or her story. A former drunk testified how he had found peace for the first time in his life. As a result he had gone home and poured a barrel of beer out on the street. His neighbors had asked what he was doing, and he told them. Now half of those who lived on his street were seated in the meeting. Time after time, poachers, horse racers, and wife beaters stood up to tell how God had changed their hearts and their behavior.
All of this confirmed to William that he was on the right path. For the next two years, he and Catherine preached at all sorts of venues around England and Wales. Two Welsh brothers, John and Richard Cory, who had become rich from coal mining and shipping ventures, offered to help with the Booths’ living expenses. William and Catherine sent for their children, and together the family lived the life of itinerant preachers. In the spring of 1864 Catherine gave birth to a sixth baby, a girl whom they named Marian.
William found himself back in London in July 1865. The family had taken up temporary residence in the suburb of Hammersmith. On Sunday afternoon, July 2, William set out from the house for the eight-mile walk to Mile End Road in London’s East End. As he walked, he was shocked by what he saw. The city was in an even worse state than he had remembered. As he approached the East End, the row houses were dirty and dilapidated. Often as many as forty or fifty people were living in one house. They had little or no running water and used the gutter as a bathroom. And every fifth store in the area was a gin shop serving rotgut liquor to anyone who could pay. These shops had special steps at the bar so that children, many younger than five years old, could step up and buy penny glasses of gin. It was not uncommon to see these children passed out on the street or suffering the effects of delirium tremens (DTs), a sure sign of alcoholism. Their tiny livers were much more affected by alcohol than those of the adults who callously introduced it to them. Such scenes both shocked and saddened William, who longed to do something to help the people trapped in these deplorable conditions.
William’s destination that day was an abandoned Quaker burial ground in Whitechapel, where he had been hired by the East End Revival Society to hold a series of tent meetings. As he picked his way around the broken pavement and heaps of garbage, he imagined he would be holding revival meetings there for six weeks before moving on to another town or city. William had no idea as he walked along that he was about to step into his destiny.
Chapter 7
A Lifetime’s Worth of Work
“I am glad to meet you, Mr. Booth,” said a Quaker man who was waiting outside the tent. “My name is Charles York, and I have everything ready for you. Come and see. I’m sorry, but I’ll be out of town from tomorrow on, so you will have to find someone to help you set up the benches for the meetings or do it yourself.”
William stepped inside the old circus tent. Its sides were worn thin enough to see daylight through them, and several of the corners had been ripped and repaired. Rows of wooden benches were set out on the bare ground.
“This will do fine!” William said.
“I certainly hope so,” Charles York replied. He then dropped his voice low before continuing. “Our Quaker meeting voted to allow this burial ground to be used for a year. So far the tent has been up for six months. Various preachers have come and gone, but they have made little impact on the people who live around here. There are over a million of them, poor souls, who live within a mile of this tent—and nine out of ten of them have never once heard the gospel.” He shook his head for emphasis as he spoke.
William stood in silence for a moment, looking at the tent. It probably seated two hundred people at most, but there were over a million people less than a five-minute walk from where he was standing! Excitement surged through him. This was the kind of challenge he was looking for—the kind of challenge he could give his life to.
William prepared for the first service as best he could. He talked a young lamplighter into helping him string the naphtha lights in the tent and lashed the flaps down.
For William all the preparation work was worth it, and when he stood to speak early that evening, people trickled in to hear what he had to say. A young girl carried a basket of wilting flowers she was trying to sell, an older woman sat near the back darning a pair of socks, and a group of dirty-faced boys sat sheepishly near the front.
Soon William launched into a simple sermon. “Imagine a man going down a river in a boat,” he began. “He is headed for the Niagara Falls, but he does not know what is ahead of him, nor does he care. The weather is nice, the sun is shining, and he’s not worried about a thing. He paddles out into the stream, and suddenly he feels the current tugging him. He is going, going…”
William paused for dramatic effect and leaned over as if he were peering down a cavernous hole. “My God!” he yelled. “The boater has gone over—and he never pulled at an oar! That is the way people are damned: They go on, they have no time, they don’t think—they neglect salvation—and they are lost!”
From there William went on to explain how Jesus offers salvation to anyone who asks for it. By the time the sermon was over, the tent was half full, and six people were standing at the penitent rail, ready to give their lives to God. One of these six people was a quiet man who introduced himself as James Flawn. He fidgeted with his cap as he talked to William.
“I own a small tearoom at Pudding Lane,” James began, “and I want to help. I’m not much good at talking or the like, but I know how to arrange chairs. If you’re needing someone, I’d be willing to straighten up the benches before and after each meeting, sir.”
William thanked him for his offer and then spent over an hour with the new converts, explaining to them the basic principles of Christian living. Before setting out on the eight-mile walk home, he told them that he hoped they would return for the following day’s meeting.
William burst into the house and swept Catherine into a hug. “I have found my destiny!” he shouted. “I have found a place where there is so much human misery in such a small space that there is a lifetime’s worth of work there for me! Why go farther afield for audiences when they lie at our doorstep? Oh, Catherine, this takes me back to the days when I was an apprentice by day and a preacher by night. Now I see I was never meant to preach inside a church. Where’s the challenge in that? It’s only in keeping the congregation awake. But the people I preached to today were awake. True, they were fidgeting, heckling, spitting, and arguing—but they were awake!”
Catherine laughed. “I have seldom seen you so excited, William! I have something to tell you as well.”
William drew quiet immediately. “What is it, my dear?”
“Today the trustees at the Eyre Arms Assembly asked me to conduct a series of meetings for them.”
“How wonderful!” William replied. “God is using both of us in London, though our congregations are as different as I can imagine.”
Catherine nodded in agreement. “I am sure that this will open the door for me to preach to some of the wealthiest men in London while you are laboring in the slums. Let’s trust that God is in both works.”
“And what about your health?” William questioned. “Won’t your back get sore standing for that long?”
Catherine smiled. “My back hurts whether I stand or not, and besides, the baby’s not due until Christmas. I can’t put my life on hold until then. There is so much to do. Thank goodness we have a nanny now, and I’m sure my mother will help out when the time comes. Though I’m not sure about little Marian. The doctor says she’s made a full recovery from the smallpox, but she doesn’t seem the same as she did before she got ill. Somehow she doesn’t seem as alert as before,” Catherine concluded as she pulled a wisp of hair back into her bun. “We must trust God and go on.”
William nodded. “We’ve come this far, and with God’s help we shall trust Him with our future.” Then he could not resist getting back to the topic of the tent meeting. “You should have seen it! So many opportunities, I hardly know where to begin!”
Over the next few weeks William came home at all hours of the night with wonderful stories to tell Catherine. There was the conversion of “Mother” Moore, a Whitechapel charwoman who was hardly ever sober. She came to a meeting and swore she would never drink again. When her old drinking companions offered her alcohol, she would chide them, “I can drink from the wells of salvation—and so can you!” After her conversion Mother Moore came to every one of William’s meetings, where she often helped James Flawn set out the benches and stack them away afterward.
There was opposition to William’s preaching, but William thrived on action and did everything he could to draw attention to his meetings. Sometimes, when the crowd was small, he would gather his converts and march down to a pub. They would stand outside and sing hymns until the drinkers came out to see what the commotion was. They would then invite everyone to march back to the tent with them to hear William preach. This often worked, and it wasn’t long before the pub owners despised William. They paid young boys to slash the tent and throw rotten fruit and garbage at him. None of this bothered William, even when he was pushed and shoved to the ground. He merely stood up again and continued preaching where he had left off.
One of the early converts at William’s East End revival meetings was Peter Monk, a brawny Irish boxer. Now that he was a Christian, he did not want to fight anymore, and seeing the way William was being treated, he appointed himself William’s personal bodyguard. He walked with William the eight miles to and from the East End each day. During the services he sat watchfully in the front row. If any of the local gangs of boys burst into the meeting intent on making trouble, they soon found themselves in Peter Monk’s strong grip.
July turned into August, and August into September. Regrettably, the tent had been slashed and mended so many times that it was useless for keeping out the autumn cold. However, since William was more convinced than ever that this area of the city was where he belonged, he persuaded the East London Christian Mission to rent a building for him to preach in instead of the tent. Not many buildings were available to choose from, and at first they could hire a building to hold only Sunday services in. The building was a dance hall on New Road, in Whitechapel. At four o’clock on Sunday mornings, William, Bramwell, and a small band of converts arrived at the dance hall to clean up after the Saturday night dance and set out three hundred chairs for the morning service. At the end of the day, after the service was over, they had to stack away the chairs.
November saw another move for the Booth family. Catherine found a house for rent in Hackney, which was not far from the East End. The family, along with their Irish nanny, Mary Kirkton, moved into Number 1 Cambridge Lodge Villa.
After the family moved into the new house, the older boys began attending the local school, though they did not have an easy time of it. Bramwell found it especially difficult to fit in. He was a tall, shy boy who was partially deaf. Soon after starting school, he came home one day bloody from head to toe. As he staggered in the door, William rushed to help him to a chair. “What happened?” he asked in a loud voice so that Bramwell could hear.
