William Booth

His biographer George Railton, an officer under him, gives his birth at Nottingham on 10 April 1829 (Railton, Life of William Booth ch. 1). He became a minister of the Methodist New Connexion, and left it when its Conference refused to release him for work as a travelling evangelist (Railton, Life of William Booth ch. 5). He was asked to take services in a tent in Whitechapel, and his biographer quotes him as telling his wife Catherine Booth that night that he had found his destiny among the poor of East London (Railton, Life of William Booth ch. 7). The mission he began there in July 1865 took the name Salvation Army at the end of 1878, and he took the title of General (Railton, Life of William Booth ch. 9 and table of dates).

In the preface to In Darkest England (1890) he writes that the sight of the poor stocking-weavers of his native town had moved him as a child, and that he had come to think the usual remedies of Christian philanthropy “lamentably inadequate” (Booth, In Darkest England preface). He died on 20 August 1912 (Railton, Life of William Booth frontispiece and table of dates). See William and Catherine Booth Found the Salvation Army.