General William Booth
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General William Booth |
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|---|---|
 |
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| 1st General of The Salvation Army | |
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In office 1865–1912 |
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| Preceded by | Position Established |
| Succeeded by | Bramwell Booth |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
10 April 1829 Sneinton, Nottingham, England |
| Died | 20 August 1912 (aged 83) Hadley Wood, London, England |
| Spouse(s) | Catherine Mumford |
| Children |
Bramwell Ballington Kate Emma Herbert Marie Evangeline Lucy |
William Booth (10 April 1829 – 20 August 1912) was a British Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878–1912). The Christian movement with a quasi-military structure and government founded in 1865 has spread from London, England, to many parts of the world and is known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid. In 2002, Booth was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll.
William Booth was born in Sneinton, Nottingham, the second son of five children born to Samuel Booth and his second wife, Mary Moss. Booth's father was relatively wealthy by the standards of the time, but during William's childhood, the family descended into poverty. In 1842, Samuel Booth, who could no longer afford his son's school fees, apprenticed the 13-year-old William Booth to a pawnbroker. Samuel Booth died on 23 September 1842.
Two years into his apprenticeship Booth was converted to Methodism. He then read extensively and trained himself in writing and in speech, becoming a Methodist lay preacher. Booth was encouraged to be an evangelist primarily through his best friend, Will Sansom. Sansom and Booth both began in the 1840s to preach to the poor and the sinners of Nottingham, and Booth would probably have remained as Sansom's partner in his new Mission ministry, as Sansom titled it, had Sansom not died of tuberculosis, in 1849.
When his apprenticeship ended in 1848, Booth was unemployed and spent a year looking in vain for work. In 1849, Booth reluctantly left his family and moved to London, where he again found work with a pawnbroker. Booth tried to continue lay preaching in London, but the small amount of preaching work that came his way frustrated him, and so he resigned as a lay preacher and took to open-air evangelising in the streets and on Kennington Common.
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