LIFE of
The GOSPEL TRUTH WILLIAM BOOTH
FOUNDER and FIRST GENERAL
of the SALVATION ARMY
by
Harold Begbie
1920
In Two Volumes
Volume 1
Chapter 2
HIS PARENTAGE, A TALE OF THE HOUSE IN WHICH HE WAS BORN, AND THE CHARACTER OF HIS ENVIRONMENTS
1828-1838
IT is an interesting coincidence that the father of Herbert Spencer came from Derby into the neighbourhood of Nottingham at about the same time that the father of William Booth migrated from Belper to a Nottingham suburb. Both men speculated with their savings, moved by the same hope of fortune from the extraordinary prosperity of lace manufacture by machinery, and both were disappointed in this ambition. The father of Herbert Spencer withdrew before he was quite ruined; the father of William Booth clung stubbornly and avariciously to his speculations, finally dragging down his wife and family into a condition of penury.
In Herbert Spencer's Autobiography an amusing anecdote is recorded which shows that his father had something of the same spirit which animated William Booth. "If he saw boys quarrelling he stopped to expostulate; and he could never pass a man who was ill-treating his horse without trying to make him behave better." This incident is recorded: "While he was travelling (between Derby and Nottingham, I think) there got on the coach a man who was half intoxicated. My father entered into conversation with him, and sought to reform his habits, by pointing out the evil resulting from it (sic). After listening good-temperedly for a time the man replied, 'Well y' see, master, 'there must be sum o' all sorts, and I'm o' that sort.'"
If heredity were an exact science one might expect William Booth to be a son of George Spencer, and Herbert Spencer to be a son of Samuel Booth.
According to Mr. Phillimore, the author of County Pedigrees, distinct evidence runs back through the local register "associating the Booths with Belper at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth." Whether the family distinguished itself in any way we do not know, but before the days of Elizabeth the fifty-first Archbishop of York was a William Booth, who had his favourite residence at Southwell, which is close to Nottingham, and where the William Booth of our present history spent a part of his childhood. A brother of this older William Booth, Lawrence, became fifty-third Archbishop of York, and also made Southwell his chief residence. He was a grievous failure as Lord Chancellor, but it is written that he took no bribes. In private life, we are told, he was "an amiable and benevolent man, expending large sums of money on educational and charitable objects."
There seems to be no doubt that the family of General Booth is connected by marriage with that family of Gregory which gave in the person of Robert Gregory, a contemporary of General Booth, a popular and picturesque Dean to St. Paul's Cathedral. A William Booth of Belper, apparently the great-grandfather of the evangelist, was married in 1742 to Elizabeth Gregory; the bondsman at the first marriage of Samuel Booth in 1797 was Robert Gregory; and the evangelist, on being told late in life of this coincidence, said that he remembered being taken as a child to see an old lady who was always spoken of as "Aunt Gregory."
Samuel Booth, father of the evangelist, was born at Belper in 1775. It was in the town of Belper that Primitive Methodists were first called Ranters; and since Samuel Booth was nominally a Churchman, and a hard, taciturn, unemotional man, it may be assumed that he shared in this local contempt for the new sect. He appears to have been a nail manufacturer, for on the occasion of his marriage in 1797 to one Sarah Lockitt he described himself in the register as a nailer. Later he added to this business the trade of builder and the profession of architect, earning a fortune which enabled him to live in a fine house at Colston Bassett and to describe himself sometimes as a "gentleman," sometimes as a "yeoman." One child was born of this first marriage, a son named William, who died of consumption at the age of twenty-four, five years after his mother's death in 1819.
Mary Moss, the second wife of Samuel Booth, and mother of the evangelist, was born in 1791, six years before the first marriage of her husband. Like Samuel Booth, she came of Derbyshire stock, probably, as the name suggests and her wonderfully handsome face corroborates, of Jewish origin. She was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer. Her mother died when she was quite young, and she went to live with relations, the second marriage of her father not being conducive to a happy family life. She encountered Samuel Booth at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, whither he had gone to drink the waters as a cure for rheumatism. On his first proposal she refused him. He left the town indignant, but returned, and renewed his proposal, leaving her no peace till she accepted him. Of this marriage there were five children. The eldest son, a boy named Henry, died in his third year; the second child was a daughter, Ann, destined to exercise some little influence on the evangelist in his early years; the third child was the evangelist himself, named William after the son of the first marriage, who had died five years previously; and the two remaining children were girls--Emma, a lifelong invalid who died unmarried, aged forty, and Mary, who became Mrs. Newell, and died at the age of sixty-nine. William Booth, therefore, grew up the only son of the family, with an elder sister and two younger sisters.
Samuel Booth did not come to Nottingham until he had more or less impoverished himself by speculation, and in leaving Colston Bassett it is quite certain that he not merely hoped to retrieve his fortunes, but was positively obliged by his altered circumstances to seek a very much humbler way of living.
In those days Nottingham was just beginning to lose its ancient charm of a beautiful and pleasant market-town distinguished by a romantic history. Deering had boasted in 1750 that the town, "adorned with many stately new buildings, the castle on the left, and Sneinton and Wolwick Hills on the right, presents the traveller coming from the south with a surprisingly grand and magnificent prospect, in the framing of which it is hard to say whether Art or Nature has the greatest share; a prospect which puts even a person the most acquainted with all parts of England, to stand, to name its equal."
But a later writer had to paint a more sombre picture. He exclaims:
Could the worthy Doctor rise from the graveyard of St. Peter's with his flowing surtout, his powdered wig, three-cornered hat, high-heeled shoes, and silver buckles, and be placed in the Meadows, his surprise would be, that so fine a view should have been so woefully damaged; and those modern architectural embellishments, the chimney-stalks, the low and dingy habitations, wharf buildings, and other graceful erections, which so greatly mar the prospect, would doubtless provoke an expression of indignant disapproval.
The extraordinary prosperity of the lace industry, which attracted thousands of workmen and speculators into the town in 1823, suffered a check in 1825, and soon afterwards spent itself, plunging a large population into poverty, distress, and ruin. But the effect of the fever, or, as Spencer called it, "the mania," was horribly and permanently to disfigure the town. Herbert Spencer's father came to Nottingham as a lace manufacturer; William Booth's father came as a builder; and an entry in the Date Book in April, 1825, will give the reader some notion of how the speculative builders, even when they lost their money, succeeded in changing the character of the town:
The only feature in connection with the fever that remains for notice was the extraordinary difficulty in finding house accommodation for the amazing influx of population. Thousands of houses were erected by greedy speculators, who studied, not the convenience and health of those obliged to take them, but how they might best secure 20 per cent per annum for their outlay. Many more would have been built had not the prices of land and materials been extravagantly enhanced. Bricks, for example, rose from 3os. to £3 per thousand; and a plot of land on Gilliflower Hill, not quite an acre in extent, was sold by auction for 14,000. No sooner was a row of dwellings roofed and glazed, than the kitchen fires began to smoke and the rentals to commence. The inquiry was not so much, "What is the rent?" as, "Will you let me a house?" In one instance, a butcher who had been exhibiting from town to town, a "wonderful pig," in a common showman's caravan, ousted the porkine tenant, and stationing the vehicle in his garden at the back of York Street, actually let it as a dwelling-place for 2s. 3d. per week.
In spite of all this, it must not be supposed that the Nottingham of the present day resembles the Nottingham of William Booth's boyhood. There were certainly in his days "chimney-stalks," low and dingy habitations, wharf buildings, and those other "modern architectural embellishments," against which the chronicler in 1850 brought his sorrowful and quite ineffectual accusation. But one who knew William Booth's family in the 'forties, and who was brought up in Sneinton, visited the town with me in I913, going over as much of the old ground as was possible, and from beginning to end of our journeys he expressed amazement at the obliterating effects of recent development and the pervasive change, infinitely for the worse, which has taken place quite lately in the town's aspect.
In the time of William Booth's boyhood the streets of Nottingham ended where the Midland Station now stands. The area between that and the River Trent was known as the Meadows, which in spring were blue with crocuses. Paths led to Witford Ferry, with Clifton Woods beyond. The whole character of the scenery was tender and endearing. To William Booth the fields, the woods, and the river were full of pleasure, and to the end of his days he never spoke of these scenes without an instant lapse into gentleness and reverie.
Mary Howitt describes the Meadows in her autobiography:
The greatest beauty in the landscape was one peculiar to our meadows--our inimitable crocus-beds. It is impossible for any who do not see them to conceive their extraordinary beauty, shining out clear and bright in many places to the extent of twenty acres, one entire bed of lilac flowers. Not a faint tint of colouring, but as bright as the young green grass, with which they so charmingly contrast. There is another charm attached to these flowers besides their beauty, and it is the pleasure they afford to children. You see them flocking down, as if to a fair, all day long, rich and poor carrying their little baskets full, and their hands and pinafores full, gathering their thousands, and leaving tens of thousands behind them; for every day brings up a fresh supply.
Sneinton, which must be pronounced Snenton, was in the days of William Booth's boyhood a suburb of Nottingham; but with its windmills, wooded hills, generous views over a gentle valley, and fields that were yet unblackened by factory smoke, it preserved something of the character of a hamlet. It was, however, a crowded place in certain parts; and the house to which Samuel Booth moved on his coming into the district was closed in at the back by houses in the occupation of stockingers. William Booth could very easily escape to the fields and the woods: but in his home, from the first years of his infancy, he was in close contact with the noise and crowding of industrialism. Nevertheless, it must be borne in mind, as we have already said, that both the Sneinton and the Nottingham of those days were very different from the vast wilderness of ugly houses and dreary streets, of enormous factories and towering workshops, of roaring markets and incessant traffic, which now characterize the bigger, uglier, although more flourishing modern town.
The house in which William Booth was born is still standing, and is still known by its former designation, 12 Nottintone Place, Sneinton. It stands in a tree-shaded cul-de-sac, one of a small terrace of red-brick villas sloping slowly up to a modest knoll crowned by a substantial house which blocks the end of the street. The houses of this terrace are built back from the road, and are guarded by tall railings rising from a low brick wall. Number 12 is one of three houses which share a single gate in these railings, the path diverging inside the wall to the three separate front doors.
The interior of this dwelling deserves description. The front door opens straight into the parlour, without passage or lobby of any kind. An inner door, directly facing the front door, admits to a small square hall in the centre of the house, which is dimly lighted by a lantern in the roof invisible from below. A door in this tiny hall, opposite to the parlour door, gives entrance to a fair-sized scullery kitchen at the back; a staircase on the left descends to a dark basement and ascends to the two floors above.
On each floor there are two rooms, one in front and one at the back, the whole house being of an exceedingly narrow description. The parlour is some twelve feet by ten, and the room in which it is most probable William Booth was born is of like dimensions. From the outside, the house has a somewhat dignified appearance, and not at first does one realize that only three windows, one above another, belong to the front door, which has the three similar windows of the next house on its other side, after the manner of a double fronted house.
When I visited 12 Nottintone Place in the early months of 1913, making bold to ask if I might see the interior of No. 12, I found several pictures of General Booth hanging on the parlour walls. I inquired of the occupant, who was kind enough to let me see the house, whether she belonged to the Salvation Army. "Oh, yes," she replied with some warmth; "why, we owe everything to the Army!" Later she told me her story, and I think that never was tale so extraordinarily apt told in the birthplace of a great man.
Her husband had been a cashier for some years, she related, in the house of a Newcastle firm. He fell ill, seriously ill, and was unable to work. His employer kept his place open for eight months, and then felt himself obliged to make an end of the engagement. (He died, by the way, not long ago leaving over £400,000.) The clerk, his wife, and their six little children, in order to husband their slender resources and also to get back to health as soon as possible, removed to a village. The clerk grew slowly better in health, but his efforts to find employment were unavailing. Their money became exhausted. No one in the place knew anything about them. They were too sensitive to ask for help. They began to sell their furniture. Bit by bit everything went, till the family possessed nothing on this earth and no hope of anything beyond five pillows. They starved. The eyes of the poor woman filled with tears as she told me of that awful time. "I shall never forget those days," she exclaimed; "never, never! We had just five pillows, that was all, and our little ones were crying for bread."
One day the husband happened to pick up a copy of perhaps the most impudent and unworthy journal published in London. The copy contained a violent attack upon General Booth, charging him, among other things, with gross hypocrisy, and asserting that he did not spend upon the poor and needy the money he received for their assistance. The clerk, struck by this article, spent his last two coppers on two stamps, and wrote one letter to General Booth and another to the proprietor of this paper, telling his story and asking for help.
"By return of post," said the woman, "we got a letter from General Booth--such a kind letter!--saying it was shameful that a man with references such as my husband's should be out of work, and telling him that an Officer would call and inquire into his case the next day. We never heard from the paper at all! But next day an Officer of the Army called; and the Army took charge of my children, they gave my husband work, and they carried me off to one of their nursing homes, where they wouldn't let me do a stroke of work, though I begged them to; they said that I must be nursed back to health and strength. It was wonderful. I never experienced such love in my life. Oh, how kind they were! Fancy, not letting me do any work, not a stroke! Ah, I learnt much in that Home. And, wasn't it a funny thing?--soon after they sent us to Nottingham this house fell vacant, and nothing would content my husband, who had also been converted in the Army, until we had taken it. So here we are, living by chance in the very birthplace of the dear General, all Salvationists, and my husband working heart and soul for the Army,--we who must have died of starvation but for General Booth!"
In this house, then, William Booth, the greatest religious force of modern days and one of the most picturesque and heroic figures of the nineteenth century, was born on the 10th of April, 1829--the birthday of Grotius and William Hazlitt. Nineteen years afterwards, in connection with a Chartist insurrection, the name of this day became a phrase, "almost the only one applied in England, in the manner of our French neighbours, as a denomination for an event"; but happily, as the chronicle records, "the Tenth of April remained only a memory of an apprehended danger judiciously met and averted."
Two days after William Booth's birth, no time being lost at that period to secure either immediate regeneration or a Christian burial in case of death, the infant was baptized at Sneinton Church. The entry in the parish register reads as follows:
William, son of Samuel Booth, Nottintone Place, gentleman, and Mary his wife. Ceremony performed by George Wilkins, D.D., Perpetual Curate, Vicar of St. Mary's; baptized 12th April, 1829.
Samuel Booth is described by one who knew him as "tall and fine-looking." He was noticeable for dressing in the fashion of the Quakers, wearing a drab-cloth suit, a cut-away coat, and knee-breeches. Very little is known about him, and what is known only tends to deepen the mystery which appears to have surrounded him in life, even to his own children. On meeting a Sneinton contemporary in his extreme old age, the first greeting of General Booth was a question concerning his father. "Tell me something," he said, taking his friend's two hands in his and holding them vigorously in his own, "about my father; I want to know about him." From a paper he left behind, as we shall see, it is quite evident that he had no clear notions in this matter. He spoke often, and eloquently, of his mother; seldom of his father, and then with a note of uncertainty--sometimes with unwilling harshness, sometimes with a too evident effort to discover a virtue. "Criminal instincts?" he exclaimed to me once in a discussion on heredity; "why, we have all got them. I have got them. My father was a Grab, a Get. He had been born in poverty. He determined to grow rich; and he did. He grew very rich, because he lived without God and simply worked for money; and when he lost it all, his heart broke with it, and he died miserably. I have inherited the Grab from him. I want to get." And his arm shot forward, the hand clawing at the air, to signify that he wanted to "grab" souls and get for them the treasure of eternal life. But there were other occasions when he sought to show his father in a kinder light, though his honesty always forced him at the last to emphasize the avariciousness and worldliness which had embittered his own childhood and brought his mother to suffering and poverty.
From the papers and memoranda left behind by the son, it would be quite possible to present two entirely different portraits of this father, the one almost pleasing, the other almost forbidding; and I think it is significant of William Booth's character, an index indeed to his whole life, that there should be this perplexing contradiction in his very earliest memories, in his very latest judgments. For William Booth was always struggling against the two antithetical qualities of his nature--a loving, warm-hearted, generous sympathy, and a rigorous, unsparing, religious honesty. At one moment he hungered to see only the good in human nature; at the next, he was stung to a passionate indignation by its badness---its deadness to God. In his generous moods he would speak with a broad and embracing charity, a large and kindly tolerance of mankind; in his moods of realism and intellectual honesty he could not find words sharp and piercing enough for the evil of the world.
It is also necessary to keep in mind, not only as touching his memories of his father and mother, but also in many other matters where his statements are under review, that William Booth belonged to a period when phrases were adopted without analysis and language was often used with an uncritical liberty. I have been over many of the religious magazines of the period, and studied numerous sermons by preachers of some standing at that time, and in numerous instances I have been struck, occasionally shocked, by the intellectual poverty, the rhetorical bombast, and the disagreeable sanctimoniousness which characterized much of the religious writing and preaching of that generation. William Booth never used a cant phraseology; he was one of the most honest, downright, and straightforward men that ever lived; but in his impatience to be at work saving the lost and rescuing the sorrowful, he did permit himself to use whatever language came quickest to his service, and seldom, I think, possibly never, set himself to acquire a nice carefulness in his terms, a judicious and a critical handling of the current phraseology.
"My father," he says in one place, "appears to have been a man of considerable force of character--of a high spirit, and a noble sense of truth and honour, combined with a strong desire to get on in the world." In another place he says that his father "knew no greater gain or end than money... used to task my patience to the utmost capacity by making me read to him . . . early part of his life spent in making money, latter part in losing it . . . a very unsatisfactory life." And speaking of his own childhood he says that he never received any help from his father, and declares that his early days were "blighted and made more or less wretched" by the ruinous condition of his father's affairs.
When he said that his father possessed "a noble sense of truth and honour," he was no doubt thinking of how Samuel Booth "became a bondsman, for a considerable amount, for a tradesman, who afterwards became bankrupt, and left him to pay the money, which he did, every farthing." "The punctual discharge of this liability," says William Booth, "precipitated the breakdown of his fortune. It was the last feather." In recalling this act, evidently at a generous moment, he seized the opportunity to speak of his father in such a manner as clouded out the sadder qualifies.
On the other hand, in moments of strict and courageous honesty, eager to impress upon men the danger of a life devoted to money-getting, he forgot the act which he could praise, and thrust forward, chiefly as a warning to others, only those miseries and deprivations which his father's avarice had inflicted upon his mother, his sisters, and himself.
One judges from these statements, when they are brought into relation with the impression made upon other people by those early days in the Booth family, that Samuel Booth was a man of business, honest where the law was concerned, just in his dealings, but with little conscience in his speculations; a man rather silent, selfish, and unfriendly; in his later years not kind to children, not interested in his family; dead to culture, indifferent to society, careless of religion.
William Booth's notes about his father suggest other qualities. I find, for instance, these disjointed memoranda:
Incident to show his enterprise. The purpose of his life to get money. Character. Perseverance. Enterprise. Schemes: Enlisting militia in the large towns. Shipping crockery to Holland. Advice to me against partnership. No scholar. His schooling very short. Expelled the school because on some occasion put his schoolmaster to shame by reckoning faster with his head than he, the schoolmaster, did with his slate. This capacity was remarkably developed. Religiously blind. Never remember him in a place of worship. Insisted on our regular attendance at church. No concern until his last illness.
Elsewhere he says:
He began his acquisitive career when but a child, and in many ways, and for many years persevered in it, until he succeeded in getting together a considerable fortune, which he invested mostly in tenement house property. By this he reckoned on having done a good thing for his family. When I was born he was looked upon as a gentleman and was spoken of by that designation by the people about him. But about the date of my birth, bad times set in, heavy losses followed one on the heels of the other, making in early days a season of mortification and misery.
There is very much the same difficulty when we come to his remembrance of his mother. At one moment he speaks of her in a manner that contradicts the memory of one who remembers her in his childhood, and would almost persuade one to think that Mary Booth had been to him the most gracious, helpful, and perfect mother. In this case, we think, the contradiction arises not only from William Booth's' natural anxiety, in his most generous moments, to dwell upon only the good and beautiful side of his mother, but from his seeing in the Mary Booth of later life the Mary Booth of his tragic childhood.
It appears to me quite evident that William Booth's childhood was unhappy. I think he got no help at all from his father, and very little encouragement from his mother. Mary Booth appears to have been absorbed during the whole of her married life in the anxieties and disasters of her husband's speculations. She seems to have felt her poverty acutely, and to have shrunk from the world in consequence. She worked for her children, she nursed her husband in his last illness, she did all she could to avert the final catastrophe of ruin; but she was a sombre, sad, silent, and tragic figure in that threatened home. William Booth says that he got no help, as regards school work, in his home. He says that no one told him anything about religion. He speaks of his early days as "a season of mortification and misery." He makes it clear that his childhood was dark and unhappy.
But when he comes, later in life, to write of his mother, it is as if he were describing an angel:
I had a good mother. So good she has ever appeared to me that I have often said that all I know of her life seemed a striking contradiction of the doctrine of human depravity. In my youth I fully accepted that doctrine, and I do not deny it now; but my patient, self-sacrificing mother always appeared to be an exception to the rule. I loved my mother. From infancy to manhood I lived in her. Home was not home to me without her. I do not remember any single act of wilful disobedience to her wishes. When my father died I was so passionately attached to my mother that I can recollect that, deeply though I felt his loss, my grief was all but forbidden by the thought that it was not my mother who had been taken from me. And yet one of the regrets that has followed me to the present hour is that I did not sufficiently value the treasure while I possessed it, and that I did not with sufficient tenderness and assiduity, at the time, attempt the impossible task of repaying the immeasurable debt I owed to that mother's love.
It is plain that the Mary Booth who overawed her daughter's only friend--as we shall see presently--who shrank from the world, who invited nobody to her house, who was silent and frightening, and "like a duchess," did not become the Mary Booth of her son's glowing tribute until after the death of her husband, when the end was reached of the long and dreadful tension wrought by impending calamity which had ruined her married life. She was, doubtless, kind to her children, but in their earliest years she was clearly not a mother who watched over their education, sought their innermost confidence, and deepened their sense of religion. "She had no time to attend to me," is one of William Booth's confessions. Afterwards, no doubt, when the crisis was over and the ruin had come, she came out from the cloud, and shone upon their lives with a beauty and a warmth and a solicitude which wakened her son's gratitude. But it is clear from the evidence, and important to remember, that William Booth's earliest years were dark and sorrowful, and that in spite of a kind mother he went hungry and thirsty for something that was never given.
Ann Booth's only girl friend was a Miss Sarah Butler, now Mrs. Osborne, who is still living at a great age--she was two years older than General Booth--and happily for herself, and this history, with all her faculties unimpaired. She tells me that there was always a mystery about Samuel Booth. Mystery, she says, pervaded the whole house. Ann was sent to the best ladies' school in Nottingham, but she made no friends there except Sarah Butler, and Sarah Butler tells me that on no occasion when she visited the family did she encounter another visitor. "They gave me the impression, even as a girl," she says, "of a very proud and very reserved family who felt their position acutely, and wished to keep to themselves. Ann sometimes spoke to me of her parents' former home near Colston Bassett, giving me to understand from her mother's description of it that it was 'a very beautiful place.' She never mentioned her father. I scarcely ever saw him, but I know that he made no friends in the town."
Mary Booth, the mother of the evangelist, is described by Ann's friend as "a tall, proud woman--very proud and austere." She was handsome, dignified, and splendid; some one describing her as "like a duchess." Her eyes are said to have been very remarkable, and her portrait even in old age confirms this memory. "She had the most wonderful eyes," says Ann's friend, "the most piercing eyes I ever saw. You could tell when she was looking at you !" But she, too, appears to have been reserved and silent. "I never remember her speaking to me all the years I knew her and called at her house," says this one remaining friend of the family. "Very often when I went to call for Ann she would open the door to me; and she would stand aside for me to enter, close the door, and then pointing to a chair in the parlour, say, 'Sit down, my dear,' quite kindly but without any friendliness or any attempt at intimacy, going out to send Ann to me, and not returning to bid me good-bye. She was not so great a mystery to me as Ann's father, but I was always in dread of her, and felt that she was different from other people. I am quite certain that Ann felt the same thing about her. She never liked to talk about either of them. There was something about the family which puzzled me, and puzzles me still."
This effect produced upon the child's mind seems to have had no other origin than in the reserve natural to many people who come down in the world. The Booths had been well off; they were now reduced to poverty; they desired that as few people as possible should know of their condition.
Ann Booth, according to the same authority, was a very sweet, amiable, and gentle creature. But she was shy and never made friends at school. She took after her mother and was good-looking. She always had a smile in her eyes, and spoke in a gentle voice, rather timorously. She adored her brother William, as did the other sisters, and in his youth exercised some control over him, but she was not in any way a favourite sister. That William Booth returned this love of his sisters, and never forgot their devotion, is attested by the fact that on calling to see Mrs. Osborne in his old age he quite begged her to go and see his married sister, Mrs. Newell, making this request almost the object of his visit, saying that it was the one favour he had to ask her. "She is lonely," he said; "she is sometimes sad; it will be a great kindness if you go and see her." It is interesting to know that at one time people in the neighbourhood thought that William Booth would marry a sister of Sarah Butler, who shared his religious enthusiasms, was sometimes consulted by him, and to whom he showed more attention than was his custom to the other devotees who attended his earliest meetings.
At the back of the house in Nottintone Place, as we have already said, and pressing close up to the back-yard, were dwellings occupied by framework knitters. These houses are standing at the present day, and throughout the modern streets of Sneinton and Nottingham similar houses are still to be seen. They are two-storied, red-brick dwelling-houses, topped by a working story which gives them their peculiar character and makes them easily recognizable. Instead of the ordinary square or oblong windows of the two lower floors, the windows of this upper story are of greater breadth than height, and are usually glazed with more or less opaque glass. Behind these windows William Booth would have seen from his earliest years the dim spectral figures of stockingers at their frames and have heard all day long the noise of the machines: hockety--hockety--shee, hockety--hockety--shee. On one side of his house were the decent, pleasant, and somewhat pretentious villas of a suburban terrace--very quiet, sleepy, uneventful; at the back, those dismal noisy tenements of the workers, who so often starved and so frequently filled the streets with the clamour of incipient revolution. It was indeed a case in this house of a "Queen Anne front, and a Mary Ann back."
When the family lost money, they moved to a broader street but a poorer neighbourhood. Opposite to the new home in Sneinton Road, the site of which is now occupied by a picture palace, was a smallware shop, kept by a remarkable old man called Grandfather Page, and on one side of this shop was a narrow entry leading to a back-yard which contained a slaughter-house. At every turn there were dingy habitations occupied by weavers; traffic passed continually to and from the market-place; numerous public houses hung their signs over the uneven pavements; in every way it was a move for the worse, another comedown in the world.
Some way up this road, and not far from Nottintone Place, was The Paul Pry Inn, which still swings its sign, bearing the legend I hope I don't intrude. A young lover, after parting from his sweetheart late one night, was in so fervorous a mood of happiness that soon after passing this inn, all shuttered and asleep, he threw his stick into the air and accidentally broke one of the upper windows in the private house next door--the noise causing a momentary panic. His apologies, however, were accepted, and his excuse was considered more than adequate; but the story spread throughout the district and caused a good deal of amusement at the cost of emotionalism. Another and more tragic incident occurred close to the second house of William Booth. A number of boys were playing in the streets with oyster shells, and one of them flinging a shell harder than he intended struck a man in the face, cutting out his right eye.
William Booth, from the very first, was a ringleader and a captain among his fellows. "Wilful Will" was his nickname, and a very old lady, who perfectly remembers him at this time, said to me with considerable decision, "Billy was always rather forward--not aggressive, not violent, you understand, but forward;--yes, Billy was a forward lad." He was noticeable in appearance by reason of his long legs and his long nose. His friends spoke of his nose as "the Wellington." In the game of soldiers, a game which he played in his childhood more than any other, he was usually "the captain"--an omen, perhaps, of his afterlife. In spite of physical delicacy--he was outgrowing his strength--he appears to have been a leader in games and a boy of remarkable spirit.
Grandfather Page, who kept the smallware shop in Sneinton Road, remembered Samuel Booth striding into his premises one day demanding a cane. "I'm going," he announced, "to give my son the best hiding he ever had in his life." Grandfather Page, who exercised a wonderful religious influence in the neighbourhood, and who seems to have been a most amiable and gracious person, replied to this announcement: "Mr. Booth, you must not strike your son while you are in this temper. You are in no fit mood to punish a child. You must wait till your anger is gone." Samuel Booth bridled his rage, returned to his house, and said to William, "You may go and thank old Mr. Page for saving you from a good hiding." What the offence of William had been we do not know; but one perceives that he had spirit enough to aggravate and perhaps to withstand a father who inspired almost everybody with a sense of awe and who was choleric in his bouts of rheumatism.
It is interesting to know that the old man who saved William Booth from a flogging, and whose influence on his life is nowhere recorded, had already in those days started a system of religious services in the slums. This Mr. Page had been a rich man, a racing man, and a lover of wrestling. On his conversion he surrendered his business to his sons, and lived with great simplicity, devoting all his time to religious work. But, to the surprise of every one, quite late in life he fell in love with a young girl in his Sunday School and married her. In order to support the new family that came to him, the old man took a humble smallware shop in Sneinton, and there made his home. He had a garden far away from the house, being a great lover of flowers, and in this garden was a summer-house where he made tea for himself and sat meditating on religion. Later in life one of his rich sons by the first marriage sent a carriage to the smallware shop every afternoon, and the old man would drive up to his garden. When he became blind a rope was slung beside the garden path, and he would walk to and fro among the flowers he could no longer see, singing hymns, and guiding himself by a sliding hand-support on the rope. He used to say, "I have been walking by faith for over forty years, and have not known what it is to have a gloomy hour." He worked among "the neglected, the sick, and the sorrowful," started a ragged school in the slums, and prayer meetings in the cottages of the poor. During race meetings he stood at the roadside distributing tracts.
William Booth, although he makes no mention of Grandfather Page, was perhaps influenced by that gentle and unselfish life, for the old man was regarded as a character, and lived exactly opposite the Booths' house in Sneinton Road. When William Booth crossed the road to thank this old man for saving him from chastisement, there was probably a conversation, or a few words, which may have left some impression. In any case it is certain that William Booth must often have heard in boyhood of the strange work which Grandfather Page was doing so effectually in the slums of Nottingham.
He played hockey in the streets with a wooden nog, much to the annoyance of the village constable, who was a cobbler; he entered into the fun of Plough Mondays, when men dressed up in ox-skins with horns on their heads went about the town thrusting their faces into doorways and windows demanding money--very much after the fashion of Mussalmans during the feast of Mohurrum. Later he took to reading the poetry of Kirke White, to devouring three-volume novels, and to fishing--some one remembering how he once exploded with rage at the breaking of his rod. He may have seen the prize-fighter Bendigo--who was the brother of a well-known optician in the town--walking about the streets; a son of Grandfather Page, who once spoke to Bendigo when the mighty man was fishing in the Trent, became in consequence a hero among his mates. One may be quite certain that "Wilful Will" shared in all the games and excitements of Sneinton boys, and that he spent as much time as any of them in the market, in the fields, and on the riverside, having little love for the home which was dark with misery and oppressive with the sense of ruin. His ardent, passionate, and impulsive nature made him a leader among his companions, and looking back on those days, when there was no religious influence on his character, no restraining hand upon his tendencies, and no attempt of any kind to shape him nobly, he exclaimed, "I have often wondered I did not go straight to hell."
But his faults were evidently of no very serious nature, for he was able to declare with a good conscience, "I have heard my mother say that I never caused her an hour's real anxiety in her life." It would seem that his chief deprivation lay in the absence from his childhood of any high and gracious influence, with the consequent danger that he might drift into a dull and useless manhood, if not into actual wickedness.
Here was a child of fiery temper and impetuous will growing up without definite guidance, forming his own opinions from the chaos of ideas which presented themselves without explanation to his mind, seeking adventure with the most spirited boys of his acquaintance, taking the lead in every game and every device for killing time which these companions could hit upon, and hating more than anything else on earth the black unmoving cloud that darkened the dullness of his home. What could come of such a childhood? What could the Nottingham of that epoch make of this young citizen? One does not see the necessity for going "straight to hell"; but very devious, obscure, and improbable at present is the path to glory.
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