William Booth

William Booth (10 April 1829 – 20 August 1912) was an English Methodist preacher who, along with his wife, Catherine, founded the Salvation Army and became its first General (1878–1912). This Christian movement, founded in 1865, has a quasi-military structure and government and has spread from London to many parts of the world. It is one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid.

Early life

William Booth was born in Sneinton, Nottingham, the second son of five children born to Samuel Booth and his second wife, Mary Moss. His birthplace is now a museum. Booth's father was a nailmaker and builder from Belper in Derbyshire 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 to a pawnbroker. Samuel Booth died on 23 September 1842.

Two years into his apprenticeship Booth had a religious conversion. He then read extensively and trained himself in writing and in speech, becoming a Methodist local preacher. Booth was encouraged to be an evangelist primarily through his best friend, Will Sansom. Both Sansom and Booth 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, if Sansom had 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 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.