Booth, William

English founder of the Salvation Army (1878), and its first ‘general’.

Booth was born in Nottingham. He experienced religious conversion at the age of 15. In 1865 he founded the Christian Mission in Whitechapel, east London, which became the Salvation Army in 1878. In Darkest England, and the Way Out (1890) contained proposals for the physical and spiritual redemption of the many down-and-outs. His wife Catherine Booth, whom he married in 1855, became a public preacher in about 1860, initiating the ministry of women. Their eldest son, William Bramwell Booth (1856–1929), became chief of staff of the Salvation Army in 1880 and was general from 1912 until his deposition in 1929.