William Booth Birthplace Museum, Sneinton, Nottingham

William Booth (1829–1912), the founder of the Salvation Army, was born in this house in Notintone Place, Nottingham. This is now a museum not open at specific times, so I took advantage of the Heritage Open Day last week to visit it for the first time. 

This bust of William Booth is the first thing that greets the visitor in the entrance hall.

 

This room was perhaps the parlour, and, like several other rooms, has been furnished to give an idea of how a lower middle class household such that of Samuel and Mary's – the parents of William – would have looked. Here, guests would have been entertained and games played.

 

The kitchen.

 

Perhaps this would have been the nursery, the bedroom and playroom for the Booth children.

 

Perhaps the bedroom where William Booth was born.

 

In William's childhood his father Samuel was downwardly mobile and bankrupt by 1842. At 13 (two years before his conversion to Methodism) William was obliged to begin earning a living, and started by working for the pawnbroker Francis Eames.

 

William married Catherine Mumford (1829–90), who was to be known as 'mother of the Army', in 1855.

 

In a display cabinet in the museum is William's influential book In Darkest England and The Way Out (1890), which compared the social situation of industrial Britain to Africa.

 

In London, on a central reservation in Mile End Road near the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, there are two monuments to Booth within less than 200 yards of each other.

 

'WILLIAM BOOTH

FOUNDER

AND

FIRST GENERAL

OF

THE SALVATION ARMY

 

COMMENCED THE WORK

OF

THE SALVATION ARMY

ON MILE END WASTE

JULY 1895.'

 

 

'HERE

WILLIAM BOOTH

COMMENCED THE WORK OF THE SALVATION ARMY

JULY 1865.'

 

 'THIS STATUE WAS UNVEILED BY

GENERAL ARNOLD BROWN L. H. D.

ON 10th APRIL 1979, IN WHICH

YEAR THE 150th BIRTHDAY

OF WILLIAM BOOTH WAS

INTERNATIONALLY CELEBRATED.'

 

Below are two more posts of mine on William Booth.

 

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William Booth in Sneinton, Nottingham, England

William Booth in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington