William Booth

William Booth was a Nottingham pawnbroker's apprentice who never forgot what poverty smelled like. When the churches would not seat the converts he won in London's East End — they came in rags and sat next to the people they had robbed — he stopped sending them to churches and built his own movement, renamed in 1878 The Salvation Army, with brass bands, uniforms, and his wife Catherine preaching as his equal. His people were pelted, jailed, and mocked; they kept marching. His book In Darkest England laid out farms, refuges, and job schemes for the 'submerged tenth,' and the Army's soup kitchens and shelters made the point plain: you cannot preach to a man with an empty stomach. At his death forty thousand filled Olympia hall, and London stopped for the funeral of a pawnbroker's boy.