Bramwell Booth

Bramwell Booth was involved in The Salvation Army right from its origins as the obscure Christian Mission, established in Whitechapel in 1865, into an international organisation with numerous and varied social activities.

In 1870, aged just 14, Bramwell Booth started to help in the management of his father's Christian Mission and in the cheap food kitchens set up in its early days.

The lurid revelations of how thirteen-year-old Eliza Armstrong was sold for £5 resulted in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent to sixteen years.

[citation needed] The early years of Bramwell Booth's Generalship were complicated by World War I, which threatened the international nature of The Salvation Army, with Salvationists in both Germany and Great Britain.

[4] Discontent simmered among Salvation Army senior officers, including the chief-of-the-staff Edward Higgins and George Carpenter, who incidentally had been sent to 'the freezer' by his appointment to Sydney in a role he previously held 22 years earlier.

Commissioner Phelps was hand selected to lead a team of accountants to the United States to collect overdue missions funding.

[4] In his final years as General he increasingly gave control of The Salvation Army to his wife, Florence Booth, who was given power of attorney when he was away travelling.

[2] As the years passed the Army's senior officers, including Bramwell's sister Evangeline Booth and his former brother-in-law Frederick Booth-Tucker, began to question his leadership.

[5] On 29 April 1929 the now former General Bramwell Booth received a letter from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin stating that King George V had appointed him a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.

[11] On 16 June 1929 his family was summoned to his bedside, and on that Sunday evening General Bramwell Booth died at his home, The Homestead, Hadley Wood, near Barnet, Hertfordshire.

For the Friday and Saturday following his death Bramwell Booth's body lay in state at The Salvation Army's Congress Hall.

On the Saturday evening 10,000 Salvationists and friends filled the Royal Albert Hall to bid farewell to their beloved former General.

[5] General Bramwell Booth was buried opposite his parents at Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, London.

Bramwell Booth as Chief of the Staff
Bramwell Booth visites The Hague in 1925 and speaks to the gathered crowd at his arrival (no audio)
Grave of Bramwell Booth at Abney Park Cemetery