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

William Booth in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington

'WILLIAM BOOTH

FOUNDER & 1ST GENERAL OF

THE SALVATION ARMY

BORN 1829

BORN AGAIN OF THE SPIRIT 1845

FOUNDED THE SALVATION ARMY 1865

WENT TO HEAVEN 20TH AUGUST 1912

–––––––––––––––––––

ALSO

CATHERINE BOOTH

THE MOTHER OF THE SALVATION ARMY

BORN 1829

WENT TO HEAVEN 4TH OCTOBER 1890'

'W: BRAMWELL: BOOTH

GENERAL OF

THE SALVATION ARMY

BORN 8TH MARCH 1856

BORN OF THE SPIRIT 1863

PROMOTED TO GLORY 16TH JUNE 1929

Servant of All

AND OF HIS WIFE

FLORENCE E: BOOTH

BORN 12TH SEPTEMBER 1861

BORN OF THE SPIRIT 5TH MAY 1880

PROMOTED TO GLORY 10TH JUNE 1957

They were united in love of God

and the Salvation Army'

Bramwell Booth was William's son who succeeded him, and the links below are to a previous post (plus a later one) I made on William Booth and his birthplace in Nottingham:

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William Booth in Sneinton, Nottingham, England

William Booth Birthplace Museum, Sneinton, Nottingham

William Booth in Sneinton, Nottingham, England

We always forget the most obvious things, as I discovered recently when I was walking(!) into the center of Nottingham, and remembered, immediately after the William Booth Community Centre and old people's home on Sneinton Road, the three preserved terraced houses at the back in Notintone Place, number 12 being Booth's birthplace.

The prominent statue shows the founder of the Salvation Army in preaching pose. Booth (1829-1912) left school at 13 because of his father's bankrupcy, and began work at a pawnbroker's.

But Booth's conversion to Methodism came a few years later.

There are two plaques on the house, the older being a Holbrook Bequest, which reads:

'IN THIS HOUSE WAS BORN

ON 10TH APRIL 1829

WILLIAM BOOTH

FOUNDER AND GENERAL

OF THE

SALVATION ARMY.'

The wording on the newer plaque is identical, although at the top it says: 'RESTORED 1971'. The museum is only open occasionally, but it's still slightly odd that I've not gotten round to visiting it.

There is another plaque - this time a profile of Booth's head and shoulders, about half a mile away in Broad Street, Nottingham, on one of the pillars at the entrance to what is now the Broadway movie theater. It reads:

'IN THIS BUILDING

FORMERLY THE

BROAD STREET WESLEY CHAPEL

WILLIAM BOOTH

FOUNDER AND FIRST GENERAL OF THE SALVATION ARMY

GAVE HIS HEART AND LIFE TO GOD IN HIS FIFTEENTH YEAR

1844'

Who knows, I may even take photos of the windmill once owned by George Green, the reluctant miller but very important mathematician - it's (literally) only a stone's throw from Booth's birthplace.

A link to my post on the graves of William and his son Bramwell is below, plus a later one mainly inside the birthplace museum: 

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William Booth in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington

William Booth Birthplace Museum, Sneinton, Nottingham

Literary New York City (Mainly)

I may have taken all of these images of New York City, although I'd have been unaware of the existence of most of them without Kevin Walsh's Forgotten New York, a real mine of information on many of the more obscure aspects of New York City's history. One of the most interesting things about this book is that it doesn't just cover what many people – North Americans included – often refer to as New York City: Manhattan tout court: Manhattan, of course, is only one New York's five boroughs: all too often, we forget that Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx are also a part of New York City.

Many thanks, too, to my partner Penny Atkinson, who assisted me in finding many of these places.

'We were very tired, we were very merry—

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry'

Edna St Vincent Millay's famous words, from her poem 'Recuerdo', evoke the hedonism of the 1920s. She is speaking, of course, of the Staten Island ferry, still one of the greatest free rides in the world.</> This is a view of Manhattan financial district from the ferry.

It is worth exploring Staten Island itself, and a frequent train service will take you to the bottom of the island in about forty-five minutes.

In the early part of the previous century, the land on which these structures now stand in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, near the town of Flushing in Queens, was an ash disposal heap. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes it as 'a fantastic form where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens'. That quotation is my excuse for showing these three weird images. New York's two World Fair's were in 1939 and 1964, and the remains of these occasions still, gloriously, litter the park.

The above structure was part of New York State Pavilion. This was the Tent of Tomorrow, showing the sixteen 100-foot columns which supported the roof. Sky Streak capsule lifts took people to the top.

Rocket Thrower, showing a giant hurling a rocket through a constellation.

Above is Theodore Roszak's Forms in Transit, one of the most difficult exhibits to find.

The bust above is of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and is one of a number of writers, politicians, etc, in the Hall of Fame at the Bronx Community College.

This statue is in a prominent position, in the Literary Walk in Central Park, Manhattan. Here, Shakespeare, Robert Burns and Walter Scott stand: all very famous men. Above, though, is a forgotten man of American poetry: Fitz–Greene Halleck (1790–1867). Rather than paraphrase someone else's description of Halleck's work and life, the reader is best directed to The Fitz–Greene Halleck Society web pages.

A rather odd thing for a person from Nottingham, England, to find a plaque dedicated to fellow Nottinghamian William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, in Battery Park, Lower Manhattan.

This blog supports Barack Obama in his battle to become President of the United States: at least he didn't vote for the war on Iraq, and he represents hope to so many in a deeply divided country. But he has a fine juggling act to perform, and he also supports the neo-liberal ethos which causes poverty: even if he wins two terms, how much will he have achieved in that time?

The photo above and the one below were taken in Alphabet City, Manhattan.

Poe Cottage in the Bronx is the farmhouse where Edgar Allan Poe lived between 1846 and 1849. Now a museum, the building was closed for general renovations when visited in June 2008.

Almost impossible to read because situated so high up the wall, this plaque in the Upper West Side at Broadway and 84th Street marks the site where Poe spent the summer of 1844 on a farm. The building is a café.

Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, once home to several literary figures, among them E. E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes.

Coney Island, Brooklyn, is now a shadow of its former self (and still under threat), but many New Yorkers continue to flock to the beaches. The occasion here was the Mermaid Parade, 21 June 2008. Literary references? How about Styron's Sophie's Choice?

Inevitably, Brooklyn Bridge evokes thoughts of Whitman's ferry crossing and Hart Crane's poem, but also, of course, the wonderful Marianne Moore.

The entrance to New York Public Library, home of, among many others, manuscripts by such diverse writers as Shelley and Kerouac.