Bramwell Booth and Youth Work - Catherine Bramwell Booth (1933)

These comments were written by Catherine Bramwell Booth, the daughter of Bramwell and Florence Booth. What a fantastic memoir to 'The Children's General."

William Booth had written to Richard Cory in 1869, when Bramwell was thirteen:

"My children are just beginning to work. The four eldest take a service among the young people and are very useful. Willie conducts the meeting." 

His illness interrupted the work, but it was resumed and better accommodation was found where two or three hundred children gathered. The meetings were held on the same plan as those for adults: anyone desiring to give his heart to Christ was invited to come forward. Bramwell talked personally to many of these; heard of their sin and temptation; came to understand with all the quickened apprehension of personal sympathy what it meant to grow up in a drunkard's home.

Bramwell Booth is called the Young People's General by thousands of Salvationists the world over, and to those who understand (always the few though ever the important, for they alone can carry on a man's creative work) there was something of prescience in his Father's calling him when seventeen years of age "Commissioner of the Children's Mission."

Mrs. Booth was away with the family, and Bramwell was sent out for a day or two. The note to Mrs. Booth ran:

"Tell him [Willie] I say he is to make himself agreeable to all and that I wish to remind him as special Commissioner of the Children's Mission that one of his duties is to look after is brothers and sisters. He must take Katie with him to see things."

In addition to the public meetings, meetings were held for converted children. Bramwell talked to them, prayed with them in groups and individually, shepherded them. Many have heard him describe these little meetings, the children's poverty-pinched faces and meagre clothing; there would be a score or less present, aged from nine to sixteen or so, in winter gathered around the stove. They gave their experience, confessed failures and hopes and prayed for unconverted companions and relatives.

Bramwell visited the homes of many and, almost unperceived by those around him, was learning his way about a new world. Its treasures, its language, its degradation and vice were soon familiar to him. He was himself young enough to receive indelible impressions. Knowing as we now do what was to be his place and part in The Salvation Army, we can hardly conceive anything more essential to him than that he should understand the people for whom he was to spend his life; and not only that, but that he should know how to make them feel that he understood them, make himself understood by them.

(p.54f.)

1907

When General, he inaugurated a special plan for helping boys. Those received six weeks to three months intensive agricultural training on the Farm Colony at Hadleigh, and were then employed by selected farmers in the new lands. Bramwell Booth's understanding of the young gave him a positive horror of the effect likely to result if lads grew to manhood without acquiring the habit of work. He would have spent the nation's money on training them before he would have paid the unemployment pittance to youths who had had no chance even to learn to work. He made no secret of his views on what he considered the selfishness and folly of excluding the people from the unpopulated areas, waiting 'only cultivation to become a garden,' as he said when on his way to Winnepeg. But the apathy about the idle young roused his indignation, it was more than a folly, it was 'wickedness': 'a crime'; and in his eyes nothing could be worse than a crime against the young.

The young! Of all the work that his love and vision inspired, none was more tenderly nurtured by Bramwell Booth than the work of The Salvation Army for young people. Treasured by some as their last, is the picture of him amongst a thousand slum children, met to receive gifts, in the Congress Hall in January, 1928. To hear them sing, "The more we love the Savior the happier we shall be," and to watch their faces as the General spoke to them, and to see his face as he talked, was unforgettable. As someone said who was there, 'the General looked sort of heavenly that night; I felt almost afraid, as if he didn't belong to earth.' Those familiar with the physiognomy of the London slum child can conjure up the scene for themselves: the sharp-featured, restless-eyed crew, following the General's white-crowned figure and crushing up to get a nearer view.

p.306f.