Category Archives: The Nottingham Essay

The Nottingham Essay: Catherine Booth (17 January 1829 – 4 October 1890)

Posted on by

Catherine Mumford was born in Ashbourne, Derbyshire on 17 January, 1829 to strict Methodist parents. During childhood she was forbidden from dossing about with other kids for fear that she may ‘catch’ their bad habits. By twelve, she’d read the Bible eight times and given up sugar in protest at the treatment of Negroes. By her late teens she’d joined the Temperance Movement. She would meet her perfect match in William Booth, a man who also excelled in self-denial. Through marriage they made a formidable partnership, sharing an uncompromising set of values that would define the Salvation Army and radically transform the fate of the poor.         

As you’d expect from the daughter of an occasional lay preacher, Catherine was a serious and sensitive kid. However it was a spinal problem in 1842 that left her bedridden for months – and would plague her for the rest of her life – that defined her as a person. From her bed she studied theology which would underpin her various moral crusades and lead to her penning some exceptional sermons that would challenge the religious establishment as well as books on Christian living.

She first met William Booth in 1852 at a tea party hosted by Edward Rabbits, a wealthy benefactor who William was trying to tap up. Prior to this both Catherine and William had been visiting the sick in their native Brixton and Nottingham. They were destined for each other. A month later were formally engaged. As their biographer Roy Hattersley notes, ‘In all nineteenth century England there could not have been a couple in which both husband and wife held such strong opinions – and felt such an obligation to impose them on other people.’

William Booth was notoriously averse to reading, seeing theological study as an indulgence that got in the way of proper work. But this didn’t wash with Catherine who accepted no excuses when it came to self-improvement. In one typically condescending letter to William, she put his lack of reading down to poor time management; ‘Could you not rise by six o’clock every morning and convert your bedroom into a study until breakfast time?’

If William was the brawn then Catherine was definitely the brains of the Salvation Army. Her studious nature meant she was able to bring about change through logical and rational enquiry. She was instrumental in creating equality within their ranks by introducing female ministers able to command over men.

catherine225

illustration: Lexie Mac in LeftLion.

Unlike her husband, all of Catherine’s beliefs were built on solid fact and biblical exegesis. When William originally opposed women ministers she simply dug deeper for evidence. She eventually found it in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter III, Verse 28, which stated: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bound nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’.

Catherine published her arguments in various pamphlets and directly challenged religious patriarchy. This was a highly contentious thing to do in 1850s Britain. But the Booths were never ones to worry about public opinion. The only person they were answerable to was Him upstairs.

In stark contrast to William’s histrionics in the pulpit, Catherine’s preaching style, according to the Wesleyan Times, was “no empty boisterousness or violent and cursing declamation, but a calm and simple statement of the unreasonableness of sin.” She brought something different to the table, enabling the Army to diversify its appeal, and it was this that convinced William to embrace spiritual equality.

Catherine’s logical and persuasive arguments were perfect for playing on bourgeois guilt where wasting money on ‘a single bottle of wine for the jovial entertainment of friends’ was an insult to the hardships suffered by the poor. She appealed to their goodwill and conscience, arguing their ‘knowledge of the awful state of things in the world around them must make them fully aware of the good that might be done with the money which they lavish upon their lusts’. Sermons such as this would inspire two wealthy benefactors to donate the costs of hiring their first permanent home in the East End of London.

Preaching brought her into direct contact with deprived communities whose problems were largely caused through alcohol abuse. Catherine started a national campaign raising awareness of the perils of drink and later had abstinence from alcohol written into the Salvation Army’s constitution. She also demanded greater protection for women through the law and recruited women from the working classes, her ‘Hallelujah Lasses’, to support women and children in slum districts. But her crowning glory was getting the age of consent raised from thirteen to sixteen, which helped address child prostitution.

Catherine was against sending children to boarding school on the grounds that their principles were not fully developed and therefore may be more prone to temptation. She believed that it was parents who should provide a Christian upbringing, not headmasters. In her sermons she compared a child brought up without love like a plant without sunlight. However as she was often absent from the home this role often fell to the governess.

Despite her clear love for her eight children, it couldn’t have been much fun for them growing up. They lived a pretty nomadic lifestyle, dragged from town to town, while being subjected to the strictest of rules from their righteous and bigoted parents. The Booths believed that clothing was a form of vanity and so any unnecessary frippery was unstitched before they could wear it. Inevitably their offspring became pious and earnest which led to a fair few kickings in the playground.

The Booths dogmatic regime of constant prayer and absolute discipline meant the children were raised in conditions that make the Taliban look liberal. Sports were banned, they had to take a cold bath everyday – apart from the Sabbath – and their frugal father’s idea of a treat was a scattering of currants on the daily bowl of rice pudding. But only on exceptional occasions.

Matters were made worst by Catherine’s gradual immobility. The birth of eight children had left her an invalid. Although this did not stop her preaching, it had a morbid effect on her moods. During this period melancholy was deemed a disease of the spirit and therefore the ultimate blasphemy as it suggested a denial of God’s love.         

In 1887 Catherine was diagnosed with breast cancer but, stoic as ever, refused an operation. As she lay on her deathbed a band was brought into her bedroom, not for personal comfort but so that all of the musicians who she had inspired over the years could show their respects. She was ‘Promoted to Glory’ in 1890 and her body was laid out in Clapton Congress Hall so that 50,000 mourners could visit over five days. A further 36,000 attended her official funeral on 13 October with a procession of 3,000 officers, each wearing white armbands to celebrate her life. And there was plenty to celebrate. She had persuaded William that women were the intellectual and moral equal of men. That it was nurture not nature that held them back and that “if we are to better the future we must disturb the present.” It would take a World War before women won the right to vote in 1918. But it was only in January this year that the Church of England consecrated their first female bishop. Her fight goes on.  

The above article was originally published in the Sept 2015 issue of LeftLion magazine as part of the City of Literature series. Two months later Nottingham was accredited as a UNESCO City of Literature. The source for this article is Roy Hattersley’s superb Blood And Fire: William and Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army. The video was created by Josh Dunne, a 2nd year media student from Nottingham Trent University as part of a placement scheme with Dawn of the Unread. 

The Nottingham Essay: Geoffrey Trease (11 August 1909 – 27 January 1998)

Posted on by

Geoffrey Trease dropped out of Oxford to concentrate on a career as a writer. He banged out 113 books, covered every historical period going, and transformed children’s historical fiction. The former Nottingham High School pupil is another reason why Nottingham is a UNESCO City of Literature.

Alcohol is often cited as the main muse of the writer. From Kingsley Amis to Dylan Thomas, pen monkeys have literally been drunk on words. Alcohol was also influential for Geoffrey Trease. But he wasn’t a literary lush who got into Bukowskian brawls. His parents ran a family wine and spirit shop at No 1 Castle Gate, the narrow Georgian street leading to the castle, just a few doors away from a surgical appliance firm where DH Lawrence did a brief stint as a clerk. It’s now called Weavers and, if you ask nicely, they might show you the rooms that kick-started the career of one of Nottingham’s most prolific, yet least celebrated, writers.

As a nipper, Trease would accompany his father to work and pass his time “taking the stamps off the violet-inked envelopes from the shippers of Bordeaux.” Perhaps this fostered his intrigue of travel that later manifested itself in his children’s fiction, which spanned the globe depicting almost every major historical event from ancient Athens to the Bolshevik revolution. The family business also gave him access to paper, then an expensive commodity. It was here he wrote his first stories.

Trease grew up in three houses in Nottingham, but the family home in the Arboretum area – 142 Portland Road – would have a profound effect on his imagination. The surrounding roads were named after the likes of Cromwell, Raleigh, Chaucer and Shakespeare – a constant reminder of the men who had defined history and culture. As the first world war drew to a close in 1918, nine-year-old Trease was reminded that the glory of great men came with brutal consequences, “I lay in bed with the influenza that was raging across Europe and listened to the horse-drawn funerals rumbling and clattering down our cobbled road on their way to the cemetery.”

One body not on the cart was his uncle Syd, a second lieutenant in the Sherwood Foresters who’d gone missing at the Front. Trease’s grandmother was so distraught at his disappearance that she refused to allow his name to appear on the school war memorial, in the hope that one day he would return. All they ever found was his helmet. The seeds were being sown for a writer who would prioritise human feelings above national interests in his depictions of conflict.

Trease did well at school and won an honorary Foundation Scholarship to Nottingham High School. The school’s Boys’ Library gave access to a treasure trove of adventure stories, introducing the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. This was important as his father had banned visits to the public library because he believed it was “infested with noxious germs”.

Early on, Trease demonstrated a flair for business as well as creativity when he started a school magazine. Issues were loaned out at a penny a night. When he won the Junior Sir Thomas White Scholarship, he persuaded his father to buy him a Remington typewriter that was “as heavy as a piece of artillery”. Now he could up his output and publish a school paper for private circulation. Kerching. His first paid commission came at thirteen when he sold an article to a popular boys’ weekly for half a guinea. Soon afterwards, he had a poetry collection accepted for publication, albeit by a dubious company who insisted he cough up half of the printing costs.

Trease excelled at the High School and regularly won prizes, the profits of which went on books, such as a Roget’s Thesaurus, having read that every serious writer should have one on his desk. He won a scholarship to Oxford to study Classics but dropped out after his first year in 1929. “I was bored to death with this musty scholarship, this wearisome gibberish concocted by the pedants. One year of Oxford at its driest, unrelieved by one flash of inspiration, humour or understanding from any don concerned with me, had suffocated the enthusiasm with which I had gone up from school. I told myself that if I went on like this for another three years I should hate the Classics for the rest of my life.”

He swapped Oxford for London’s East End slums, working at a settlement which “for an aspiring writer, anxious to study human nature, was a living laboratory.” The settlement was run by the Lester sisters, one of whom was a personal friend of Gandhi and had the philosophy that “one must approach the poor with the mind of the poor”, informing her approach to community service. Consequently, the most important task Trease was given was keeping the building clean and tidy. A lot of the people coming into the building in the evening had laboured hard that day and it was felt they were more likely to respect those with equally dirty hands.

Aside from cleaning and stoking fires, Trease ran library supervision sessions and escorted children to theatre productions. For his services he received his board, lodgings and seven shillings a week. The experience offered a grounding in humanity that was absent from Oxford and no doubt went some way into shaping the drive for equality that would see him revolutionise children’s stories by giving meaningful roles to both male and female characters.

Trease’s general philosophy was to avoid abstractions and generalisations and treat children as intelligent readers. Up to 1945 it was an unacknowledged preconception that children lacked experience. Historical accuracy was fundamental to his principle, but not to the extent that the enjoyment of the story was suffocated. As Margaret Meek has noted, “A familiar theme in his work is the way that men will defend their homes and the places they have built their roots, which is the basis for just about every historical story from the civil war to the French Revolution.”

Trease was ahead of his time in recognising that the stories we tell children significantly impact on their view of the world as an adult, particularly the jingoism that presents war as glorious and the victors superior. He offered more complex portrayals of people and communities. In Mist over Athelney we see how the divisions created by the Roman Empire live long after the conquerors have left.

In arguably his most famous novel, Bows Against The Barons (1934), Trease gave the Hood legend a do-over. He was frustrated that “Robin Hood is about the only proletarian hero our children are permitted to admire. Yet even he is not allowed to remain an ordinary working man! He has to be really Earl of Huntingdon.” He set out to demonstrate that harsh winters left the likes of Robin Hood starving and frail and that life wasn’t always merry in the emerald forest. It would lead to George Orwell complimenting Trease as “that creature we have long been needing, a ‘light’ left-wing writer, rebellious but human, a sort of PG Wodehouse after a course of Marx.”

As he developed his craft and became more aware of the responsibilities of a writer, Trease would renounce his earlier propagandist novels such as Comrades for the Charter (1934) and The Call to Arms (1935), arguing that a children’s writer “should have the same sort of professional ethic as a teacher – whatever his personal beliefs, he mustn’t use his position of professional advantage to press party politics on readers too immature to argue with him on fair terms.”

These principles would be cemented in Tales out of School (1949), the first wide-ranging survey of twentieth century children’s literature, which concluded that the best books confirm and extend the child’s own experience. A good book, he wrote “uses language skilfully to entertain and represent reality, to stimulate the imagination or to educate the emotions”. The book, along with his others, would be instrumental in driving up literacy levels, encouraging reading and bridging the gap between the comic and the classics.

This article was originally published in LeftLion, March 2015. The video was produced by Richard Weare, a Nottingham Trent University student on a placement at Dawn of the Unread. Geoffrey Trease featured in Issue 11 of Dawn of the Unread, Nottingham’s literary graphic novel.