The Skeleton Army

I've written about grassroots resistance to the temperance lobby in Victorian Britain. It got quite violent.

 

It was in Worthing that I first heard of the Skeleton Army. Could it really be true that there were organised mobs beating up temperance activists in Victorian Britain? It seemed too good to be true. Yet true it was. The Salvation Army invited trouble from the start. Founded in 1878 by the self-styled “General” William Booth, they would pitch up in town, find themselves a “barracks” to live in and march through the streets saving drunks for Jesus.

Most of the drunks did not want to be saved. They mostly just wanted to drink. Even those who did not drink disapproved of a bunch of do-gooders with military pretensions parading around with a brass band.

The Skeleton Army, formed in Exeter in October 1881, was only the latest incarnation of violent opposition to the Salvationists. They had been attacked by “roughs” calling themselves the “2nd Squad of The Salvation Army” in Coventry two years earlier.

In Whitechapel, the “Unconverted Salvation Army” had been making its presence felt. There had already been two anti-Salvationist riots in Basingstoke at the hands of the puzzlingly named “Massagainians”.

Gangs of mostly young men hurled stones, flour, beer, paint, dead rats and mud at the Sally Army wherever they found them. Blood was shed. Bones were broken. The windows of the Army’s “barracks” were smashed. This happened all over the country, often night after night.

Some incidents were less serious than others, but as Nigel Bovey says in his history of the Skeleton Army, Blood and Flag, “in today’s Britain even a single incident of the type endured 150 years ago would be considered a major outrage”.

I can't say I condone all their behaviour but we could do with a bit of their spirit now.

Read the rest.

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