| Funeral And Memorial back to 'Catherine Booth'
Commissioner Railton, summoned back from the continent, was given charge of the funeral arrangements, the first phase of which was a combined public memorial and funeral service in the Olympia, the largest building in London, on Monday, 13th October. The congregation began to assemble as early as three o'clock in the morning.
By six o'clock in the evening 36,000 had passed through the turnstiles. Fog made the huge building seem even more vast. The daughters of the General wore in the folds of their bonnets a white ribbon on which were the words "Thy will be done" embroidered in red. The service was conducted by means of signs exhibited from the platform and corresponding with instructions given in the programme. Passages from Mrs Booth's writings, incidents in her life-story, verses of her favourite songs, extracts from her messages, all found a place in the service; but, as one writer put it: " Everything was cheerful, even to a kind of solemn merriment."
The funeral procession on the day after revealed a tremendous exhibition of popular feeling. Business, in the busiest hour of the day in the City, was at a standstill. The veteran Superintendent Foster, of the City of London Police, declared that he had not seen anything like it since the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, nearly half a century earlier.
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The bare-headed General stood alone in an open carriage acknowledging the sympathy of the immense crowds that thronged the streets, but the Chief of the Staff and Commandant Herbert Booth were on horseback, as were Commissioners Booth-Clibborn and Booth-Tucker.
Four thousand officers formed an escort. On the way from the Victoria Embankment to Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington bands played the specially composed funeral March, Promoted to Glory.
A gallery with seats, tier upon tier, had been erected at the graveside, around which were gathered some 10,000 persons; the cemetery authorities had set this number as the most who could be admitted. In an announcement of his beloved partner's passing, and at the funeral service in the Olympia, the General had already paid his unstinted tribute. At this service, conducted by Commissioner Railton, he again "did his duty like a saint and a soldier, holding the crowd before him easily and strongly, as was his wont, holding his own grief under sway to the very end."

The funeral at Abney Park Cemetery
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At an officers' meeting held in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, on the night after the funeral the General spoke again of his comrade-in-arms: She called me up at four one morning in the week she died [he said], to give me a solemn message. It was that she feared the women of The Salvation Army were not going to rise up to take the place she wished for them. ...She could never read fiction, because she wanted facts. The world to her was full of great, big black facts. She said to me once, "People don't really believe! I ask them what messages I shall take to their friends in heaven, and they hardly seem to believe I shall see them." And then he referred to the Darkest England Scheme, in the preparation of which she had taken so large apart : This is a new development [she had said] not a new departure. ...But mind, it is all one Army! We haven't a Social Army and a Salvation Army.
Memorial meetings were held at every corps in the United Kingdom on the Sunday following Mrs Booth's funeral.
Foremost, in the enterprises set on foot to commemorate the immediate call for fifty officers to volunteer in India. How ready was the response is indicated by the fact that a contingent of fifty-five made up United States of America, Sweden, Canada and Kingdom were given a send-off from Exeter Hall on 13th November, within six weeks after the call was made.
Nearly 10,000 people braved the inclement weather of 19 October 1891, to attend a memorial service Crystal Palace. A choir of 3,000 voices supplied the singing, and messages, meditations, prayers and songs were "precipitated" by a special limelight apparatus on to a huge screen, forty feet square, no fewer than 280 slides being used. Bramwell Booth conducted the service, as his father was Zealand.
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