Emma Moss Booth-Tucker was an American social activist. She was the Consul of the Salvation Army.
Background
Emma Booth-Tucker was born on January 8, 1860, in London, England, the daughter of William and Catherine (Mumford) Booth. There were six children in the family, of which Harold Begbie says in his Life of General William Booth (1920) that outside the pages of Dickens it was probable that no other such household ever existed. William Booth had begun night street-preaching at seventeen, and a year after Emma's birth resigned from the New Connection Methodist Church in order to devote himself entirely to evangelical preaching.
Career
Unlike her brothers and sisters, Emma, who was a nervous, delicate child, made no attempt at public speaking for sometime, contenting herself with conducting a children's Bible class where she had "frequently a row of weeping penitents" to her credit. But at sixteen she spoke before a meeting at St. Leonard's and five souls sought salvation; after this experience she became a frequent speaker. Booth founded the Salvation Army two years later, as a means to his complete independence, and in 1880 Emma was made Mother of a training home to prepare women cadets for officership. She spent much time with individual cadets, praying with them and advising them, and when they left each carried an inscribed photograph of her.
When the campaign of the Army in India expanded under the impetus of a $25, 000 donation Emma met Frederick St. George de Lautour Tucker, who was summoned from India to head the fifty officers to be sent there. Emma selected the group and helped him organize them. They became engaged, but Tucker departed without her, to return a year later for their wedding, which was celebrated before five thousand spectators in Clapton Congress Hall in London. A second collection of $25, 000 was raised on this occasion and fifty more officers ("The Wedding Fifty") set out for Bombay, this time under the joint command of Tucker and his bride, who was given the title of Consul. The Consul assumed native costume and manners, and was soon embarked on a career of lectures which took her to inland villages in Southern India, and to Ceylon.
The illness of her mother recalled her to England after a few years, but on Mrs. Booth's death in 1890 she returned to India only to find her own health failing. With her husband she went to England once more and in 1896 Tucker was made Commander in charge of the work in America. An assembly of four thousand received them at Carnegie Hall in New York. They settled in Mt. Vernon, a suburb of New York, with their children. The work in America took a more practical turn, perhaps because of the criticism with which Gen. Booth's book In Darkest England (1890) had been met. Much of the Consul's time was spent in organizing industrial homes providing temporary employment, rescue homes for women, working men's hotels, orphanages, and country homes for city poor; much of it also was spent in the care of the Salvation Army's three farm colonies. But she continued her speaking: her most famous lecture, "Love and Sorrow, " describing the activities of the Army, was delivered for two years in fifty cities. She liked to lead marches through the slums at midnight to "stir things up" and gather the "roughs" about her for prayer. In the midst of her duties she visited the sick, wrote innumerable letters of exhortation and encouragement, and articles for the official publication, the War Cry. She was on a speaking tour when her train was wrecked near Dean Lake, Missouri, and she and Col. Thos. C. Holland, in charge of the Colorado farm colony, were fatally injured. Thousands crowded Carnegie Hall for her funeral services.
Achievements
Emma Booth-Tucker was a famous lecturer and the principal of The Salvation Army's pastoral training school for women. The organization flourished under her administration. Her most known published work is The League of Love, Being the Assistant Rescue Branch of the Salvation Army (1896).
Personality
Emma Booth-Tucker had a winning personality and a capacity for hard work.
Connections
On 10 April 1888 Emma Booth married Major Frederick St George de Lautour Tucker, the son of an affluent British family living in India, whose first wife had died of cholera in India in the previous year. On the insistence, William Booth required the men who married his daughters to add their wife's maiden name to his own. Therefore, Frederick became Booth-Tucker. The couple had a total of nine children; Frederick, Catherine Motee, Lucy, Herbert, John and Muriel and three others who died in infancy.
