Catherine Booth-Clibborn was an English Salvationist and evangelist.
Background
She was the oldest daughter of William and Catherine Booth. Born in Gateshead, where her father was serving as a minister, during her childhood Katie Booth was particularly close to William Booth"s secretary, George Scott Railton, who lived with the Booth family for ten years and acted as her spiritual mentor. Saved by the age of thirteen, she began preaching at the age of fifteen and shared the platform with her father at the East London Christian Mission"s annual conference in 1876.
Career
She was also known as "la Maréchale". A captain, she led two lieutenants (one of whom was Florence Soper, who later married Katie"s brother Bramwell Booth) in preaching the Gospel in Paris, wearing sandwichboards when the police forbid them to hand out leaflets. They were not well received.
Their street-corner sermons were often interrupted by people pelting them with mud and stones.
After repeated attempts by men on the roads to strangle them by their bonnet strings, they began pinning the strings on rather than sewing them. They lived in rented apartments where prostitutes lived in poor conditions.
Progress was slow. Opposition was fierce, and those who were converted were given a rough time, sometimes being fired from their jobs.
The newspaper reports in France were nearly unanimously critical. Eventually, Captain Booth moved on to Switzerland, where the opposition was even fiercer.
The authorities refused to allow her to rent halls in which to preach, and she was arrested, tried, acquitted, and subsequently deported from Switzerland for conducting an open-air meeting in a forest outside Neuchâtel. After becoming Pentecostals in 1906 the Booth-Clibborns together continued preaching and spreading the Gospel as travelling evangelists in Europe, the United States, and Australia for the rest of their lives.
On her death from double pneumonia in 1955 Katie Booth-Clibborn was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Her grandson Stanley Eric Francis Booth-Clibborn became the Anglican Bishop of Manchester.