Catherine Mumford Booth's Consecration

The coach wheels rattled over the last stretch of road into Brixton just after dusk, the horses blowing hard from the long pull out of Derbyshire. I stood with my father at the edge of the yard where he kept his small stable, watching the Mumford carriage draw up. John Mumford climbed down first, his coat dusty, and then Sarah helped Catherine out. The girl was seventeen, thin from the years of illness, her bonnet strings loose at her throat. She carried a Bible bound in worn calf under one arm and a bundle of letters in the other.

We had heard the family was coming south because of the carriage work. My father offered the use of his shed for the first weeks. Catherine did not speak much that evening. She stood near the lamp and looked at the rows of houses pressing close along the lane, her face set as if she were measuring the distance between one life and the next.

Within a fortnight she was at the Wesleyan chapel on the high street every Sunday morning and again at the prayer meeting on Wednesday. The congregation was plain, the benches hard, the singing steady rather than loud. Catherine sat with her mother on the left side, three rows from the front. After the service she would linger by the door while the older women spoke of household matters. She listened but rarely joined in. One afternoon I saw her copy out a passage from Isaiah on a scrap of paper and fold it into her glove before she left.

Her father’s drinking had already begun to pull at the edges of the household. Some evenings John Mumford came home late and unsteady, and Sarah would send Catherine to the back room with her books. The girl never complained. She simply closed the door and read until the house grew quiet again. By the end of that first winter she had finished the Bible through once more and started marking passages that spoke of entire surrender. She showed none of them to me, but I saw the pages when she left the book open on the table.

In the spring she joined the Juvenile Temperance Society that met above the ironmonger’s shop. She kept the minutes in a small ruled notebook, her handwriting neat and small. At the meetings she sat near the back at first, then moved forward when asked to read the pledge aloud. Her voice carried without effort. After one meeting she stayed behind to help clear the benches. I asked her why she had come so far from her own county. She said the work here needed steady hands and that London had more souls to reach than Derbyshire could count.

By midsummer the chapel leaders asked her to help with the younger children on Sunday afternoons. She agreed without hesitation. The room they gave her was small and smelled of damp wool. She brought her own copy of the catechism and a handful of printed temperance cards. The children listened when she spoke because she never raised her voice above what the farthest bench could hear. One boy asked her if God could forgive a man who drank away his wages. Catherine answered that grace reached farther than any debt a man could owe. The boy came back the next week and brought his sister.

Her mother’s health had begun to trouble her by then, and Catherine took on more of the household duties. She rose before daylight to see to the fires and the bread. In the evenings she wrote letters to friends in the north, urging them to hold fast to the temperance pledge. She never mentioned her father’s condition in those letters. When visitors asked after him she simply said he was occupied with business.

One Wednesday evening in October the prayer meeting ran long. The gas lamps had been turned low to save oil. Catherine remained kneeling after most had risen. I stayed in my seat at the side because I did not want to disturb her. She stayed there until the caretaker came to lock the doors. When she finally stood, her knees were stiff and she had to steady herself against the bench. She looked straight ahead as she walked out, but her face had changed. The tightness around her mouth was gone.

From that night she began to speak more openly in the meetings. She did not preach; she simply told what the Scripture had shown her about giving the whole life rather than pieces of it. The older members listened. Some nodded. A few of the younger women began to sit nearer to her. Catherine never asked for their attention. She simply kept speaking when the moment came.