When in 1878 William Booth adopted the name The Salvation Army for the movement he had created, an ‘irresistible spiritual offensive swept over cities, towns and villages in every direction and set the whole country ablaze’. It was an ecclesiastical big bang of spectacular proportions and its effects soon spread to the far corners of the globe.

The next 13 years, which climaxed with the introduction of large-scale social work in 1890, proved astonishing by any measure. Virtually all that the Army is today was forged in those first few years. In this short and well-illustrated book I tell the story of those unique years by means of 36 ‘rear-mirror views’.