William Pearson

PEARSON, William. b. Derby, 1832  d. Hackney, London, 17 October 1892. Pearson’s parents belonged to the Primitive Methodist Chapel in Traffic Street, Derby, where he was converted at the age of fourteen, and where he later became a local preacher.  In 1874 he went to London to join William Booth’s Christian Mission as an evangelist, and became superintendent of the Mission’s Shoreditch Circuit.  Subsequently he served as a Mission evangelist in Hastings, Whitechapel, Wellingborough, Manchester and Bradford, where he was stationed in 1878 when the Christian Mission was renamed The Salvation Army.  In his verse autobiography in The War Cry, 5 October 1882, p. 1, he explained how he started...