The War Cry, From a Whitechapel Press to 130 Countries

The Salvation Army launched its own newspaper, The War Cry, as a weekly halfpenny broadsheet from a small printing works in Whitechapel on 27 December 1879, thirteen months after the Christian Mission had renamed itself the Army. From the start it was as much a tool of the movement's public identity as a report of it: illustrated from the early 1880s, sold on street corners by uniformed Salvationists rather than distributed through ordinary newsagents, and written in the same vivid, sensational idiom the Army used in its open-air preaching and brass bands to compete for attention in the industrial city's crowded religious and commercial marketplace.

The paper crossed the Atlantic with the movement itself: an American edition began in 1881, the year after the Army's first landing in the United States, where local newspapers had already taken to calling its bands and female preachers vulgar and sensationalist, a reputation The War Cry did not try to soften. Between 1920 and 1970 the Army's individual American territories each published their own version of it, and today variant editions of The War Cry appear in more than 130 countries, still sold hand to hand rather than only subscribed to, still funding the Army's social relief work directly through its own sales rather than through a separate collection. In the United Kingdom and Ireland alone it remains, in the twenty-first century, a fixture on high streets, still recognizably descended from the four-page broadsheet a small Whitechapel press turned out in 1879.