Sweden
From Sawiki
In 1878, Chief of the Staff, Bramwell Booth, vacationing at Värnarmo, south of Jönköping, to stave off a total breakdown in his health, typically found relaxation by conducting a non-stop chain of meetings. Aided by an interpreter, he held one of these meetings in a large room behind Värnarmo's post office. The postmistress, Hanna Ouchterlony, daughter of an old Swedish military family, was to become Sweden's first Salvation Army officer.
Commissioner Ouchterlony officially opened fire for the Army at a Stockholm theatre on the 28th of December 1882. Many well-to-do Swedes were alarmed by the bleary-eyed mobs that gathered to hear the Army's message of salvation.
For twelve long years Commissioner Hanna Ouchterlony and her officers faced fierce oposition to their quest for converts. Fearing riots, the police forbade the Army to hold open air meetings after dusk. Salvationists retaliated by carrying newspapers to the meetings. As long as was light enough to read the headlines, they argued, how could it be dusk?
In 1895, a one time teacher at a school for the deaf, Captain Oktavia Wilkens, realised that many of Stockholm's converts were not only deaf, but were incapable of clear speech. To aid their comprehension of the salvation message, a headquarters waiting room was set aside for Captain Wilkens to hold special meetings. The Salvation Army's first deaf and dumb corps was born.
News of the Army's work for the deaf and dumb struck a sympathetic chord with the liberal minded Swedes, but it was Sweden's King Oscar II who finally gave the Salvation Army resectability and ensured their acceptance. The Army's concern for men entombed while living, so moved him that despite Court officials misgivings he donated 500 kroner (then about £27) to the Self Denial Fund.
His next gift, which set the Royal Seal on the Army's work, was a plot of land that became an Army wood yard employing 10,000 men a year. Taking the lead from their King, officers of the Swedish Army now cracked to parade ground salutes each time Salvationists passed them on the streets.
One hundred years after Bramwell Booth's fist meeting in Sweden some thirty officers operate from Stockholm and seven provincial cities dedicated to the needs of Sweden's six thousand deaf mutes and eight thousand blind.
