Well done, Dave, thanks for confirming the story.
Smethwick wrote: I wonder if Albert Hall was Methodist?)
....Not that I know of, and he wasn't a large building in London either. If anything, his religion was the Temperance Movement - he was a dedicated teetotaler, and attended Mrs Lewis's Teetotal Mission, in Blackburn.
rosblackcreative.com/2014/11/03/elizabet...for-sexual-equality/
....From what I've found so far, he had more letters published in the Blackburn Times than any other soldier in South Africa.
....2971 Private Albert Hall was an impressive speaker at temperance meetings, and the Blackburn Times was sufficiently impressed as to interview him on the day he set off for Taunton to rejoin his regiment.
...."Perhaps you'd like to look at this," he said, taking a tin case out of a drawer, from which he pulled a beautiful address lithographed on silk, which set forth the splendid services Mr. Hall had rendered to the Army Temperance Association in India, and the esteem in which he was held by the officers and men of his regiment."
....Albert was the secretary of the A.T.A. while in India.
....Other soldiers who were members of Mrs Lewis's Teetotal Mission, and who served in South Africa, were Private T. Walsh, 3rd Scots Guards, and Corporal Martin Meade, Royal Army Medical Corps.
....Private Walsh, in a letter to a member of the Mission, written on board ship on the way out to South Africa, said "We have just been having an experience meeting on a small scale, about seven or eight of us, one, a former comrade of mine, after hearing what it had done for me in the five months I have been teetotal, said he would try it, for he knew it was the right thing to do. He knew how I used to carry on when I was in the battalion, and they were all convinced that it was better for them in every way to be teetotal, and whenever any of them chimed in with moderation or any other thing, I could always beat them with the ammunition I got served out in Lees Hall. I don't know how it is, but whenever I get out on deck the subject is sure to finish with teetotalism, and I cannot help saying a word for our dear leader, and putting my hand in my pocket and letting them have a look at the Queen of Teetotalers, not the likeness you gave me but the one in the little book. I knew the other would get spoiled, so my missus is going to frame it. I think just the same of this one, and will take it in my pocket wherever I go, for your work is never absent from my mind."
[The Queen of Teetotalers was, of course, Mrs Lewis, and Lees Hall was where the Mission's meetings were held.]
....3,515 Lance-Corporal Pratt, 2nd Scottish Rifles, was a member of the "Love and Unity" Teetotal Mission, Blackburn.
....7350 Lance Corporal W. Harrison, East Lancashire Regiment, was a member of the United Teetotal Mission, also Blackburn.
....Both Hall and Meade spoke from the audience when an Africander Deputation appeared at a meeting in Blackburn, August, 1900.
