Memoirs of A Happy Belfastman

Born to a Quaker family of biscuit manufacturers in Belfast on 7 November 1890 and schooled at Sidcot in England, Arnold Marsh embarked on an odyssey into the New World, leaving for Canada at the age of twenty-one with his sister Sylvia within months of the ill-fated Titanic, on her maiden voyage to New York.

Spanning over eighty years, Arnold’s experiences and observations convey a boundless sense of humour, respect, tolerance and self-discipline in the face of relentless encounters across North America and Europe. On arrival in Canada in 1912 he joined his brother Victor at the gold mines of Ontario, and then began to work on two new railways up through Alaska, providing access to the Pacific trade routes to Asia. Heading south by way of a nascent Hollywood, he enlisted as a soldier with the US Army during World War I, returning to Europe and a France beset by Spanish Flu. During the societal and economic progress of the 1920s Machine Age, an Irish Civil War raged as Arnold became a forceful commentator on politics and a principal figure as headmaster of two progressive Quaker schools Newtown and Drogheda.

Memoirs of a Happy Belfastman encompasses this extraordinary life and is augmented by selected letters home written between 1912 and 1922. It is richly illustrated with photographs, clippings, maps and postcards. Both as narrator and witness, Arnold offers the reader a ringside seat at some of the most dramatic world and local events of the twentieth century.

‘Early in 1972 Dr Theodore Moody, Professor of Modern History in Trinity College, Dublin, practically ordered me to write my memoirs. Coming into my eighties, the idea of getting chickenpox amused me, but a few days later I got a bill from my doctor for five or six visits, and Hilda, my wife, said he had been a good many times, and it was probably right. I had the quietest, easiest illness of my life, but as awareness and strength returned I remembered Professor and Mrs Moody’s demand, and, thinking that I might have died unknowingly, and might still do something of that sort, I saw that I had better try to write about some of the people, things and places that remained in my memories of more than eighty years.’ Arnold Marsh 1974