Memoirs of a Happy Belfastman

Memoirs of A Happy Belfastman: Arnold Marsh

The Life and Witness of Arnold Marsh -1890 -1977

By: Arnold Marsh

Publication Date: December 2023

30.00

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

‘Arnold Marsh had a varied and adventurous career before he became formally involved in education, and throughout his life a vast range of interests. This background helps to explain his success as an educationalist. Young people, who are usually quick to differentiate between the genuine and purely theoretical, respected him as something more than a dry academic. He respected young people’s opinions and individuality because he was incapable of discourtesy anyway, and because his broad appreciation of history (combined, incidentally, with remarkable mathematical insights) reinforced his natural sympathy with an intellectual conviction of the importance of youth for the future of humanity. He was a large man, forbidding of countenance till he smiled, when his acute and many-sided sense of humour became infectious.
Arnold Marsh was a pioneer. He believed in and strove for co-education, non-sectarian education, social justice and world peace when such ideas were sneered at, or considered pernicious.’ John de Courcy Ireland, The Irish Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arnold Marsh (1890-1977) was an Irish Quaker educator and former principal of Newtown School Waterford and subsequently Drogheda Grammar School.

Quantity
ISBN
9781843518723
Weight 0.520 kg
Dimensions 234 × 156 mm
Format

Paperback w/ Flaps

Extent

320pp

Publication Date

December 2023