To & From Alaska 1912 – 1922

In the early 1900s Arnold Marsh is a young Quaker from Belfast, about to embark on an odyssey into the New World, leaving for Canada aged twenty-one with his sister Sylvia within months of the ill-fated Titanic, when it first sailed from Belfast shipyards on it’s maiden voyage to New York.

Spanning over eighty years, Arnold’s perceptions and experiences come across with a boundless sense of humour, respect, tolerance and self-discipline in the face of relentless encounters in the USA and Europe. On arrival in Canada in 1912 he made his way to join his brother Victor at the gold mines of Ontario, and then on to work on two new railways up through Alaska, providing access to Pacific trade routes to Asia. Then, as a soldier during World War I serving with the U.S. Army, he was sent to France accompanied by the dreaded Spanish Flu, until the war ended. Then came societal and economic progress during the Machine Age, while the Irish Civil War raged. He then became a forceful commentator in Irish politics and then a principal figure as headmaster of two progressive Quaker schools. This book combines his memoirs, with selected letters home to Belfast between 1912 and 1922, illustrated with photographs, clippings, maps and postcards. Arnold becomes our friend and narrator, and shares his experience and observations of some of the most dramatic world and local events of the twentieth century.

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