Early Life
Williams was born at 46 George Street, Cardiff, Wales, his parents’ home, and was the youngest son of Silas and Mary Williams. He was one of eight children and known as “Jack” within the family. He left school at 14 in 1900 and entered the timber exporting business. "Jayo" as he was usually known, like two of his brothers, Hiram and Arthur, became a commercial clerk at the age of fifteen.
The family’s heavy industrial and clerical occupational experience was the background for at least two other logging, trading, and shipping agency companies he was to set up. In 1908, at 22 years of age, he moved to work for Evans and Reed, Cardiff coal exporters and importers of pit props. In 1914 during the First World War, he worked in the Baltic area, and in August of that year, he went to Montreal, spending September to December 1914 in Newfoundland. From the end of the war, he sought to develop his business interests on the island. In 1921, he obtained £10,000 backing from Franklin Thomas and Company, Cardiff coal importer, to help him set up J. O. Williams Company in 1925. However, the liquidation of the British and North American Trading Company in which Williams had shares bankrupted him.
Read more about this topic: John Osborn Williams
Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)