Youth
Welensky was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. His father was of Lithuanian Jewish origin, hailing from a village near Wilno in then Russian-ruled Lithuania, who settled in Southern Rhodesia after first emigrating to the United States and then South Africa, while his mother was a ninth-generation Afrikaner who was of Dutch ethnicity. Welensky's mother died when he was 11, being treated by Godfrey Huggins, a doctor who was later to become the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia.
Although not of British ancestry, Welensky was intensely pro-British, a distinctive sentiment among Rhodesians. John Connell, in his foreword to Welensky's book 4000 Days, states, "Welensky, who had not a drop of British blood in his veins, shared this pride and loyalty to the full."
After leaving school at the age of 14, Welensky found employment with Rhodesia Railways as a fireman, while putting his physical strength to work as a boxer. He rose through the ranks of Rhodesia Railways to become a railroad engineer and became involved in the trade union movement, becoming leader of the powerful European Railway Workers Union.
While working on the railways, he became the professional heavyweight boxing champion of Rhodesia at 19 and held the position until he was 21. During this time, Welensky met his first wife, Elizabeth Henderson, who was working at a cafe in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia at the time. They married after a two-year courtship.
Read more about this topic: Roy Welensky
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“If youth but knew; if age but could.
Wives in their husbands’ absences grow subtler,
And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“His youth was distinguished by all the tumult and storm of pleasures, in which he licentiously triumphed, disdaining all decorum. His fine imagination was often heated and exhausted with his body in celebrating and deifying the prostitute of the night, and his convivial joys were pushed to all the extravagancy of frantic bacchanals.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)