Early Years
He was born in London, England, on 19 February 1810. Parnell's father was a gentleman named James Parnell, and his mother Joan Parnell. He trained as carpenter's apprentice until 1834, when he took a job at a joinery on Theobald's Road in London. As carpenters in London routinely worked 12 to 14 hours per day, the problems with such long working days would have been painstakingly clear to him. Parnell argued about the length of the working day with his colleagues. Around the same time, a Grand National Consolidated Trades Union was being formed, and Parnell asked the union to support the shortening of the working day. The union did not agree, and so Parnell did not join the union, but instead set up his own business.
On 6 September 1839, Parnell married widow Mary Ann Canham, and only eleven days later, the newly wedded couple set off together for New Zealand. For £126, Parnell had secured the boat fare, and the right to 100 acres (40 ha) of country land, and 1-acre (4,000 m2) of land in the area then called Port Nicholson and now the city of Wellington, New Zealand. The couple left on the Duke of Roxburgh on 17 September 1839, and landed on Britannia (Petone) Beach on 8 February 1840.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Duncan Parnell
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)