Word: welshed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Steep Descent. The man who can put medieval scholasticism into such comfortable modern dress was born in Belfast, Ireland, where his grandfather, an itinerant Welsh boilermaker-turned-shipbuilder, had settled. At the age of twelve, young...
...from school at Rugby, later became a Communist, was beaten up by Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts at a fascist meeting. He got into Oxford with difficulty and became the first Communist president of the Union (Oxonian debating society). He later rejected Communism, joined the army as a Welsh Guardsman in 1940, was "commissioned as an intelligence officer and wound up in the Ministry of Economic Warfare...
Then Jim Horner's money ran out. Arthur had to quit his religious studies, take a job in the coal pits. But he kept preaching. His sermons became tinged with socialism, and gradually only socialism remained. The mine owners fired him and he was blacklisted in all the Welsh mines. When World War I broke out, he refused to bear arms in what he called "an imperialist and anti-working-class...
...Prisoner. Together with a red-haired Welsh miner called Charlie Jones, he organized the miners of Maerdy. When the police got after Horner again, he fled to Ireland, and under the name Jack O'Brien served in the Irish Republican Army. When he heard that his wife had borne him a son, he returned to Britain. The minute he came ashore, the police arrested him. During his term at Wormwood Scrubbs Prison, he was the most obstreperous prisoner the wardens ever knew...
...release, he was forcibly inducted into the Army, forcibly dressed in uniform; a tall Welsh Guardsman, who was to escort him back to Wales, ordered him to shoulder his pack. Homer refused. The deadlock continued till a crowd gathered. Finally a grey-haired little man stepped forward, quietly picked up the pack and murmured: "Come along, Arthur." It was Arthur Horner's father. Arthur's finish to the story: "Of course, as we got round the corner, I took the pack from the old man-but I was damned if I was going to cave in under...