Thomas was often away from home. When Welsh was ten, his father died. His mother, faced with running the hotel alone, sent Kate and Stanley to an aunt in Merthyr, while Welsh was sent to his maternal grandfather in Radyr. After a year, suffering from homesickness, Welsh returned home to Pontypridd. His mother later remarried, to Richard Williams, an innkeeper from Aberdare. When Welsh left school at the age of 14, he took up work as a boilerman (the 1901 census, when he was 15, has him recorded as an apprentice mechanical engineer) finding work with Llewellyn & Cubbitt of Pentre, Rhondda. At the age of 16 he and three friends decided to find a new life in Canada. They set sail from Liverpool to Vancouver arriving in January 1903, but although his companions were able to find work, Welsh struggled to hold down any steady jobs. It was in Canada that he took a serious interest in bodybuilding and became a firm advocate of Bernarr Macfadden's physical culture regime. After a year Welsh was again homesick and borrowed enough money to return to Britain, but with only $10 he was forced to travel as a worker on a cattle-boat. With his newfound physical fitness he entered the boxing ring undertaking amateur fights in Scotland, far away from Wales to prevent his mother discovering his passion for fighting. After twelve months he raised the money needed to return to the America, travelling to New York on the Baltic on her maiden voyage on 29 June 1904. Welsh failed to find steady work in the States, and although his mother thought he was earning a regular wage and living comfortably, Welsh was actually taking any casual work that was offered him. Initially he rode the rails to the Dakotas to labour in the farm fields, before heading to New York City working long hours as a dishwasher or banner bearer. When Welsh was mugged while sleeping at a cheap hotel, he was given a job as a porter by the sympathetic hotel manager. His first job in New York was as a boxing instructor in one of Bernarr Macfadden institutes. He was allowed to sleep in the gym, was given all his meals, plus $1 salary a day. It was as an instructor he first met his future wife, Brahna Weinstein, a Jewish Russian girl who anglicised her name to Fanny