Following a delinquent childhood and youth, Davies renounced his home and his apprenticeship with a frame-maker. At the age of twenty-two, having borrowed money from the executor of his grandmotherâs estate, he sailed to America. This was the first of more than a dozen Atlantic crossings, often made by working his passage aboard a cattle boat. Between 1893 and 1899 Davies travelled the highways and railroads, tutored by hardened men of the road. He took advantage of the corrupt system of "boodle jails" in order to pass the winter in Michigan, staying a series of different jails. These were jails in which a tramp could make an illicit arrangement with a law enforcement officer to stay in the jail without being an actual prisoner. Here, with his fellow tramps, Davies would enjoy the relative comfort of "card-playing, singing, smoking, reading, relating experiences and occasionally taking exercise or going out for a walk." Regular work was never an option and Davies subsisted largely by begging. After crossing the Atlantic one last time, from Britain to Canada, at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, Davies fell while hopping a train. His foot was crushed and his leg had to be amputated below the knee. He later wrote of the effect the accident had on his life: "All the wildness had been taken out of me and my adventures after this were not of my own seeking."
The book was praised by Osbert Sitwell for its "primitive splendour and directness", while Bernard Shaw himself commended the prose to "literary experts for its style alone", describing Davies as "the incorrigible Supertramp who wrote this amazing book."

Question: What was Davies' job before he left Britain?
Answer: A frame maker's apprentice. 
Alternative answer: begging