the continuance of the war. His efficiency in the position met with general acknowledgment.
Brackenbury was made C.B. in 1880, promoted K.C.B. in 1894, and received the K.C.S.I. in 1896. In 1900 he was promoted G.C.B., and he was made a privy councillor on his retirement in 1904. He died at Nice 20 April 1914. He was twice married: first, in 1861 to Emilia (died 1905), daughter of Edmund Storr Halswell, F.R.S., and widow of Reginald Morley; secondly, in 1905 to Edith, daughter of Louis Desanges, who survived him. There was no issue of either marriage.
Brackenbury was an able man, with considerable capacity for organization. He wrote well upon military subjects, and was a competent student of the art of war as it was known in the nineteenth century. His published books were The Last Campaign of Hanover (1870), The Tactics of the Three Arms (1878), Narrative of the Ashantee War (2 vols., 1874), The River Column (1885), and Some Memories of my Spare Time (1909).
[Private information.]
BRADDON, MARY ELIZABETH (1887-1915), novelist. [See Maxwell, Mary Elizabeth.]
BRASSEY, THOMAS, first Earl Brassey, of Bulkeley, Cheshire (1836-1918), was born at Stafford 11 February 1836, the eldest son of Thomas Brassey [q.v.], railway contractor, of Buerton, Cheshire. He was educated at Rugby and University College, Oxford, where he took honours in the school of law and modern history (1859). His father’s railway enterprises led to school holidays being spent partly at Portsmouth, where he acquired his love of the sea and interest in maritime affairs, partly in France, where he obtained a sound knowledge of the French language. Other holidays and Oxford vacations were spent in yachting cruises, a pastime in which he took great interest throughout his life. He was elected to the Royal Yacht Squadron a year after leaving Oxford. Brassey decided not to follow his father’s profession but to join the parliamentary bar, and he became a pupil of John Buller, the leading parliamentary draftsman of the day. He was called to the bar in 1866, but soon abandoned a legal career for politics. Having already stood unsuccessfully as a liberal for Birkenhead in 1861, he was elected for Devonport in June 1865, but, before taking his seat, was defeated at the general election a few weeks later. He failed at a by-election at Sandwich in 1866, but was successful at Hastings in 1868 and retained that seat until 1886.
From his entry into parliament until 1880 Brassey worked hard and laboriously at the subjects in which he was interested: wages, the condition of the working classes, and employers’ liability; naval matters of every department, administration of the dockyards, naval pay, shipbuilding and designs, organization of the naval reserves, and the creation of the Royal Naval Volunteer Artillery (1873). He compiled useful volumes entitled Work and Wages (1872), Foreign Work and English Wages (1879), British Seamen (1877), The British Navy (1882-1883), an encyclopaedic work in five volumes, and Sixty Years of Progress (1904). The character of his work and his conception of his duty in public life are aptly described in his own preface to The British Navy: ‘Few men have entered the House of Commons with more slender share of what are usually described as parliamentary talents than the humble individual who writes the present introduction; and if, by devotion to special subjects, he has gained the confidence of the public, his experience may perhaps encourage others.’
There is no doubt that Brassey’s untiring industry contributed greatly to the reforms in naval administration and maritime policy that were being evolved as the conditions of the old sailing navy and marine rapidly passed away. Besides his parliamentary work he published articles in the leading reviews, wrote letters to The Times, issued pamphlets and read papers and lectures at public institutions, nearly always on labour questions or naval and marine affairs. He spent part of every parliamentary recess at sea in his yacht; and in 1876-1877 he accomlished a tour round the world, an account of which is given in his first wife’s popular book, Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’ (1878). The later voyages of the Sunbeam Brassey described in his book ‘Sunbeam’ R.Y.S., published a few months before his death. He was the first private yachtsman to be given the certificate of master mariner after examination. Although he was never happier than when afloat in his yacht, he never undertook a long voyage unless it was to fulfil some public purpose; and in 1916 he handed over the Sunbeam to the government of India for hospital work during the war.
In 1880 Brassey joined Mr. Gladstone’s second administration as civil lord of the
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