Such was roughly the position at the time when I reached Brittany and
conceived the idea of joining the French forces on the Loire and
forwarding some account of their operations to England. During my stay in
Paris with my father I had assisted him in preparing several articles, and
had written others on my own account. My eldest brother, Adrian Vizetelly,
was at this time assistant-secretary at the Institution of Naval
Architects. He had been a student at the Royal School of Naval
Architecture with the Whites, Elgars, Yarrows, Turnbulls, and other famous
shipbuilders, and on quitting it had taken the assistant-secretaryship in
question as an occupation pending some suitable vacancy in the Government
service or some large private yard. The famous naval constructor, E. J.
Reed, had started in life in precisely the same post, and it was, indeed,
at his personal suggestion that my brother took it. A year or two later he
and his friend Dr. Francis Elgar, subsequently Director of Dockyards and
one of the heads of the Fairfield Shipbuilding Company, were assisting
Reed to run his review _Naval Science_. At the time of the Franco-German
war, however, my brother, then in his twenty-sixth year, was writing on
naval subjects for the _Daily News_ and the _Pall Mall Gazette,_ edited
respectively by John Robinson and Frederick Greenwood.
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