Draft:Charles Edwin Brand

Charles Edwin Brand (20 Jan 1883, Marylebone, London, - 24 May, 1965, Hampstead, London), was a British journalist and writer, who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘David Masters’. His parents were William John Brand (a greengrocer) and his wife Ada (née Upson), who had married in 1875. His father died in 1889 at the age of 37, whilst Charles was still only eight, and his mother raised the family of three sons and one daughter, running a newsagent with the assistance of her sister, Emma Jane Upson. Ada Brand also died young, at the age of 39, in 1895, and the children were then raised by Aunt Emma. At the time of the 1901 census, Charles Brand was working as a grocer's assistant in Putney.

He applied for a patent on what he described as combination gardening tools. Brand, a journalist then living at Hadley Barnet, Hertfordshire, had created a tool consisting of a metal plate, one side of which was formed as a rake, a second as a Dutch hoe, the third an ordinary hoe and the fourth a drill-maker or clod-chopper; the plate had a central socket so that a handle could be attached. The patent was published on 6 June 1918.

Little is known of his journalistic career, but as ‘David Masters’ he was a contributor to Wide-World Magazine, Conquest, Saturday Evening Post, Traveller's Pack and Pictorial Magazine. Under his pseudonym ‘David Masters’, he wrote at least 25 books, all of which are non-fiction, mostly related to diving and salvage but his earliest, published when he was 40, The Romance of Excavation is on an archaeological theme. One of his books noted that he was a salvage expert and hard-hat diver who worked upon the sunken German fleet at Scapa Flow. Four of his books are on medical topics.

Charles Edwin Brand was living at 10 Belsize Park, Hampstead, London NW3, when he died on 24 May 1965, aged 82.