He composed many of his Buccaneer Ballads in that office, and wrote his first novel, The Haunted Island, on the train to and from work. (It was relatively free of telegraph traffic until the evenings, allowing him to read, write, and entertain visitors in the mornings and afternoons. Visiak found a job with the Indo-European Telegraph Company as a telegraph operator, working for a brief (but unhappy) spell in their Manchester offices before returning to London, to become senior clerk at their Mincing Lane office. None of Visiak’s brothers seems to have become a sculptor (though two - John and Frank, again - would follow the family tradition on their mother’s side by heading Searcys in the interwar years, Frank actually rescuing the company from financial straits thanks to his independent success as a business- and statesman in Malaya ). The fact these same two brothers, John and Frank, were choristers at the Chapel Royal and sang, in 1893, at the wedding of Prince George, Duke of York (later to become King George V), gives some idea of the family’s standing, or at least its aspirations. The enrolment records of St Augustine’s School, Westminster, meanwhile, list both Edward Harold Physick and two of his brothers as attending (Visiak did so between the ages of 10 and 13, after which the statutory education of the period ended), so that is likely the unnamed London school. “Hallingford”, for instance, is actually Hitchin Grammar School (which is named as Visiak’s school in other biographical sources ). “Eversleigh” and “Hallingford” seem to be fictional names. Visiak was the first of seven sons born to Edward Joseph and Maude, his brothers being John Searcy (1880–1957), Frank Savill (1882–1983), Arthur Cecil (1883–1938), William Gordon (1886–1919), Algernon Sidney (1889–1977) and Noel Gilbert (1894–1911).Īccording to his memoir, Life’s Morning Hour, Visiak was first educated at the school of a Mrs Peters, then at “Eversleigh College”, then a church school (“a nightmare in a sordid dimension, dark and dingy” ), then a few terms at “Hallingford” Grammar School, until homesickness forced his return, and finally an unnamed school in London. Advert for E J Physick’s services as a sculptor, from The Times, 1866
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