never left following his father's death. After studying in Exeter he taught English and Classics at Blackburn Grammar School, but then sailed from Genoa in 1901 to teach at the "School for European Boys" founded by his brother Herbert in Weihaiwei, China. He left less than nine months later, however, departing to Japan. As Rupert Bruce-Mitford later wrote, he departed "with ambitions to set up his own school, and devise its curriculum and ethos according to his own ideas". Shortly before his 1902 departure to China, Eustace Beer adopted the surname Bruce-Mitford—perhaps indicative of his desire to separate himself from his family's missionary past. "Mitford" was a take on "Midford", his mother's maiden name, and perhaps not unintentionally, that of the unrelated Algernon Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, whose name carried respect in the British expatriate community in Japan. "Bruce" may have been taken from Major Clarence Dalrymple Bruce, an acquaintance who commanded the Weihaiwei Regiment. In Japan Eustace founded the Yokohama Modern School, which targeted the sons of English, or English-speaking, businessmen and missionaries. In 1903, and likely on the basis of his book and articles on Weihaiwei, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; he subsequently became interested in geography and vulcanology, and in 1905 and 1914 issued additional books on the country. Eustace Bruce-Mitford had met Beatrice Allison on his ship to Yokohama, and soon after founding his school recruited her as an assistant teacher; they married on 27 July 1904, at Christ Church, Yokohama. She was the oldest daughter of early settlers of British Columbia, Susan Louisa (née Moir) and John Fall Allison, an explorer, gold prospector, and cattle rancher. In 1908, however, by which time the family had three sons, William Awdry, the Bishop of South Tokyo, announced from the pulpit of Christ Church that "certain marriages of British subjects celebrated in Japan" might not be legally valid, and if so "the couples ... will find that they have been and are living together ... in concubinage and that their children are 'illegitimate'". Though a legal technicality, and one which was remedied by an Act of Parliament in 1912, the announcement disgraced the Bruce-Mitfords, and Eustace lost his leadership of the Yokohama Modern School. He was taken on as an assistant editor by Captain Francis Brinkley, owner and editor of the Japan Mail, though by 1911 had returned to England as a freelance