Autograph request
Postcard sent by Bray to The Commander, HMS Talbot, c/o GPO, London on 27th September 1905 asking for his autograph.
I can't quite work out the signature, the captain at the time was Henry J.L. Clarke.
HMS Talbot was an Eclipse-class protected cruiser built for the Royal Navy in the mid-1890s.
HMS Talbot was laid down 5 March 1894 and launched 25 April 1895. She commissioned on 15 September 1896 for service on the North America and West Indies Station, but was back in the United Kingdom a couple of years later. In April 1901 she was commissioned at Devonport by Captain Frederick George Stopford, with a crew of 437, to serve at the China Station. She arrived at Hong Kong on 10 December 1901. In June 1902 she visited Kobe in Japan. Captain Lewis Bayly was appointed in command on 11 July 1902.
She was present at Chemulpo Bay in 1904, during the historical naval battle between two Russian ships, the cruiser Varyag and the gunboat Korietz against a fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Future Arctic explorers and members of Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition Patrick Keohane and Edward Evans served aboard her.
