Brewitt-Taylor was born 11 December 1857, Kingston, Sussex and died 4 March 1938 at the age of eighty, in his house, Cathay, in Earlsferry, Fife.
The couple had two sons, Raymond, who was killed as a member of the Field Ambulance Service in World War I, and Leonard, who died in 1933 from a cancerous blood condition.
In 1880 aged 22 he married Alice Mary Vale and went to China to teach mathematics, maritime navigation, and nautical astronomy at the Naval School at the Foochow Arsenal.
The school was part of the naval dockyard which had been established to support the Self-Strengthening Movement in its of learning science and technology from the west.
[2] After his house was destroyed by French artillery in the Battle of Fuzhou in 1885, Brewitt-Taylor joined the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and was assigned in 1891 to Tianjin.