[5] At the age of 18, and to spite his father who wanted him to train for an army career at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he set off with an older friend, the occasional photographer and eccentric, John Hope-Johnstone, to walk to China.

Brenan spent the next ten months in Germany, learning the language, surprisingly in preparation for joining the Indian Police Service, but this plan was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.

They lived in Churriana, a village near Málaga, during the early part of the Spanish Civil War, befriending the 72-year-old zoologist, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell.

Like Sir Peter, they provided safe haven to a right-wing sympathiser, despite objecting to his political views, staying on in Spain until the city was occupied by Italian forces sent by Mussolini to support the fascist rebels.

At the time of his death, his body was donated to the Medicine Faculty of Málaga for medical research and later cremated; his ashes are buried in the English Cemetery, Malaga.