Arthur Henry Neumann

Arthur Henry Neumann
Arthur Neumann in 1897
Born	(1850-06-12)12 June 1850 Hockliffe, Bedfordshire, England
Died	29 May 1907(1907-05-29) (aged 56) Westminster, London, England
Occupation	Hunter, author, soldier, explorer,
Notable works	Elephant Hunting In East Equatorial Africa

Arthur Henry Neumann (12 June 1850 – 29 May 1907) was an English explorer, hunter, soldier, farmer and travel writer, famous for his exploits in Equatorial East Africa. In 1898 he published Elephant Hunting In East Equatorial Africa.

Neumann was born in Hockliffe, Bedfordshire, a village four miles east from Leighton Buzzard, the youngest child of seven of the Reverend John Stubbs Neumann and his wife (née) Annie Mary Formby. His father was rector of a rural parish and the young retiring Neumann would recall ‘an attempt I remember to have made to get out of the sight of houses in a secluded part of the common and fancy myself in an uninhabited country’ Although it is known that Neumann’s brother Formby attended Wadham College, Oxford Arthur’s education is not known and most likely he was educated at home with private tutors.

In 1869 his father who was from a wealthy family of Liverpool salt merchants retired from his living in Bedfordshire and departed for Italy, a country with a sizeable flock of wealthy British expatriates for the next five years. This was the spur for his son Arthur to depart to South Africa to begin a life of wanderlust. Neumann declared in later life that life for him had really only begun in 1868: what had gone before, in his opinion, hardly counted. On arriving in Durban on the Natal coast Neumann found a town that was barely fifty years old with the demeanour of a frontier town. He took a job with a coffee planter near Port Natal shortly before the deadly Borer Beetle infected the growth and decimated the fledgling industry. Several months of this work was enough for Neumann, and with his brother Charles they struck further north to the lower basin of the Umvoti River. Here they found government land suitable for the growing of tobacco and cotton. However, Arthur failed to settle and headed in 1871 to the newly discovered goldfield in the eastern Transvaal. The fledgling Boer Republic was close to bankruptcy in this period of the 19th century beset with debt and hostility from the Zulu inhabitants and the prospect of a gold rush was encouraged. It does not seem to have proved a fruitful period for the young Neumann who had returned to Natal by 1872.