Sheffield Airey Neave

Born in Kensworth in Hertfordshire on 20 April 1879, he was the son of Sheffield Henry M. Neave and his wife Gertrude Charlotte Margaret (née Airey). He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford.[1]

Neave's first work was research into the problems related to the tsetse fly and the study of African animal life. He was part of the Geodetic Survey of Northern Rhodesia between 1904 and 1905. Between 1906 and 1908 he was part of the Katanga Sleeping Sickness Commission and then from 1909 to 1913 the Entomological Research Committee of Tropical Africa.[1] While he collected in Eastern Africa, fellow collector James Jenkins Simpson collected from West Africa.[2]

Neave returned to the United Kingdom in 1913 and was appointed assistant director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, becoming director from 1942 to 1946. He was rewarded for his contribution to entomology with an appointment as an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1933 and a companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1941.[1] From 1918 until 1933 he was honorary secretary of the Royal Entomological Society and was its president in 1934–35.

In 1934 he had the idea to compile an updated index of all published generic and subgeneric names in zoology, an activity which occupied the period 1935–1939 and resulted in the publication of his (initially) four-volume Nomenclator Zoologicus in 1939–1940. He also oversaw the preparation of a fifth volume, published in 1950, and with the work of others, the work eventually ran to 9 print volumes (covering names published between 1753 and 1994) plus an additional tenth, electronic-only compilation, completed by Thomson Reuters in 2004. The entire work was subsequently digitised by the uBio project in the U.S.A. and made available for web-based query in 2004–2005.[3]

Neave retired in 1946 to garden and farm in Essex but he carried on as honorary secretary of the Zoological Society of London until 1952. It was a position he had held since 1942.[1]

Neave married twice, firstly to Dorothy Middleton and they had two sons and three daughters, the eldest is Airey Neave later a Member of Parliament. Dorothy died in 1942 and Neave married secondly to Mary Hodges in 1946 in London.[1]

• ‘NEAVE, Sheffield Airey’, Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2008; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2007 accessed 21 May 2011
• Gilbert, P. (2010). "Sheffield Airey NEAVE: Administrator, editor, systematist". Archives of Natural History. 37: 171–172. doi:10.3366/E0260954109001752.