Thomas Alexander Barns, known as Alexander Barns or T. Alexander Barns (4 June 1881 – 4 March 1930), was an English business man, explorer, big game hunter, author, artist, naturalist and lecturer connected with the opening up of Central Africa in the early 20th century.
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The second son of the Rev. William Amos Barns, by his marriage to Eva Cecilia Buckworth, Barns was born at Bletchingley, Surrey, in 1881 and educated at Cranleigh School.[1] His father was a Church of England clergyman and a graduate of St John's College, Oxford.[2] His mother, Eva Cecilia Buckworth, the daughter of a clergyman, had been awarded the Royal Humane Society's Silver Medal in 1868, at the age of thirteen, for saving her ten-year-old sister from drowning in the River Erme at Ivy Bridge, Devon, after she had been saved herself by her governess.[3][4] Eva Cecilia was the daughter of the Rev. Thomas Everard Buckworth (born 1822), Rector of Norbury, Staffordshire, whose mother Maria Clarke was one of the sisters of General Sir John Clarke (1787-1854), a veteran of the Peninsular Wars.[5][6]<
In 1898, at the age of seventeen, Barns went out to Africa as an assistant manager to the Nyasaland Coffee Company. From 1900 to 1903 he was Agent for the Tanganyika Concessions in Northern Rhodesia, where he also worked in ranching and organized expeditions to German and Portuguese East Africa, shot elephants, traded ivory, and collected zoological specimens for museums, such as a large African elephant for the South Kensington Museum.[1]
Between 1919 and 1922 Barns led three Trans-African Research Expeditions through the Belgian Congo and the Tanganyika Territory. He became the first Englishman to describe the Ngorongoro Crater, a volcanic caldera in the Crater Highlands of what is now Tanzania, at that time the largest known crater in the world.[1]
In his The Wonderland of the Eastern Congo (1922), Barns was an early observer of mountain gorillas and reported that he had observed them living in large troops and that all such troops included at least two adult females with young of different ages.[7]
His book Across the Great Craterland to the Congo (1924) followed an expedition partly driven by the search for a rare butterfly which Barns called "the Antizox". On his first visit to the Congo he had himself observed it floating on the water just out of his reach.[8][9]
Barns was a member of the African Society, the Shikar Club, and the National Geographic Society of Washington, D.C., and a correspondent for The African World, as well as publishing several books about Africa.[1]
He married Margery, the daughter of Frederick Cory, and they had one son and one daughter.[1]
He died in Chicago in 1930, run over by a taxi-cab. An obituary in The Entomologist called him "A notable and inspiring figure among the naturalists, geographers and sportsmen of Africa". [10]