Background
Newcombe was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, as the eighth of fourteen children.
Newcombe was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, as the eighth of fourteen children.
University of London.
He is known for his work with the native people of Canada. Newcombe received his Bachelor of Medicine from the University of Aberdeen in 1873 and his Doctor of Medicine in 1878. In 1884, he established a general practice in Hood River, Oregon.
He moved in 1885 with his family to Victoria, British Columbia.
In 1889, he moved back to Victoria and worked at the "Insane Asylum" in New Westminster. With his eldest three children he returned to England and participated in geological and natural history studies at the British Museum and the University of London.
He ceased to practice medicine after 1894. Newcombe began to interest himself in the botany of North America and made many trips to Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands) by boat.
In the process he became very interested in the Haida and started to collect their artifacts to "preserve" them from, what was then thought to be, the demise of the native culture.
Newcombe and others were driven by the "fear that "pure" Northwest Coast cultures were disappearing through depopulation and assimilation". In 1897, George Amos Dorsey asked him to collect Haida artifacts for the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago. Dorsey, an American, was known for his haste and he had to advise James Deans who had been a guide in the area that he should just keep quiet.
This was required as the local missionary John Henry Keen lambasted Deans and his unidentified, but American, collaborators for desecrating the graves of the local natives in their hunt for Northwest Coast artifacts.
Newcombe also acquired many totem poles for the Royal British Columbia Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the Totem pole for the British Museum, Kew Gardens, and museums in Cambridge, Liverpool and Sydney. In 1904, he went with six Vancouver Island Native Americans and their medicine man to the World"s Fair held in Saint Louis to show their crafts and culture.
He also conducted biological and geographic research, such as on local (British Columbia) mollusks and paleontology. In 1913, he led a Commission studying the effect of sea lions on the salmon industry.
In 1914, he prepared a report on the circumnavigation of Vancouver Island.
Much of his work, including collection of plants, mollusks, fossils, aboriginal artifacts and information, was done with the help of his youngest surviving son, William Henry Arnold Newcombe (1884-1960). He died in 1924 in Victoria, British Columbia, after catching a cold on a sailing expedition.