Barnard was born in
London. His first education was at a private school in
Camberley from where he went to the
Realgymnasium in
Mannheim to improve his German. From 1905 to 1908 this unusually gifted and versatile scholar attended
Christ's College, Cambridge, taking the
Natural Sciences Tripos in Botany, Geology and Zoology. He also took the newly introduced courses in Anthropology, Ethnology and Geography. For the following three years he studied law at the
Middle Temple, becoming a barrister in 1911. After a short spell as naturalist with the
Marine Biological Laboratory in
Plymouth, he joined the staff of the
South African Museum in
Cape Town in 1911 as a marine biology assistant. He became assistant director in 1921 and director from 1946 until his 1956 retirement when he was free to work on the molluscs. His
D.Sc. was from the
University of Cape Town with a dissertation on the "
Distribution of Crustacea in South African Waters", and he eventually became a world authority on
crustaceans. His other favoured field was the taxonomy and classification of South African fishes, a discipline in which he did important pioneering work.
Stellenbosch University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1956. Barnard was a keen mountaineer and served as secretary of the
Mountain Club of South Africa from 1918 to 1945, and it was by way of the mountains that he met the amateur botanist
Thomas Pearson Stokoe who was to become a close friend and climbing companion. Barnard's mountaineering interest first brought him into contact with the genus
Colophon, and many species of the beetle, such as
Colophon primosi, were named after his mountaineering friends. In 1915 he married Alice Watkins, and they raised a family of two children, a son and a daughter. Barnard died, aged 73, in
Cape Town. ==Legacy==