Auber Octavius Neville (1875-1954) was one of scores of young British men of 'good standing but slender means' who looked to a future beyond their own shores. Arriving in Western Australia in 1897, aged twenty-two, to join his brothers, he was part of the great movement of English clerks into the Colonial Civil Services. Pat Jacobs, through skilled and careful use of original sources, gives a convincing sense of a man and the context in which he lived and acted. Mister Neville is also, obliquely, a comment on the process of history.