Born in Paris of Danish parents but moved with his family to England at the outbreak of war in 1914. Educated in London and at Pannal Ash College, Harrogate. At the age of 14 contracted TB and spent the next 7 years at sanatoria in Belgium and Switzerland. On returning to England he taught in preparatory schools at Goatland, Harpenden and Honiton, before marrying in 1943 and moving north to the Holmes Chapel and Sandbach area of Cheshire where he taught at the Terra Nova school. Here his work and a growing family meant that his entomological work was put on hold and was not really rekindled until some time after his retirement and move to Dunnmow, Essex in 1973. In an article titled ‘Looking back: reflections of a quondam Coleopterist’ in ERJV, 96, 1984, pp.103-107 Kaufmann wrote that he caught the entomological ‘bug’ during his time in Belgium and Switzerland... ‘one day a friend brought me an Elaterid, dull brown, with tufted pubescent patches of iridescent gold; on another occasion he arrived with a torpid Procrustes coriaceus... these beetles changed my collecting habits... I wrote off [for] 100 beetles from that most reliable firm, Watkins and Doncaster... next I persuaded my parents to send out a copy of Rev. C.A.Hall’s Common British Beetles and later W.E.Sharp’s Beetles of our Countryside... Coleopteromania had taken off!’ On returning to England he befriended K.G.Blair in the NHM and ‘Where the Coleopteraa were concerned my working life seems to have been divided into four parts’. These concerned first the genus Carabus, which resulted in a 332 page typescript never published; then a three year investigation into necrophagous species which culminated in a long paper in The Naturalist, 1941, pp. 63-72, 115-24, 133-38, 149-56; thirdly five years working on water beetles which saw papers on the Herts, Middlesex and Devon faunas; before finally settling on the Cerambycidae which were to occupy him for the rest of his life. Even before his ‘retirement’ from entomology Kaufmann had begun work on the Cerambycidae publishing a twenty page account of their biology and vice-county distribution based upon records from both the literature and collectors with whom he was in contact in EMM.,84, 1948, pp.66-85, and attending a refresher course at Oxford in 1949 ‘when all my spare time was spent in the Hope Department... going through their material’. The second phase of his work on Cerambycids saw the publication of numerous articles detailing the county distribution and varieties of the British species mostly in the ERJV and later in The Coleopterist; Colin Johnson’s obituary in EMM, 141, 2005, pp.187-191 includes a full bibliography. Kaufmann did not begin hyphenating his name with Uhthoff until 1984. Johnson records a letter from his widow stating that ‘he hated the telephone, he always insisted on putting the full name in the Directory so no one would find him! We do not really use the full name except on very formal occasions, far too difficult to pronounce!’. She also noted that he was somewhat reclusive and avoided being photographed (though there is one in Johnson’s obituary). Kauffman is recorded to have had long correspondences with A.A.Allen and David Nash, and he also wrote to me for biographical information. Much of the earlier correspondence and his library was sadly lost in a fire prior to his retirement. His collection, amounting to some 2,700 specimens, is at Manchester in 10 store boxes, accessioned in 1958 as part of the R.W.Lloyd collection (Johnson, 2004 p.16) and Pedersen (2002) p.129 records a letter in the RESL to C.J.Wainwright dated 1946. Apart from the obituary mentioned above there is another (based on it) in Latissimus, 20, December 2005 p.21 which adds that he contributed 500 records to the national water beetle recording scheme. FRESL from 1986. (MD 12/04, 11/09)
Dates
1910 – 11 October 2003