Initially a biologist, who achieved his most notable fieldwork, with W. H. R. Rivers, Charles Gabriel Seligman and Sidney Ray on the Torres Strait Islands.

[6] At Cambridge, he studied zoology and became the friend of John Holland Rose (afterwards Harmsworth Professor of Naval History), whose sister he married in 1881.

[1] Eventually, funds were raised to equip an expedition to the Torres Straits Islands to make a scientific study of the people, and Haddon was asked to assume the leadership.

[7] Haddon was convinced that the art objects collected would otherwise have been destroyed by Christian missionaries determined to eradicate the religious traditions and ceremonies of the native islanders.

[11][12] Similar anthropological work, the recording of myths and legends from the Torres Strait Islands was coordinated by Margaret Lawrie during 1960–72.

[7] On his retirement Haddon was made honorary keeper of the rich collections from New Guinea which the Cambridge Museum possesses, and also wrote up the remaining parts of the Torres Straits Reports, which his busy teaching and administrative life had forced him to set aside.

He was the first to recognise the ethnological importance of string figures and tricks, known in England as "cats' cradles," but found all over the world as a pastime among native peoples.

He and Rivers invented a nomenclature and method of describing the process of making the different figures, and one of his daughters, Kathleen Rishbeth, became an expert authority on the subject.

[7] Though subsequently sidelined by Bronisław Malinowski, and the new paradigm of functionalism within anthropology, Haddon was profoundly influential mentoring and supporting various anthropologists conducted then nascent fieldwork: A.R.

Marrett's student at the University of Oxford,[18] as well as John Layard on Malakula, Vanuatu (1914–15),[19] and to have Bronisław Malinowski stationed in Mailu and later the Trobriand Islands during World War 1.

[20] Haddon actively gave advice to missionaries, government officers, traders and anthropologists; collecting in return information about New Guinea and elsewhere.