Kitching and his three sons, James, Ben, and Scheepers, regularly joined Broom on field trips around Graaff-Reinet and Nieu-Bethesda collecting fossils.

Broom was also close friends with Raymond Dart and had contributed to the discovery and research of hominin fossils, namely of Australopithecus and Paranthropus, that had been recovered from Sterkfontein and Makapansgat.

Once the BPI was formally set up, Broom recommended that the young James Kitching, on his return from military service at the end of World War II, be the fledgling institute's first director.

[3] Within a week of his appointment as Director, Kitching took a train from Johannesburg back to Graaff-Reinet to embark on his first official field trip for the BPI.

Within five months Kitching, with the aid of his younger brothers, had assembled a collection of more than 200 fossil specimens as research material for the Bernard Price Institute, mostly skulls of therapsid species.

This allowed the institute to extend its field collecting activities to include Sterkfontein in the north and also the Makapansgat caves at what was then known as the Northern Transvaal (now Limpopo Province) of South Africa.

Over the following decades, the academic staff of the Bernard Price Institute led numerous research teams to Antarctica, the Americas, continental Europe, and Russia.

When Kitching retired in 1990, the Director's post of the Bernard Price Institute was awarded to Professor Bruce Rubidge, the grandson of Sidney H. Haughton.