As a boy he took an interest in animals, collecting water beetles and maintaining them in aquariums and was a member of the local natural history society.
He studied at St Paul's School and later went to Trinity College in Dublin from where he graduated with a gold medal in 1903.
In 1910 he joined the Zoological and Anthropological section of the Indian Museum and when the organization was converted in 1916 to the Zoological Survey of India, he became Superintendent and took up the study of crustaceans to continue work started by James Wood-Mason and Alfred William Alcock.
He spent fourteen years in India during which he published seventeen papers on the decapods in the Indian Museum.
[4] In 2018, researchers from the Zoological Survey of India have named a new species of crab, Teretamon kempi, discovered from Namdapha, Arunachal Pradesh after him.