Clement Harry Pead, metallurgist and amateur entomologist, was the son of William Pead and Kate Hunter. He received his education at the Bury St Edmunds Grammar School in England and came to the South African Republic (Transvaal) in 1889. He started his career in Johannesburg in 1890 as an assistant in the assay office of the Jumpers Gold Mining Company.That same year he was promoted to chief assayer, a position he held to 1895. During the last eighteen months of this period he also held the position of cyanide manager. Early in 1896 he was appointed chief metallurgist to the East Rand Proprietory Mines, Limited, where he remained for eleven years.
Pead became a member of the Chemical and Metallurgical Society of South Africa in 1894, the year of its formation. He continued his membership after the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when the society was renamed the Chemical, Metallurgical and Mining Society of South Africa, and read a paper before it at some time before the end of 1903. At a meeting in September 1905 he read "Notes on improvements in the cyanide treatment of sands and slimes", which was published in the society's Journal (Vol. 6(3), pp. 76-78). In 1899 he was granted a United States patent for new and useful improved slime-filter presses.
During 1907-1908 Pead spent some months in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to report on its mines for a private syndicate. In 1909 he moved to Rhodesia and settled in Bulawayo as partner to Mr G.H. Fison. By 1911 he was the senior partner in Pead & Fison, assayers, metallurgists and mining engineers, but by 1916 he was practising on his own as "C.H. Pead, assayer, metallurgist and mining engineer". He became a member of the (British) Institution of Mining and Metallurgy in 1912.
Pead also joined the Rhodesia Scientific Association (Bulawayo), probably mainly because of his interest in entomology and related subjects, and read a number of notes and papers before the association that were published in its Proceedings: "Note on the habitat of a lizard and on an arachnid found therein" (January 1910); "Some Rhodesian cicadidae and observations on economic entomology" (February 1910); "Some observations on the pupating habits of a Noetuid moth, Cucullia palliastria" (September 1910); and "Town water" (December 1912). He was president of the Association for 1912/13, delivering his presidential address on "Irrigation" in June 1913.
Pead married Adele Frederika Puzey on 28 April 1897, but she died later that same year. In November 1910 he married Florence Irene Featherstonehaugh, with whom he had a son and three daughters.
