Outline his Life:

Eldest son of Walter Newman of the Royal Artillery, Edwin was named after his grandfather (Edwin the lawyer) and his mother Emma Montague Browne (names that continued in the family for one or more generations). He was the first of the Newman's to be educated at Wellington College where he was enrolled in the Anglesey dormitory. He was a bright student, winning the Modern Exhibition prize in 1879 - see half way down left side, photo left.

In the summer term of 1879, Edwin passed the entrance exam into the Royal Military Acadamy, Woolwich, gaining 4th place in the exams - the highest amongst Wellington's applicants.

After Woolwich and Chatham, Edwin joined the Royal Engineers on 26th July 1881. His career and his life were tragically cut short less than four years later, when on 22nd March 1885 at the age of 24, he was killed at the battle of McNeill's Zeriba at Tofrek in the Sudan, serving as a sapper subaltern with the Field Company Queen's Own Sappers and Miners (later became the 14th Fld Coy QVO Madras Sappers and Miners).

In 2015 I created a Wikipedea page describing the battle (together with a separate page on the Suakin-Berber Railway which formed the underlying reason why British troops were called to the area). The main sources of information on which I drew were:

• "The Battle of Tofrek" by Galloway W., pub. 1885 available on-line through Google Books and also in printed form, having been republished in 2004 by the Naval and Military Press. This 400 page account, written immediately after the incident, gives a full (if tortuous) account of the events before and after the battle. Most interesting, perhaps, is that the author's intention in writing the book was to correct erroneous statements that appeared in contemporary official and press reports of the battle, and to draw attention to deficiencies in the planning of the entire Tofrek expedition.
• "The Indian Sappers and Miners" by Lt.Col. E.W.C. Sandes, published by the Institution of Royal Engineers in 1948. Pages 300–306 give a brief but lurid account of the battle and of Edwin Newman's death, and have been transcribed in PDF format here.
• A short biograhy of Corporal George Andrews of the Royal Engineers, the full text of which was once to be found at 15744 Corporal George Andrews, Royal Engineers.htm which may now be defunct. If so, the text relating to Tofrek has been copied here. It appears that parts of it have drawn heavily on Sandes' account of the battle (see above).

An excellent book describing the political circumstances that led to the rise of the Mahdi and the Mahdi Wars that followed (or which the Battle of Tofrek formed part), is: "Armies of God: Islam and Empire on the Nile, 1869-1899" by Dominic Green, pub. Century, 2007.

It should be possible to find more information about Edwin through school records from Wellington, and (perhaps) army records or museums.

Edwin was buried, together with the other 33+ members of the British contingent who died at the Battle of Tofrek, in one of the communal graves that were dug at the northern and western sides of the zeriba where they died.