Neville arrived in the region that would become the Niger Coast Protectorate as early as 1880. He was first an agent of the shipping firm Elder Dempster & Co., based in Bonny and Lagos, Nigeria (in West Africa since 1874). In 1891 he founded the Bank of British West Africa with Elder Dempster and shipping magnate Sir Alfred Lewis Jones (Phillips, 2021, 344[122]). His opinion of Benin culture and its population differed somewhat from his fellow businessmen, in so much as he showed himself to be considerably more "sympathetic to the plight of the Edo peoples" (Coombes, 1994, 31[160])