User:Sealake

Hubert Dennis Collings was born in Surrey on 3rd March 1915. Educated at Eversley School and Dover College, at the age of 18 he went to Portuguese East Africa as a pupil of tropical planting and surveying, and whilst there was responsible not only for laying the only telephone line in Portuguese Nyassaland but also compiling the first map of the region. He inherited his father’s enthusiasm for natural history, and took a keen interest in the wildlife of the region. During a three month hunting expedition he collected a fine selection of native curios and natural history specimens.

After a two and a half year absence, he returned home to his parents’ home in Southwold in 1927, and in the following year went up to St Johns College, Cambridge to study archaeology and anthropology, where he was a contemporary of Lethbridge and Louis Leakey, and pupil of and assistant to Louis Clarke. Following his graduation in 1931, Collings took up a post with the Museum of Cambridge, where he spent the next three years. Many of the exhibits there bear his cataloguing descriptions and labels to this day.

Following his return from Africa, Collings renewed his friendship with another Southwold resident, one Eric Blair (later to find fame as the author George Orwell), which was to last until Blair’s death in 1950. Both men enjoyed a romantic liaison with another Southwold resident, Eleanor Violet Mary Jacques, who Collings finally married on 23rd July 1934 in Cambridge.

Another unsolved mystery involving my grandfather and Orwell is the the claim that they buried a 'time capsule' on Southwold common - but this too remains unsubstantiated. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1453390/Writer-hot-on-the-trail-of-Orwell's-lost-time-capsule.html

In the same year, Collings was appointed Assistant Curator of the Raffles Museum of Singapore, where he was to stay until the outbreak of World War II. Whilst Eleanor and his family took refuge in Cape Town, Collings joined up, becoming an intelligence officer with the 12th Indian Infantry Brigade.

Before the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Collings was sent to Java and was subsequently, and reluctantly, ordered to surrender to the Japanese. With his knowledge of the area and language, he was employed as an interpreter in his prisoner-of-war camp, wrongly enduring criticism from his Allied comrades for engaging with their captors, whom he despised. Collings in fact is recorded as bravely avoiding any direct interpretation that might endanger the lives of his fellow prisoners, and, for the sake of his family, describing with chilling understatement the terrible ordeal endured at the hands of the Japanese as ‘not too bad’.

At the end of the War, Collings returned to the Raffles Museum and Singapore, where he assisted in the setting up of the Malayan Jungle Welfare School. Throughout his time in the Malay Peninsula, he became well acquainted with the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the French philosopher, paleontologist and geologist. Teilhard strongly contributed to the constitution of an international network of research in human paleontology related to the whole Eastern and south Eastern zone of the Asian continent, a subject which was to fascinate Collings for the rest of his life. Perhaps his greatest achievement in these years was the study of the indigenous Peninsula Malayan peoples, the Orang Asli, and the compilation of the only recorded dictionary of their language.

In 1952, Collings took up the position of curator of the Ghanian State Museum and the Portuguese fort of Dalmina, where he was to remain until 1961. As a result of his meeting with the Australian anatomist and anthropologist Raymond Dart, Collings’ research turned to the use of bone artifacts by early man. In recognition of his services both in Singapore and Ghana, he was awarded an OBE, but declined to accept it, objecting to colonial policy and its consequences, both at the fall of Singapore and later at the plight of ordinary Ghanaians prior to the country’s independence in 1957.

Throughout his travels, Collings frequently returned home to Southwold. As a boy, his father had developed his son’s interest in the excavation, collection and curation of Pleistocene fossils along the beaches and cliffs of the East Suffolk coastline. This interest became a lifetime’s obsession, and Collings’ theories and papers supporting the evidence of man’s existence in the Lower and Upper Pleistocene, once maligned, have now been largely corroborated.

Collings, like his father, was generous with his time, knowledge and findings, and on his return to Southwold in the 1960s, collected a wide network of friends and enthusiasts, professional and amateur, with whom to further his life’s work, and was a keen contributor to the Southwold Museum, amongst others. Like all great collectors, his range of interests was vast and varied, accumulating a deep treasure trove of objects and papers over a seventy year period, stored in an eclectic mix of cabinets, drawers and boxes, atop wardrobes and under beds at 23 Station Road, Southwold, where he remained until his death in 2001.