SAMUEL COLLINS
1879-1940
Railway labourer and carman
EPILEPTIC COLONY IN LINGFIELD
The railwayman with a young family returned from the First World War with a brain injury.
Sadly he was still in the colony 20 years later.
Samuel Archibald Collins was born in the St Pancras area of London in 1879. He worked as a
labourer and carman on the railways there. He married Sarah Arnold in 1901 and they had two
children Alfred and Florence. He enlisted in July 1916, as a Private, assigned to the Labour Corps
of the 520th Home Service Employment Co. providing essential war work on home soil. It’s not
known what happened to him but two years later aged 41 he was declared physically unfit to
continue. Curiously he hadn’t returned to his wife and family by 1921. In fact he was an ‘inmate’ as
they called it, at the Epileptic Colony in Lingfield.
Established by philanthropists around 1899 as a training school for poorer epileptic children – with
a capacity for learning – who might otherwise find themselves in senile wards of a workhouse.
According to an article in the British Medical Journal, in its 300 acre site, the colony it was able to
provide teachers and medical staff, a schoolhouse, and training in laundry, carpentry and gardening.
Treatment included medicines such as bromide as appropriate of course as well as regular
employment, as much fresh air as possible, organised games and amusements such as concerts, the
interest and discipline of school, a largely vegetarian diet and an ‘abundance of sleep’.
Usually home to hundreds of children and youngsters, lead by the matron Nora Henson and school
teachers Katherine and Annie Caston, suddenly in wartime dozens of men, presumably with brain
injuries and symptoms akin to epilepsy, needed the specialist care services on offer too. Of the 400
inhabitants in 1921, there were other railway workers such as platelayer Harold Trivett, railway
f
ireman Wilfred Stevens and shunter Frederick Sandles, but also the likes of Walter Lucas the
footman to Baroness Wedel Jarlsberg and a grocer’s assistat from Selfridges. By 1939 the colony
was housing almost 500 patients, Samuel being one of them until his death in 1940, aged 61.
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