About Hubert Dennis Collings, a pre-war asst curator at the then Raffles
Library and Museum
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Eccentric Southwold collection for sale

[image: Artefacts among the collection up for auction]*Artefacts among the
collection up for auction * * IAN COLLINS <ian.collins@...>*

17 January 2009 06:07


Southwold's reputation as the home of eccentric adventurers has rested on
the likes of the late Dennis Collings, whose modest terrace house in Station
Road was crammed with treasures and trophies from all over the world and far
back into pre-history.

A friend of George Orwell, this traveller-collector - whose front door was
famously stuck fast by a mountain of unopened mail - died in 2001. After
many gifts to Southwold Museum, the remnants of his heaped hoards are to be
sold at Bonhams in London next Wednesday.

Some 37 lots span the Collings passions for natural history, archaeology and
anthropology. Most have low estimates, but the huge range and quantity of
objects amazes.

Behold a boneyard of tusks, horns and skulls - of walrus, antelope and lion,
some of which were shot by the late owner in the 1920s. Like the
part-fossilised whale ribs, the ancient fragments of human craniums were
pulled from cliffs or picked from sand.

Alongside a glazed case containing 14 bird skeletons (estimate £100-£200)
there are two cabinets of exotic butterflies (£200-£400) and a group of
Victorian portraits of native Solomon islanders (£400-£600). There are boxes
of arrowheads and fossils and masses of Roman pottery and medieval
metalware, books, book plates, seals and micro-mosaics depicting Grand Tour
scenes.

A large collection of animal bones from the eroding beach at Easton Bavents,
north of Southwold (£300-£400), relates to a favourite hunting ground, where
Mr Collings also detected the primeval traces of "Bavents Man".

Visitors were often regaled by the academic's unintentionally hilarious
stories about the "marvellous little chaps" he had largely imagined.

His collection of antique blades and clubs - Japanese Tanto, Malay
Bade-Bade, Indian Pesh-Kabz and Maori Greywacke Patu, with the stress very
much on the wack - attested to a life of both discovery and danger.

Hubert Dennis Collings was born in Surrey in 1905, the family moving to
Southwold four years later when his father Dudley bought a doctor's practice
in the town. Dr Collings was founder-curator of Southwold Museum from 1933,
giving much of his own considerable collection, which he had arrayed in the
room over St Edmund's Church porch.

At 18, Dennis set off to survey tropical plants in Portuguese East Africa,
staying on to lay a telephone line to Portuguese Nyasaland and compile the
first map of the region. Back home, he renewed a friendship with George
Orwell that lasted until the novelist's death in 1950.

After Cambridge, the scholar became assistant curator of the Raffles Museum
in Singapore until the outbreak of war. While his wife and children took
refuge in Cape Town, he became an intelligence officer, ordered finally to
surrender to the Japanese in Java. But a man intent on uncovering history
was to remain largely silent about his imprisoned past, claiming to anyone
who asked that his horrific ordeal had been "not too bad". Freedom took him
back to Singapore, where he helped set up the Malayan Jungle Welfare School
and compiled a dictionary of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the
Malay Peninsula.

After almost a decade as curator of the Ghanaian State Museum and the
Portuguese fort of Dalmina, from 1952, he returned to Southwold.

Orwell's friend was made an OBE for his work in Singapore and Ghana but
turned it down in protest at British colonial policy and its consequences.

For decades, those with a curiosity about the world were welcomed to the
Station Road museum, where whole departments were stuffed under beds or on
top of wardrobes.

In the secret museum with the blocked front door everything was behind the
scenes.

The Collings Collection will be part of The Gentleman's Library sale at
Bonhams in New Bond Street on Wednesday. View on www.bonhams.com (lots
843-879).


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