Life
Collins was born 12 May 1859 on a fairground in Chester, one of 5 children of John Collins an agricultural labourer of Irish descent. He went to St. Werburgh Catholic School in Chester but left at the age of ten to go travelling with his family. He had two wives, Flora Ross (married 1880, died 1933) and Clara Mullett, who was his secretary. They married in 1934 and she survived him. Flora gave him a son, Patrick Ross Collins (born 7 March 1886) who continued the business. Pat Collins Ltd was created in 1899, when he had established a round of fairs in the Black Country based on traditional holidays or 'Wakes' from August to October.
He was President of the Showmen's Guild of Great Britain from 1920 to 1929. He lived in Bloxwich in the borough of Walsall, where he became a Liberal Councillor in 1918, an Alderman in 1930, and Mayor of Walsall in 1938. In 1939 he was made a Freeman of the Borough of Walsall. He also won a place as Liberal MP for Walsall in the 1922 General Election, retaining his seat in the 1923 elections but losing it in the 1924 general election to a Conservative, W. Preston.
He died at his home in Bloxwich in December 1943, aged 84, and was buried in the cemetery there.
Read more about this topic: Pat Collins (showman)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The word career is a divisive word. It’s a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.”
—Grace Paley (b. 1922)
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)