Reverend Charles Henry Collyns (1820-1884)

Charles Henry Collyns became Secretary of the  British Temperance League, a national temperance organisation, when it moved its headquarters to Sheffield in 1880.

He had become teetotal in 1864 when he was 44, so relatively late in life, but had quickly become a very active campaigner and regular public speaker. In a speech in 1875, Charles said:

The greatest enemy of the Church was drink. The greatest retarder of education was drink. The greatest demoralizer of the people was drink. Drink created most of the crime, pauperism and lunacy of the country. It was drink which prevented the political and moral progress of the people.

A year after becoming teetotal, Charles became a vegetarian and joined the Vegetarian Society eventually becoming Vice President. He was a keen campaigner for this cause too writing articles and giving speeches.

In 1884 he wrote:

I look upon abstinence from alcoholic drinks and from fleshmeat as the two great temporal blessings which I enjoy, and upon adherence to this two-fold abstinence as the greatest privilege which God has conferred upon me.

Charles credited improvements in his health, including weight loss, to becoming both teetotal and vegetarian. He described himself as ‘very full habit of body, large and corpulent, and make flesh rapidly’. One obituary reported that Charles had often remarked that he was ‘a standing contradiction to the idea held by many that a teetotaller and non-flesh eater must necessarily be possessed of a lean and hungry appearance’.

Charles received many glowing obituaries such as:

In private life Mr. Collyns was genial and courteous, and there are many in Sheffield to whom the intelligence of his death will cause deep regret. The regret will by no means be confined to temperance circles, for Mr. Collyns had the happy knack of making friends and of keeping them.

Charles Henry Collyns was interred in grave B2 127 in the Anglican area together with his wife Mary.