In 1850, he started working for Booth and Company, a firm of ironmongers in Birmingham; in 1864 he became a partner in the renamed business, Collings and Wallis.

[2] This pamphlet recommended that a similar free and non-sectarian (non-denominational) form of school education to that of the United States should be set up in England and Wales.

Collings also advocated the education of women, signing a petition seeking to award degrees to female students at the University of Cambridge in 1880.

[6] Collings' background in Devon gave him an appreciation of the problems of the agricultural worker and small-scale farmer rare in a major industrial city like Birmingham.

[1] He was a friend of Joseph Arch, the founder of the National Agricultural Labourers Union, who lived in Barford, Warwickshire, near Birmingham.

[2] When Chamberlain became President of the Board of Trade, Collings acted as his unofficial advisor on agricultural matters affecting peasants in Britain and Ireland.

[7] The slogan for Collings' 1885 land-reform campaign Three Acres and a Cow became the battle cry of land reform and the fight against rural poverty.

[1] However, the programme of land reform via allotments and small holdings never made a considerable impact upon the countryside, either in Collings' time or in the interwar period.

On Chamberlain's recommendation, Collings served in Gladstone's administration as Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board in 1886, although at a reduced salary.

Erroneously or not, Collings along with Chamberlain and others believed that land reform in Ireland would give the peasants a stake in the country and reduce poverty, but convinced neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives to attempt it.

Collings continued to be active in promoting land reform until 1918, when he retired from Parliament[1] on the abolition of his seat when he was then aged 87 and oldest member of the House.