Leslie GH Pride Collins, a resident of Warwick, N.Y., from 1973 until 2019, died in Oneonta, N.Y., on Oct. 4, 2025, at the age of 96.
Leslie enjoyed a long and happy life full of love, good friends, stimulating work, travel, and a close and caring family. He had a profound and lasting affection for his parents, siblings, wife, children, and grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and close friends.
Leslie was born in London in 1929, the first son of Leo and Violet Collins. His father was an outstanding professional clarinetist, well known in London’s classical music fraternity of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Strong traditions in music, poetry and art marked his family’s origins. The name “Pride” was from Leslie’s maternal grandmother who was a direct descendant of Lord Thomas Pride of Nonesuch, famed in English history for “Pride’s Purge” of Parliament (1648) and condemned to execution as one of the regicides in the beheading of King Charles I. Leslie was pre-deceased by his young sister Sally, his sister Mary, and his deeply loved younger brother, Mike.
The foundations of Leslie’s education were set at the illustrious Bedford Modern School in England. His training in communications began in the Royal Signals, a corps in which he served in the Middle East. On leaving the British Army, he obtained formal engineering training at colleges that included the prestigious University College London. He immigrated to Canada in the 1950s, working on an island in the Arctic and in other isolated northern locations. Early in the ”space race,” he was invited to work for Collins Radio Company of Dallas, establishing facilities for NASA and the Goddard Space Flight Center in many parts of the world. During these activities, he was admitted as a Member of the Institution of Electrical and Radio Engineers. He took pride in achieving the status of a Chartered Engineer while working on the Apollo (Man-on-the-Moon) project. His work took him to scientific laboratories on Long Island, N.Y., where he met and married Jacquelyn Taylor, a young schoolteacher from Oneonta. He and Jacquelyn celebrated their golden wedding in 2013.
In 1973, when Western Union established America’s first domestic satellite system, Leslie headed up the communications engineering department in its network of earth stations, which included the master station in Glenwood, N.J. This was the beginning of his residence in Warwick, N.Y. In 1984 he purchased Centrex, a small company in the satellite communications business, and expanded its operations to include a subsidiary in the U.K. From a modest office in Warwick, his company provided satellite services to many prestigious clients. These included long-term relationships with the U.S. Social Security Administration, the United States Senate, Boeing Aircraft, Fox Sports, The Caribbean Broadcasting Union, and other U.S. and international entities.
Leslie felt a strong wish to serve the Warwick community. He was a member of the Cystic Fibrosis Chapter of Orange County and the committee responsible for assessing handicapped access in local area schools. He also recorded newspapers for the visually handicapped and delivered Meals-on-Wheels. More importantly, he trained and qualified as an Emergency Medical Technician, achieving outstanding scores in the examinations. His objective was to become an active member of the Warwick Ambulance Corps.
Two years before retiring from active work at Centrex, Leslie acquired a 17th-century stone cottage in Kingsand, a historic fishing and smuggling village in Cornwall, U.K. There, with his wife, he spent happy periods every year, enjoying its rustic charm, the friendly villagers, the beauty of the coastal environment, and a close association with his younger brother and stalwart friend, the late Mike Collins of Millbrook, Cornwall.
Leslie was a life member of the Institution of Engineers & Technicians, a member of the Old Bedford Modernians Club, the Torpoint & Rame Peninsular Lions, the UCL Alumni Society, a former member of The East India Club in London, and a member of five other clubs or societies in the Rame area of Cornwall. He had a strong bass voice and sang occasionally with the Halfway Harmony and occasionally with the Warwick Chorale over a period of more than forty years. He was the founder of the Chorale’s Christmas Ceili. He had writing ability and wrote a weekly column for the Warwick Valley Dispatch in the later years of his retirement.
Three daughters and one son survive him: Alice, Emily-Jane, and Sally-Ann Reidy; six granddaughters, three grandsons; and many nieces and nephews in the U.S.A. and the U.K. His wife, Jacquelyn, passed in 2018.
Memorial contributions may be sent to The Orange County Land Trust.