Hayward Lewis Samson was born in Sutton, Surrey, England on 2 August 1881. By the early 1890s he had moved to Wandsworth in London. He was articled to William Harvey in London from 1898 to 1893. He also attended the Architectural Association Schools in London. He worked as an assistant to William Flockhart (1852-1913) and to Walter Hilton Nash (1850-1927) in 1905.
From August 1910 to July 1911 he taught at the Architectural Association Schools in London. In 1911 he qualified as an architect an later that year was elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects (ARIBA). Soon after this he moved to Canada and worked in the office of Sproatt & Rolph in Toronto, Ontario in 1913-14. went back to England in 1914. He returned to North America in 1916 and worked in the office of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924) in New York City until August 1917 when he then joined the staff of the Assistant Director of Production for the British war effort in the United States at the end of World War One. Following the war he worked with T. Foster.
In the mid-1920s he was in partnership (or collaborated) with Douchan Slobodan Petrovitch (c.1896-1975). Designs for two houses by them were entered in The "Daily Mail" Ideal Houses Competition for Architects in 1927.
In the late 1920s Samson worked in Rangoon Burma, [now Yangon, Myanmar]. He subsequently returned to England and retired in 1937.
Samson's address was given as 12, Bennington Park Road,. London in 1927; Nutcombe Heights, Portsmouth Road, Haslemere, Surrey in 1939 and 134 Edgware Way, Edgware, Middlesex in 1948 and 1953. He died on 13 June 1953.