Dan Irving's Grave

In Burnley’s main cemetery is an imposing monument at a junction of the paths. It commemorates Dan Irving, the town’s first Labour MP, who died in 1924. Representing the borough since 1918, he helped create the system whereby MPs were better paid and had their expenses covered separately. Although this has proved controversial more recently, with some parliamentarians resembling pigs in a trough, back then it assisted Members from working-class backgrounds who did not have vast reserves of private wealth upon which to draw.  

The Pendle Radicals website gives some good biographical space to Irving, including the following section which describes the aftermath of a work-based accident he suffered in 1884 in which he had lost a leg:

The Railway took him back on in a clerical job, but only paid him less than half his previous wage. In his years in Bristol he went from being a Liberal Baptist, to a non-believing, left wing member of the Socialist Democratic Federation (SDF). He became heavily involved in trade union organisation and a leading campaigner for socialism, in Bristol and beyond. He was said to be a rousing speaker, at his best outdoors, and able to make people laugh.

The hardship of the amputation and attendant reduction in pay must have worked wonderfully well on focussing his mind on injustice. Yet it was the description of him as a ‘Liberal Baptist’ which most caught my attention. He could have been a Liberal Party-voting member of the Baptist Church, who abandoned both for socialism, or he could have been a theologically liberal Baptist (whose leaders Charles Spurgeon was then objecting to), who further slid off the scale of Christian theology altogether.

From what I have read of Irving, I rather like him. Nevertheless, his forsaking Christian truth for socialist promises was a dreadful error to make. The appalling social conditions under which many British labourers operated did indeed convert many political liberals to socialism; perhaps it also converted believers to unbelievers, in their wondering why a just God could tolerate such squalor among the people ostensibly made in His image. People who accept an evolutionary world view, who think that we are on an Express Train to some utopia called Progress, will look askance at the suffering on planet earth. We who believe in the Fall of Man and the cursing of creation will be less surprised by what we see, though equally willing, I hope, to try and mitigate its effects. Irving lost his faith and now awaits God’s verdict and eternal justice, much like the uncaring, unbending Victorian industrialists against whom he campaigned.

The injustices and hardships of a fallen world, much as excessive pleasures and luxuries, blind people to their need for the truth and power of the eternal gospel. Let us hope that Mr Irving recalled his former years in those final minutes: a preacher's admonishment, a Sunday School teacher's lesson, a Saviour's quiet knocking. 

A D