C. Delisle Burns

Cecil Delisle Burns (26 January 1879 – 22 January 1942) was a leading English atheist and secularist writer and lecturer.

Early life

Burns was born in Saint Kitts and Nevis, West Indies, where his father was treasurer of St. Christopher-Nevis in the Leeward Islands. After leaving Christ's College, Cambridge, he was trained in Rome for the priesthood, but left the Church in 1908 and devoted time to the study of social problems in a wider sense. In 1912, he married the painter Margaret Hannay: the sister of Alexander Howard Hannay, art critic of the famous "London Mercury".

He was appointed as a regular lecturer at South Place Ethical Society, at Conway Hall in London, in 1918 and continued to lecture there until his health deteriorated in September 1934.

He was a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London; the London School of Economics and as Stevenson Lecturer in Citizenship at the University of Glasgow.