Rowland Burdon

Colonel Rowland Burdon, VD, DL, JP (19 June 1857 – 1 August 1944 ) was an English landowner and Conservative Party politician from County Durham. He sat in the House of Commons from 1918 to 1922.

Early life and family Burdon was the son of the Reverend John Burdon, from Castle Eden in County Durham. He was educated at Repton School and University College, Oxford. and served as High Sheriff of Durham in 1907. He was also a Justice of the Peace (JP) for County Durham, He was awarded the Volunteer Decoration in 1898.

At the December 1910 general election, Burdon unsuccessfully contested South East Durham, a constituency which had been held by Liberal Unionists from 1886 to January 1910, when the sitting Liberal Unionist Frederick Lambton was defeated by the Liberal Party candidate Evan Hayward. Burdon accepted the nomination as a duty in a time of crisis, asserting that "a man who shirked his duty was as much a traitor to his country as the man who betrayed it in a military sense". but the swing of 3.6% was not enough. Burdon halved Hayward's majority, to 1,182 votes (7.8% of the total), down from 15% in January 1910. Standing as a Coalition Unionist (a supporter of the coalition government led by David Lloyd George), he won the newly created seat in a three-way contest, with a majority of 826 votes over the second-placed candidate, Labour Party candidate John Herriotts. He did not contest the 1922 general election, when Herriotts won the seat for Labour. In October 1947 his daughter Mrs Sclater-Booth presented the Castle Eden Vase to the British Museum, in his memory. The glass vase was a 6th-century Anglo-Saxon "claw beaker" which had been found by a labourer working on a hedge on the Castle Eden estate in about 1775, in the time of his great-grandfather Rowland Burdon MP.