James Cecil Patrick Delisle Burns ^13,54

  General Notes:

From The Times, January 23, 1942

Dr. Cecil Delisle Burns, who died at Edgehill, Deepdene Park Road,
Dorking, yesterday, excerised a wide influence on the constructive
side of the Labour movement.
Born in 1879, son of Mr. J. Burns, treasurer of St. Christopher-Nevis,
and grandson of Mr. Patrick Burns, Auditor-General of the Leeward
Islands, he was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, and in Rome.
He was a D.Lit. of London University. After five years as a
University extension lecturer he devoted himself during the last war
to adminstrative work. He was a member of the staff of the Ministry
of Reconstruction from 1917 to 1919, was for a short period assistant
secretary of the International Organizing Committee of the
International Labour Office, and during 1919 and 1920 worked in the
intelligence Division of the Ministry of Labour. He became in 1921
assistant secretary to the Joint Research Department of the Trades
Union Congress and Labour Party, and held that position till 1924.
Burns's interests were speculative rather than practical. By nature
resourceful and constructive, he was an efficient and trusted officer
of the departments which he served, while he valued the opportunity
which his duties gave him of observing from the inside the working of
different kinds of social machinery. His personal bent, however, was
towards the life of the teacher and student. From 1924 onwards he was
able to follow it. He held two posts in the University of London,
first as lecturer in logic and philosophy at Birkbeck College and then
as lecturer in social philosophy at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. Finally, a post even better suited to his special
gifts, as it allowed him more leisure for writing, came his way. The
Stevenson Lectureship in Citizenship had just been established at
Glasgow University, and Burns was appointed to it in 1927 for five
years, and the appointment was renewed for a second term of five years
in 1932l. Illness, however, did not allow him to complete more than
two years of the latter term, and he resigned the lectureship in 1935.
As a lecturer and teacher Burns had remarkable gifts. Widely read,
and with an unusual power of lucid exposition, he made his subjects
live, and kindled in his hearers the same vivid and enthusiastic in
the problems of the modern world that he felt himself. The lectures
on democracy, citizenship, and industrial questions which he delivered
in Glasgow were a brilliant success, and made the Stevenson
Lectureship an important contribution to the intellectual life of the
city. The majority of his books were devoted to subjects of the same
order - international questions, problems of government and industry,
and political theory. They were marked by the qualities of insight
and lucidity which characterized his lectures.
In 1912 he married Margaret Hannay, a gifted painter and etcher, who
survives him. They had two sons.

  Noted events in his life were:

1. He appeared on the census in 1911 in 25 Mores Garden, Chelsea. ¹⁰

2. Resided: 22 January 1942, Edgehill, Deepdene Park Road, Dorking. ¹³

3. He had an estate probated on 2 June 1942 in Llandudno, Wales. ¹³

James married Margaret Hannay in 1912 in Hampstead, London.²⁷