Burdon was
Lord of the Manor of both
Castle Eden and Little Eden, 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. == References ==