Constituency : Nottingham South 1885-6, Mansfield 1892-1900
John won the new seat of Nottingham South.
John was privately educated. He was a Congregationalist agitator and secretary to the Liberation Society for thirty years ( 1847-77 ). In 1866 he and Henry Richard orchestrated as campaign to mobilise nonconformist voters by forming local registration societies. He was a deacon at Surbiton and trained in ecclesiastical law. He wrote a number of pamphlets on Nonconformist causes and founded The Liberator journal in 1853. He was a director of the Whittington Life Insurance Company.
By the time of his election John was deaf and suffered from a harsh cough.
In 1886 John carried a Bill extending the permitted hours for Noncnformist mariages. In 1889 he was one of the founders of the Nationl Education Association to protect undenominational education.
John was friendly with Morley and able to clarify the religious equality aspects of the second Home Rule Bill in 1892. He wanted to use the campaign for Welsh disestablishment as a spearhead to drive through English disestablishment but this was effectively resisted by the Welsh MPs particularly Stuart Rendel who operated outside the L.S.
In 1894 John apologised to the Liberal leadership for the advice sent out to Liberationist voters by the Society to abstain at the Horncastle by-election because the Liberal candidate would not commit himself fully to disestablishment. A year later he sought to dissociate the Society from Lloyd George's amendment to the Welsh Disestablishment Bill which succeeded , as he foresaw, in wrecking the bill. He himself had been consulted on the Bill's technical details.
On the fiftieth anniversary of John's first association with the Liberation Society in 1897 Gladstone praised his "consistency, devotion, unselfishness, ability".
In 1900 John became president of the Congregational Union.
In 1901 John publicly complained that the National Liberal Federation was stifling discussion of disestablishment. By this time the Liberation Society was dying on the vine and their 1901 triennial meeting which he chaired was described as an "Old Guard of greyheads". John lamented that "a very large number of young men have gone to the football or cricket field, to the golf links or the cycling track, and the appeals which stirred their fathers have gone unheeded".
He died in 1907 aged 86.
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