John Wilson (Mid Durham MP)

John Wilson (1837 – 24 March 1915) was an English coal miner, trade unionist, and a Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for more than 25 years.

1807 at Greatham), died of cholera when Wilson was ten, he worked in the mines, spent four years as a merchant seaman, and return to Durham as a miner in 1860.

Married in 1832 to Margaret (née Firth), the couple emigrated to the United States in 1864, where Wilson worked the mines in Pennsylvania and Illinois.

The Reform Act 1867 had extended the vote to working-class men in urban areas, allowing the election in 1874 of Thomas Burt and Alexander Macdonald as Liberal–Labour Members of Parliament (MPs).

A primitive methodist, he was a Liberal by conviction rather than by convenience, an admirer of Gladstone who believed in free trade when much of the rest of the Labour movement was following a socialist path.