Longstaff, William Dunn

Author

b Sunderland, Tyne and Wear (Co Durham) 1822, d Sunderland 1894. A businessman and ship-owner, he was a former member of the CofE who helped to establish the Bethesda Free Chapel founded in Sunderland by Arthur A Rees. For a time he was the chapel’s treasurer. He took what was then a bold lead in welcoming the evangelistic duo of D L Moody and Ira D Sankey to England in 1873. He formed a close friendship with them and with Wm Booth, founder and ‘General’ of the Salvation Army to which he may have briefly belonged; several songs by W D Longstaff were published in the Salvationist paper The War Cry between 1883 and 1889. Gordon Taylor, SA, says these were ‘probably written by the same author’. The one undoubted text for which he became known, a didactic/devotional favourite of its kind, is found in many traditional evangelical hymn-books. No.815.