Bristol merchant and Wesleyan (not to be confused with John Irving, London merchant and slave-owner), was born at Dornock, Dumfries-shire, on the Solway Firth. After a sound parish education he left Scotland and migrated to Bristol. In his teens he served on ships trading with Jamaica. He rose to be master by 1810 and then by 1815, having gained some capital, he entered the Bristol merchant elite. In any one year between 1815 and 1860, he had up to seven vessels trading chiefly with the West Indies and Canada, but also by the early 1850s Australia and the South Seas In the 1830s he added emigrant passages to his trading voyages. Though apparently never owning a steamship, he evidently had a share in one on which the Rev DrJabez Bunting and his party of Wesleyan dignitaries returned after a farewell to missionaries bound for India in September 1837. Besides vigorously defending the port of Bristol in its rivalry with Gloucester, after the opening of the Gloucester & Berkeley Canal in 1827, Irving sat on the committee of ten merchants and capitalists who in 1836 sponsored Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western steamship (which made its first transatlantic crossing in 1838).

Through his first wife Elizabeth nee Taylor, a farmer's daughter (d. May 1819), whom he married at Littleton on Severn in September 1803, he joined the Wesleyan Methodists. By her he had three sons and two daughters, which possibly motivated his quick second marriage, to Mrs Elizabeth Cottrell of Arlingham, on the Severn, in October 1819. She died in June 1841. In June 1842 he was married a third time, to Mrs Mary Gillatt, widow of Joshua Gillatt (d. 1840), aSheffield dispensing chemist and Wesleyan.

His contributions to Wesleyan Methodism were numerous and varied. He was on the managing committee of the Bristol Methodist Sunday School Society (established 1804). As on later occasions for various voyages, in 1818 Irving gave free passage to the West Indies to nine Wesleyan missionaries. The following year he joined the national committee of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, and served intermittently between 1819 and the 1850s. In many years he made sizeable donations to the WMMS, having a special interest in the West Indies. To the Wesleyan Centenary Fund of 1839-44 he donated £1,500, the largest sum listed. Through his influence, £6,000 of the £221,939 collected for the Fund was spent on purchasing and fitting out the missionary ship Triton for service in the Pacific islands, which he oversaw. He sat on the Polynesian Missionary Ship sub-committee of the WMMS, 1840-55. He was a general treasurer of Kingswood School, 1835-65. On his death in Bristol in 1865 he left £8,000.

His eldest son, John William Irving, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, became a priest in the Church of England

Entry written by: DJJ
Category: Person
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