Dennis Wrigley, who died last week, was an inspirational pioneer in the rejuvenation of the Young Liberals and the Liberal Party in the Manchester region and the North West during the 1950s and 1960s.
Dennis came to national prominence in the High Peak by-election in 1961, in the year before Orpington. A combination of the rising national Liberal vote, a lot of outside help including Manchester students and YLs, and Dennis's personal charisma and campaigning energy produced a Liberal vote of 30.5%, narrowly third but up by more than 10% from the General election in 1959. He contested the seat at the following three General Elections, polling well but never as well as at the by-election.
In 1964 the Labour candidate was the subsequent Liberal Democrat peer and Lords Chief Whip John Roper. The story that both of them told is (from Dennis) "Of course I was able to preach in every chapel in the constituency" with the riposte from John "Yes but I drank in every pub!" Unfortunately neither won that year.
Together with the likes of Alan Share, Terry Maher, Mary Mason and Muriel Burton, Dennis was one of the team who made the Manchester Young Liberal Organisation a power in the party and the spearhead of Liberal revival in Greater Manchester, all of them going on to fight constituencies in the 1960s. They went on to play a key part in another significant body in promoting a North West Liberal revival, the regional candidates association, together with the likes of Geoff Tordoff, and Merseyside's Cyril Carr and Gruffydd Evans.
Dennis's very specific input came with Northern Radical Publications. This was a publishing outfit run from his home in Flixton in response to the perceived failure of the national Liberal party to produce good campaigning literature. Their distinctive crimson-red and black leaflets and pamphlets with their punchy style featured in many a local Liberal campaign in the region. In 1970 Dennis wrote a Liberal Publications Department pamphlet "A Realistic Approach to Transport" with a young Andrew George.
Dennis was always a committed evangelical Christian and after the disappointing 1970 election he gave up on party politics and devoted his life to his Christian zeal, founding and running the Maranatha Community. This formed his main life's work as he rather wrote out his previous Liberal party activities. But he never gave up local campaigning, co-ordinating a mass campaign in Trafford on the rates support grant formula, pressing for the Flixton motorway spur road and against the stenches from the Davyhulme sewage works, among many other local causes including most recently action against the proposal to build a Biomass Incinerator in the Urmston and Flixton area.
I met Dennis on a couple of occasions when he came to lobby the Lords on behalf of various Christian campaigns. It was a privilege to talk again to a person who half a century ago had been such a campaigning inspiration to a generation of new Liberal activists in and around Manchester. Our thoughts are now with his wife Sheila and their family.