James Dinwiddie 

James Dinwiddie was a cousin by marriage of the Baptist minister Samuel Medley. He was an Independent layman in Manchester associated with the firm of Dinwiddie, Kennedy, and Dinwiddie, Merchants and Cotton-Manufacturers, at 4 Red-Cross Street. In the Thomas Raffles Collection, John Rylands University Library of Manchester, is an undated letter from Thomas Barnes, minister at Cross Street Presbyterian Chapel in Manchester, to Dinwiddie, then living in King-Street, in which Barnes responds to a request by Dinwiddie for assistance concerning some business of the  “Institution,” the forerunner of the Independent College in Manchester which later became Lancashire Independent College. Barnes declined, arguing that

it would not add much to the credit of this Establishment with many persons to whom you will make application, if a Dissenting Minister were one of the petitioners—This consideration has influenced me upon many occasions besides the present. My feelings would have led my to step forward, & to take an active share in some public business; but prudence dictated caution & reserve.—

Your situation in life, your general character, & I am happy now to add, your Office among us, qualify you to take a lead in this important affair with peculiar advantage.— 

Dinwiddie subscribed 1£1s. to the Sunday School Society in London in 1789. He may be the same individual to whom William Steadman writes on 27 February 1835, asking his influence in procuring admission to the congregational school at Lewisham for a young relative of Steadman’s wife. See Universal British Directory (1791), 3:806; Raffles Collection, Eng. MS. 369, f. 11, JRULM; Plan of a Society Established in London, Anno Domini 1785, for the Support and Encouragement of Sunday-Schools in Different Counties of England (London: Sunday School Society, 1789), 24; and Timothy Whelan, Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1845 (Macon: Baptist History Series, Mercer University Press, 2009), 212.