Burden was born in Hythe, Kent, the eldest of three children of Thomas Burden, a grocer, and his wife Sarah née Munk. He studied theology in Cambridge and was ordained in Carlisle in 1888. He afterwards moved to the East End of London, to do charitable work. On 26 September 1888 he married Katherine Mary Garton, daughter of a tobacco manufacturer of Hull. They moved to Uffington, Ontario in Canada, where they were missionaries among Ojibwe communities. They had two children, who later died, and Katherine's health declined. They returned to England in 1891, and took up the curacy of Shoreditch. From 1893 to 1895 Burden was chaplain of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and he studied at the university. He wrote two books about his missionary work in Canada.
Bristol
In 1895 the Burdens moved to Bristol, where Harold became secretary of the Church of England Temperance Society and chaplain of Horfield Prison. They became concerned about poverty, alcoholism and mental disability. They established in Bristol in 1898 at Brentry House the Royal Victoria Home for Women, of which Katherine was superintendant; it was the first Inebriate Reformatory in the country. In 1902 they formed the National Institutions for Inebriates, which had 600 beds by 1904. Burden had good relations with the Home Office, and he was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded in 1904, in which he was influential. Subsequently the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 was passed; it advocated "colonies" for people with mental disabilities. In 1907 they opened at Sandwell Hall, near West Bromwich, the Industrial School for Mentally Defective Children, specified in 1908 to accommodate 200 boys. It was the first such school. In 1909 they established at the Dower House in Bristol Stoke Park Colony. It was expanded in the years to 1917, when, housing 1528 people, it was the largest licenced institution in the country.
Later years
In 1913 the Burdens set up a trust, the National Institutions for Persons Requiring Care and Control, to take over ownership of their several institutions. Katherine Burden died in 1919; Harold Burden married in 1920 Rosa Gladys Williams, the superintendant of the Stoke Park Colony, with whom he continued philanthropic work. Harold Burden died on 15 May 1930 at his home at Clevedon Hall, and was buried at Clevedonparish church. Stoke Park Colony had become important for neurological and psychiatric research; in 1933, Rosa Burden founded the Burden Mental Research Trust, an expansion of the earlier research. The Burden Neurological Institute was founded at Stoke Park in 1939. After Rosa Burden's death the NIPRCC became the Burden Trust.
