Joseph Oldham

Joseph Houldsworth Oldham (1874–1969), known as J. H. or Joe, was a Scottish missionary in India, who became a significant figure in Christian ecumenism, though never ordained in the United Free Church as he had wished.

He was the son of Lt-Col George Wingate Oldham RE (1807-1859) and Eliza 'Lillah' née Houldsworth (1845-?) born in India and brought up in Bombay until age 7, when his family returned to Scotland, living in Crieff and Edinburgh. He was a student at Trinity College, Oxford. He went to Lahore in 1897, a missionary for the Scottish YMCA, there marrying in 1898 Mary Anna Gibson Fraser (1875-1965), daughter of Sir Andrew Fraser KCSI and Agnes Whitehead née Archibald (1847-1877). He and Mary both suffered with typhoid, and returned to Scotland in 1901.

He became editor of the International Review of Missions in 1912, and travelled widely. At the end of World War I he was a secretary of the Emergency Committee of Cooperating Missions, chaired by John Mott. Article 438 of the Treaty of Versailles dealt with the property of German missions in territories ceded to the Allies by a mechanism of putting them in trust, and its inclusion is attributed to lobbying by Oldham.

He was secretary of the International Missionary Council from its setting up in London in 1921 to 1938, an organisation having its roots in the 1910 World Missionary Conference in which he was heavily involved, and which he helped found and make effective (with Mott, William Paton and Abbe Livingston Warnshuis). He promoted the 1926 founding of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures by his efforts to gather funding. He then played a major role in the formation of the World Council of Churches.

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