William Ainger Wigram

William Ainger Wigram (16 May 1872 – 16 January 1953) was an English Church of England priest and author, notable for his work with and writings on the Assyrian Church of the East.

William Wigram, a younger son of Woodmore Wigram, was born at Furneaux Pelham, Hertfordshire in the vicarage of his father, also a Church of England priest. He was the grandson of Money Wigram, a director of the Bank of England, and great-grandson of Eleanor, Lady Wigram, a notable nineteenth century philanthropist and Robert Wigram, who was awarded a baronetcy in 1805 – an honour which eventually passed to William's brother Edgar, who became the 6th Baron Wigram.

William Wigram was educated at King's School, Canterbury and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating in 1893. He became a pupil of Brooke Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, was ordained in 1897, and was appointed a curate in the diocese.

In 1902 he joined the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Assyrian Christians on the invitation of O. H. Parry – later an author of a 1907 History of the Church, written in Assyrian. The mission concentrated on the supporting the Patriarch, and the education of Assyrian clerics and laity, including the founding of a college for priests, and 45 schools in Mesopotamia. Wigram served as a teacher at a school in Van, eventually rising to lead the mission for the last five years of his service, ending in 1912. Wigram was awarded a Lambeth degree in 1910 by Archbishop Randall Davidson and in the same year published The Assyrian Church, 100–640 AD. His work with the church is reputed to have, to some extent, healed the divide between the Assyrian Church and the wider Anglican communion, in part as a result of his diplomatic exertions, and in part through his argument that the Nestorian tendency of the church was no more than nominal. In 1914, based on his mission-related travels, he published (with his brother Edgar) The Cradle of Mankind; Life in Eastern Kurdistan, an anecdotal progression through the region.

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