William Fitzjames Oldham

William Fitzjames Oldham (15 December 1854 – 27 March 1937) was an Indian-born British-American Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church and Missionary Bishop for Southern Asia. He distinguished himself as a missionary, an author and a church official. He was the founder of Anglo Chinese School in Singapore in 1886.

William was born in Bangalore, India, the son of James and Mary Elizabeth Oldham. James was a British officer commanding Sepoy troops in India. William's ancestry was primarily Irish-English, with some Indian blood, it was said, on his mother's side. Although he was baptized a Roman Catholic, his earliest religious contacts came from Protestant military chaplains and the headmaster of the Madras Christian College. His father, though a Catholic, had turned anti-Romanist, and Oldham had absorbed the religious teachings of the Protestants when attending Anglican schools. He recollected that as a child of six, missionaries had taught him the childs prayer, "O Lord save me, O Lord Christ convert me" which remained with him to adulthood and helped transform his faith. The young Oldham studied Paley's Evidences of Christianity so well he won a competitive prize for this subject. Oldham's keen abilities in apologetics came to the fore in Madras Christian College where non-Christians frequently presented strong counter-arguments against Christianity. Yet Oldham claimed that during this time he did not yet have a true Christian faith.

Oldham earned a B.A. degree from Boston University and an M.A. from Allegheny College, and became a government surveyor. He was handpicked for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, a key 19th century survey of India and its adjoining lands. It was in 1873, in the midst of this secular work, that Oldham was invited to the preaching tents of visiting American Daniel O. Fox. The teachings of these Methodist missionaries, led by Bishop William Taylor, were strange yet attractive to Oldham. Bishop Taylor himself had served in far-flung mission fields including the Americas and Australia, and had been brought to India through the invitation of Bishop James Thoburn. Bishop Thoburn also had a Chinese background, and he was to be an influence on Oldham's decision to serve in Southeast Asia and thereafter to assume the mantle of the Bishopric. Oldham later compiled Thoburn's biography in a work entitled Thoburn Called of God (1918), testifying to the influence of his mentor. He thus was converted and became a Methodist at Poona while attending evangelistic services held by Taylor. In 1879, married and living in Bangalore, he committed himself to work as a Methodist missionary and traveled to Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, for training. In 1885 he was sent to Singapore to initiate a Methodist mission. There he found access to the Chinese merchant population through schools; he established what became the first of a large number of Methodist schools in what was then British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), as well as the first Methodist Church in Singapore.

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