He was born in the rectory at Stanford-on-Teme, Worcestershire, the fourth son of Edward Winnington-Ingram (a Church of England priest and Rector of Stanford) and of Louisa (daughter of Henry Pepys, Bishop of Worcester).

As an administrator he has been judged inefficient in maintaining standards among the clergy in comparison with his disciplinarian-minded successor Geoffrey Fisher, a feature aggravated by his lengthy tenure.

He saw the war as a "great crusade to defend the weak against the strong" and accepted uncritically stories of German atrocities.

For a clergyman the language he used about the German people verged on xenophobia and H. H. Asquith, Prime Minister at the outbreak of the war, described his pitch as "jingoism of the shallowest kind".

In 1930, he noted the difficulty of finding young men to study for the priesthood, saying there was "a certain amount of social contempt for a boy who intends to become a clergy man.”[21] Australian sculptor Theodora Cowan created a portrait bust of Dr Winnington-Ingram which "took pride of place" in her one-woman show at London's Grafton Galleries.