J. H. Oldham

Joseph Houldsworth Oldham CBE (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 born in India and brought up in Bombay until age 7, when his family returned to Scotland, living in Crieff and Edinburgh before matriculating as a student at Trinity College, Oxford.

[2] At the end of World War I he was a secretary of the Emergency Committee of Cooperating Missions, chaired by John Mott.

[3] 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.

[8] From 1938 to 1947 he convened ‘The Moot’, a Christian think-tank concentrating on the problem of post-war reconstruction, at weekend residential meetings several times a year.