Needham was born in Bramhall, Cheshire, England and emigrated to Canada where he settled in Saskatchewan.
Ordained as a Methodist minister, Needham entered commercial life in 1919 in Unity, Saskatchewan near the Alberta border working as an agent and secretary and eventually becoming a hospital superintendent.
Needham was one of only two of the 17 Social Credit MPs to have been elected from outside of Alberta having been returned from the Saskatchewan riding of The Battlefords.
In 1938, he proposed a resolution in the House of Commons calling for a world conference of economists, educators and peace workers to examine removing the causes of war and "diverting defence expenditures from implements of destruction into the creation and distribution of their equivalent in gifts of goods to needy people, including so-called enemy peoples.
Needham also served as president and de facto leader of the Social Credit Party of Saskatchewan from the mid-1930s until the mid-1940s but did not personally contest a seat in provincial elections.