Holdsworth, W. West
c.1859-1939; e.m. 1884

New Testament scholar and missionary in India. He was born in Jamaica, where his father was a lay evangelist. He was educated at Woodhouse Grove, Kingswood and Oakham Grammar Schools and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he was the first non-Anglican to be awarded the Cambridge BD. He trained for the ministry at Richmond College and from 1884 to 1901 was a missionary in the Mysore District, India, where he taught at the boys' high school in Bangalore. The Holdsworth Memorial Hospital (1906) in Mysore was named in honour of his wife Mary (née Calvert), who had been appalled by the annually recurring plague, especially among women and children, in Mysore city. She had died in 1902, soon after their return to England. He was tutor in Classics and New Testament at Handsworth College 1904-1915 and during World War I was a hospital chaplain in Birmingham. His special interest was in the Synoptic Problem and the Fourth Gospel and his Fernley Lecture of 1911 was on Christ and his Gospel. He undertook the completion of G.G. Findlay's History of the WMMS (1921), which involved much of the actual writing. In retirement at Crowborough, his interests included bee-keeping and wood-carving. He died on 3 August 1939.

Sources
  • Methodist Recorder, 17 August 1939; 10 November 2005