William Abraham

William Abraham (1840 – 2 August 1915) was an Irish Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom House of Commons.

Early life William Abraham was born in Limerick city, the son of William Abraham of Mount Prospect, Roxborough, Limerick, and his wife Eliza. He was raised as a member of the Congregationalist church, leading him to joke in later life that he was of 'old Cromwellian stock' (Oliver Cromwell was also a Congregationalist). He had three sisters, of whom the eldest, Rose, married the prominent Shetland-born local businessman Peter Tait, founder of the Limerick Clothing Factory. Abraham, like his brothers-in-law, was a manager in that factory, and in around 1868 became a partner in the new firm of Peter Tait and Co. This association continued even after Tait sold the firm in 1884, and in 1890 Abraham became a director of its successor, the Auxiliary Forces Uniform and Equipment Company, lobbying successfully on its behalf in Parliament. He also remained a proprietor of his father's plant nursery at Mount Prospect throughout the 1870s and 1880s.

Louis Abraham Abraham's youngest son, Louis Arnold Abraham (1893–1983), was a parliamentary official of considerable standing for nearly 40 years. Educated at Owen's School in Islington, he won an exhibition to read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he graduated with first-class honours in 1920. A committed Liberal like his father, he was elected President of the Cambridge University Liberal Club during Michaelmas term in 1915, a one-year period in office that was cut short by war service. On return to Cambridge in 1919 for his final year he was elected President of the Cambridge Union Society. An authority on the law of privilege, he submitted a memorandum to the Select Committee on Parliamentary Privilege in 1966, which was later praised by Quintin Hogg as "one of the most distinguished pieces of work I have read for some time." His books include A Parliamentary Dictionary (1956), written with S. C. Hawtrey. Abraham was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1950 and a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1956.