Walter Cunliffe, 1st Baron Cunliffe

Cunliffe became a director of the Bank of England in 1895 and its governor in 1913, working under Chancellors of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, Reginald McKenna, and Bonar Law.

Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, he calmed the money markets by preventing both the suspension of payments in gold and the removal of foreign securities.

Cunliffe was appointed a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in June 1917;[6] he disagreed with Bonar Law later that year by feeling that the Treasury was taking too much of a role in maintaining the pound sterling's exchange rate.

At the Bank of England, Cunliffe personally wrote one of the first office dress codes for women and noted that he was "pained by some of the costumes he encountered" in the hallways.

Something of his style is conveyed by the following anecdote from Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks:Lord Cunliffe, giving evidence before a Royal Commission, at the special request of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, would only say that the Bank of England reserves were "very, very considerable".

[10] Cunliffe's manner was so arrogant and abrasive that, whilst Governor of the Bank of England, he had a strained relationship with two of the three Chancellors of the Exchequer with whom he worked (Reginald McKenna and Bonar Law).

His dismissal "was a decision that Cunliffe found impossible to accept, mounting a vain campaign over the rest of 1917 to persuade bankers, press and senior figures at the Treasury to try to get Bonar Law to apply pressure on the Court to reverse its vote".

In 1880, he was given the original farmhouse estate of Headley Court, formerly the main manor of the village, and its remaining 300 acres (1.2 km2), by his father, on the condition that he would make a career in banking, rather than become a farmer.

The family fortune had been made by his grandfather,[dubious – discuss] James Cunliffe, with his development of the North Eastern Railway (UK).