Walter Cunliffe, 1st Baron Cunliffe, GBE (3 December 1855 – 6 January 1920) was a British banker who established the merchant banking business of Cunliffe Brothers (after 1920, Goschens & Cunliffe) in London, and who was Governor of the Bank of England from 1913 to 1918, during the critical World War I era. He was created 1st Baron Cunliffe in 1914. He chaired the Cunliffe Committee which reported in 1918 with a plan for the monetary policy of the central bank and government after the war, which helped to shape fiscal policy. Early life and family Cunliffe was born in London in 1855, the second eldest of four brothers and two sisters. His father, Roger Cunliffe, helped to finance and negotiate the development of the North Eastern Railway and became a merchant banker in the 1860s. He was educated at Harrow School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. His brother, Alan Percy Cunliffe (1864–1942), was a landowner and racehorse-owner who married film actress Malvina Longfellow in 1940. Banker He entered the banking industry in 1880. With two of his brothers, Arthur Robert and Leonard Daneham, he founded the merchant bank Cunliffe Brothers in 1890. On 1 January 1920, it merged with Frühling & Göschen to become Goschens & Cunliffe, which failed in December 1939. 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. He was created Baron Cunliffe, of Headley in the County of Surrey, in December 1914. In April–May 1917, he was a member of the Balfour Mission to promote co-operation with the United States during the war. Cunliffe was appointed a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in June 1917; 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. By November, Cunliffe had been forced to announce his imminent retirement, which occurred in March 1918. 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