Sir Crawfurd Wilfred Griffin Eady (27 September 1890 – 9 January 1962) was a British civil servant and diplomat. Eady was born in the village of Villa Nueva,

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

, the son of George Griffin Eady, a railway civil engineer, and Lilian Armstrong D'Olivier Millar, the daughter of Gen. John Crawfurd Millar. He was educated at

Clifton College ''The spirit nourishes within'' , established = 160 years ago , closed = , type = Public schoolIndependent boarding and day school , religion = Christian , president = , head_label = Head of College , hea ...

, and read classics at

Jesus College, Cambridge Jesus College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's full name is The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the glorious Virgin Saint Radegund, near Cambridge. Its common name comes fr ...

leaving with first-class honours in 1912. He was a British delegate to the

Bretton Woods Conference The Bretton Woods Conference, formally known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, was the gathering of 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations at the Mount Washington Hotel, situated in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, Unite ...

of July 1944, in

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the nor ...

. The conference was to decide the post-war international financial system; it led to the

International Monetary Fund The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries. Its stated mission is "working to foster glo ...

and

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Inte ...

John Maynard Keynes John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in ...

was hailed as the presiding intellect at the conference. Eady, at a banquet on the last night of the conference remarked: "The whole meeting spontaneously stood up and waited, silent, until he eyneshad taken his place. Someone of more than ordinary stature had entered the room." After the Second World War, Eady negotiated a loan to Britain, from Canada, of a billion and a quarter dollars, and cancelled debts of $425,000,000 (incurred when Canada housed and trained British flyers during the war under the Commonwealth Air Training Plan) and $150,000,000 (other war debts). Eady remarked on this loan, designed to keep afloat a trading relationship between the two countries, that it was by no means a one-way deal and that almost all the money will be spent in Canada, principally on foods and manufactured goods. Eady was the Principal of The Working Men's College from 1949 to 1955. Liberal Education, the raison d'etre of the College, was defined by Eady as "... something you can enjoy for its own sake, something which is a personal possession and an inward enrichment, and something which teaches a sense of values."

J. F. C. Harrison John Fletcher Clews Harrison (28 February 1921 – 8 January 2018), usually cited as J. F. C. Harrison, was a British academic who was Professor of History at the University of Sussex and author of books on history, particularly relating to Victor ...

,''A History of the Working Men's College (1854-1954)'', Routledge Kegan Paul, 1954 Between 1949 and 1951, he was the chairman of Civil Service Benevolent Fund. in 1957, Eady gave his name to the

Eady Levy The Eady Levy was a tax on box-office receipts in the United Kingdom, intended to support the British film industry. It was introduced in 1950 as a voluntary levy as part of the Eady plan, named after Sir Wilfred Eady, a Treasury official. The lev ...

on cinema ticket sales, a tax designed and introduced by President of the Board of Trade Harold Wilson who said: "If you want to get a measure adopted, name it after the civil servant who would have to implement it." His son was the film director David Eady. He died in 1962 and was buried at

Rodmell Rodmell is a small village and civil parish in the Lewes District of East Sussex, England. It is located three miles (4.8 km) south-west of Lewes, on the Lewes to Newhaven road and six and a half miles from the City of Brighton & Hove and ...

, Sussex, England.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Eady, Wilfred Griffin 1890 births 1962 deaths English civil servants British diplomats Knights Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire