Hartley Withers

Before finance took over his working life, Hartley Withers wrote a guidebook to a cathedral. The Cathedral Church of Canterbury, issued in 1896 in Bell's Cathedral Series and revised the year after, describes the fabric of the building alongside a short history of the archiepiscopal see. Withers, born in Liverpool in 1867 and a classics graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, joined The Times in 1894 to write on the City, later held the same post at the Morning Post, spent a short spell at the Treasury during the First World War, and edited The Economist from 1916 to 1921. War-Time Financial Problems, published by John Murray in 1919, collects the pieces he wrote for Sperling's Journal between 1917 and 1919 on borrowing, currency and the cost of the fighting. The League of Nations, from 1918, argues the economic case for the proposed body. His most reprinted book remains The Meaning of Money of 1909, which set out to explain banking to readers who had never been told how it worked. He died at Colchester in 1950, aged 82.