Cutforth Arthur Edwin

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Biografie:
Arthur Edwin Cutforth, C.B.E. (1881 - 1958)
If Arthur Cutforth had not devoted so many years with such concentration to public life and becoming one of the greatest accountants this country has ever known, he might well have been a most distinguished mountaineer.
As it is he spent several seasons in the Alps, beginning in 1904. He seems particularly to have favoured the Saas area, but he also climbed in the Ortler group, the Engadine and the Mont-Blanc district. He knew the English lake hills better than most people. He had the physique, the energy, the will and the understanding of hills and mountains which might have carried him far.
But, alas, at the height of his career ill-health came to him and dogged him for the last twenty years of his life. Although he often returned to his much-loved Buttermere 'where it had all begun', he was unable to do more than walk up some of the hills he knew so well. Arthur Cutforth joined the firm Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co. as a very young man. His exceptional ability and his most human gifts of understanding people, old and young, who worked with him, soon marked him out as a future partner. He became a member of the firm in 1912 and was President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants from 1934 to 1936. He wrote and lectured widely on many professional topics. He also diverted his friends and himself by writing humorously about his experiences in the City, as a hill-lover and climber and a story-teller for children.
In the field of public service he was used by successive Governments. He was Accountant Assessor to the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry in 1925; a member of the Food Council from 1932 to 1938; Chairman of a Commission appointed to report on the reorganization of the Milk Marketing Schemes in Great Britain; a member of a SubCommittee of Imperial Defence and of the Tithe Redemption Committee.
He was also a member of the Cambridge University's Appointment Board and a Governor of, and generous benefactor to, his old School, Trent College in Derbyshire. He was High Sheriff of Hertfordshire in 1937-8, created C.B.E in 1926, and knighted in 1938.
A former chairman of the Urban Council at Sawbridgeworth, where Arthur Cutforth settled soon after the first war, said of him: ' He did more for Sawbridgeworth than any other one man.' The Sports Association there was almost entirely his creation and he gave much time and money to it. At his two country homes in Hertfordshire and later at Sawrey in the Lake District, he had a host of affectionate and admiring friends, principally of the younger generation. Together with his remarkable and charming wife, formerly Miss Alizon Farrer Ecroyd (incidentally a favourite niece of Cecil Slings by), they fired these friends with their own love of the hills and helped to give them a fuller life in every way.
Arthur was a great lover of Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, which he truly knew by heart. He was no mean cricketer and was widely read in a variety of subjects.
Much reference has been made to his ' puckish sense of humour'. Rather, I would say that he was a born jester who carried his audience with him, delighted at their pleasure in his fun, which was always kindly. Like all great jesters, the sadness and melancholy lay near the surface. The essential wisdom and sincerity of his talk was remembered long after the fun had died down.
He was elected to the Alpine Club in 1916, proposed by Edward Broome and seconded by Sir Alexander Kennedy, and remained a member for over forty years.
Eleanor Winthrop Young
Quelle: Alpine Journal Vol. 64. Nr. 298, 1959, Seite 98-99


Geboren am:
1881
Gestorben am:
1958