Leith-Ross was born in
Saint Pierre, Mauritius, the son of Frederick William Arbuthnot Leith-Ross, a banker, and his Dutch wife, Sina van Houten, the daughter of politician
Samuel van Houten. He grew up with his grandfather John Leith Ross, 5th Laird of
Arnage Castle at the family estate in Ellon, Scotland. He was the brother of the artist
Harry Leith-Ross (1886–1973). After graduating with a double first from
Balliol College, Oxford, he joined the
Treasury in 1909. He was also chairman of a bank in China and chairman of P&O. in July 1932 During the
Second World War, Leith-Ross helped to lay the foundation for international humanitarian relief efforts in the postwar period. Following a speech of Prime Minister
Winston Churchill to the
British Parliament on 20 August 1940 that rhetorically raised the prospect of Britain bringing the German and Austrian peoples "food, freedom, and peace" upon the defeat of the Nazi regime in Europe, Leith-Ross was appointed to head an ad hoc governmental committee to address the question of how surpluses could be raised to deliver on such a pledge. In September 1941, his committee was reconstituted as the Inter-Allied Committee on Post-War Requirements, in which form it collaborated with the European governments in exile in London, on estimating the needs for food, raw materials, and other necessities in the first six-month period after liberation. Leith-Ross's committee laid the groundwork for what eventually became the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), founded in November 1943. As deputy under the UNRRA's first director-general, the American
Herbert Lehman, Leith-Ross contributed to the difficult work of organizing and staffing the new international agency, which, in the end, received the mandate not of feeding German civilians but, rather, of fulfilling basic needs of the millions of people displaced from their homelands as a consequence of the war, who needed assistance to be repatriated or to otherwise re-establish their lives in the postwar period. The term
displaced persons, which came into parlance at that time, and shaped the understanding of the postwar landscape, may have even originated in Leith-Ross's committee and the report it produced. In 1912 Leith-Ross married Prudence Staples. Their children included the author and biographer
Prudence Leith-Ross who was born in 1922. His 1968 autobiography is entitled
Money Talks: Fifty years of international finance. ==External links==