Walter Lutwidge was an important merchant in early eighteenth-century Whitehaven whose letter books provide a valuable window into the tobacco trade that brought significant prosperity to the port. He boasted around 1740 that he was worth £30,000, and there is evidence that he and a relative named Thomas Lutwidge were heavily involved in defrauding the customs in the early 1720s. His precise family connection to Charles Lutwidge, the Revestment-era customs enforcer on the Isle of Man, is uncertain.