Kin, but less than kind

About 100 years ago two brothers settled in the same small English town and raised 12 children. Charles Greene was a scholar, destined for the Bar, who blundered into schoolmastering while eating his dinners at the Inner Temple and later became headmaster of Berkhamsted School. His younger brother, Edward (known as ‘Eppy’), declined to go to university and blundered into the coffee trade in Brazil. Having made a fortune, he returned to England and bought a large house in the same town. Shades of Greene is the story of those two families and of what happened to eight of the more interesting children. They included the novelist Graham Greene, whose life occupies the largest part of this account.

Graham had three brothers. Hugh, who, after Lord Reith, became the BBC’s only other outstanding Director General, Raymond who became a successful Lon- don surgeon and one of the pioneers of endocrinology, and the oldest child, Herbert, who became a drunk, a confidence trickster and remittance man. There was also the youngest of the six, Elisabeth, who joined MI6, worked for ‘C’, Sir Stuart Menzies, and was one of the few women recruited into the secret service before the outbreak of the second world war.

Since these four were the children of Charles they were known in the family as the ‘School House’ Greenes and regarded as the intellectuals. The wealthy and frivolous ‘Hall’ Greenes, living in the big house on the edge of town, had a German mother. They included Ben, who played a prominent role in both the ILP (International Labour Party) and the mainstream Labour Party in the 1930s, and worked with Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee. Felix was the BBC’s first North American correspondent and became a renowned documentary filmmaker. Their sister Barbara was an unfulfilled writer who trekked through Africa with her cousin Graham, wrote a fine account of their adventure and then married a German.