The Greenes: A Talented Tribe of Trailbrazers

From The Telegraph:

Greenesum_1683971d In the early years of the last century, two brothers found themselves living in a small Hertfordshire town. The elder, Charles, was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School; his six children included Graham Greene, the novelist, and Hugh Carleton Greene, the BBC’s controversial director-general in the Sixties and the bête noire of Mary Whitehouse. They were a gifted lot, elegant and clever, with round heads like cannonballs and bulbous blue eyes. A natural reserve was attributed by some to an innate coldness of disposition, by others to shyness.

After making a fortune in the coffee trade, Charles’s younger brother, Edward, bought an enormous house on the edge of Berkhamsted, and he too had six children. The “rich” Greene children had an exotic air – their mother was German and they had spent their childhood in Brazil – but they were thought to be woolly-minded by the “intellectual” Greenes, who considered themselves harder-headed and more down-to-earth. Both sets of cousins were extremely tall – so much so that when Ben Greene, the oldest of the “rich” Greene boys, was interned in Brixton in May 1940 at the same time as Oswald Mosley, his bunk had to be extended with a pile of bricks.

More here.