Hugh Greene - Early Life and Work

Early Life and Work

Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, one of the four sons and two daughters of Charles Henry Greene, the then Headmaster of Berkhamsted School. He was the brother of the novelist Graham Greene and Raymond Greene, a physician and Everest mountaineer. (The eldest brother, Herbert Greene, was a relatively little-known poet recruited in 1933 as a Japanese spy and now perhaps best remembered for leading a march at BBC Broadcasting House in protest against one of his brother's actions as Director-General.)

After education at Berkhamsted School and Merton College, Oxford, Greene came to prominence as a journalist in 1934 when he became the chief correspondent in Berlin for The Daily Telegraph newspaper. He and several other British journalists were expelled from Berlin as an act of reprisal for the removal of a Nazi propagandist in England. Greene, though, managed to report from Warsaw on the opening events of the Second World War and continued as a correspondent for a short time. He served briefly with the Royal Air Force in 1940 as an interrogator, but was encouraged by the military authorities to join the BBC later that year.