Stanley Green - Early Life

Early Life

Green was born in Harringay, north London, the youngest of four sons of Richard Green, a clerk for a bottle stopper manufacturer, and his wife, May. He attended Wood Green School before joining the Royal Navy in 1938, and fought in the Second World War until he left the Navy in September 1945.

Philip Carter writes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that Green's time with the Navy affected him deeply. He was reportedly shocked by the sailors' obsession with sex, and by 1958 had come to believe that their libido had been dangerously heightened by the intake of too much protein. "I was astonished when things were said quite openly – what a husband would say to his wife when home on leave," he told The Sunday Times "A Life in the Day" column in 1985. "I've always been a moral sort of person." He began to protect himself against erotic excess with a daily diet of porridge, home-made bread, steamed vegetables and pulses, and a pound of apples. "Passion can be a great torment," he told the newspaper.

After the war he took a job with the Fine Art Society, and it was while working there in March 1946 that he failed the entrance exam for the University of London. He later worked for Selfridges and the civil service, and as a storeman for Ealing Borough Council. He said that he had lost jobs because on two occasions he had refused to be dishonest. In 1962 he worked for the post office, then became a self-employed gardener, and seems to have earned his living that way until he started his full-time anti-protein campaign in 1968. He lived with his parents until they died – his father in 1966 and his mother in 1967 – after which he was given a council flat in Haydock Green, Northolt, Middlesex.