Hugh Greene

Greene was born on 15 November 1910 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the youngest of four sons and the fifth of the six children of Charles Henry Greene, headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and his wife (and cousin), Marion Raymond, the daughter of the Rev Carleton Greene, vicar of Great Barford in Bedfordshire, with his mother being a cousin of the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. Among the couple's other children were Graham Greene, the novelist, and Raymond Greene, a Doctor of Medicine and a mountaineer. Greene was educated at Berkhamsted School and at Merton College, Oxford, where he obtained a second class in classical moderations (1931) and English (1933). Before his undergraduate years at Merton, Greene had spent some time in Germany and, after graduating, he returned there, beginning his career as a journalist. He worked in Munich for two British publications, the Daily Herald and the New Statesman, The writer of his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, Colin Shaw, comments that Greene's direct witnessing of the Nazis deeply influenced him for the rest of his life, "teaching him to hate intolerance and the degradation of character to which the loss of freedom led". The Daily Telegraph sent Greene to Warsaw but his time there was brief. In September 1939, the Germans invaded Poland and he was forced to leave. As the war spread in Europe he reported from Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, the Netherlands, Belgium and finally France, returning to Britain in June 1940, narrowly escaping the German army's arrival in Paris. After a few months in the Royal Air Force as a pilot officer in intelligence, he was released to join the BBC German Service, becoming its news editor. Throughout the war, the BBC remained committed to impartial and accurate reporting to enemy-occupied territories. ==Early broadcasting career==

At the end of the war the British government asked Greene to return to Germany as controller of broadcasting in the British-occupied zone. He established a peacetime radio service, Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, served as its first director-general and gave it a charter on the lines of the BBC. In 1956, Sir Norman Bottomley, director of administration and deputy to the director-general, Sir Ian Jacob, retired. Greene was appointed to succeed him; Shaw comments that this temporarily distanced him from any direct involvement with programmes, but clearly identified him as the potential successor to Jacob, who was due to retire in 1959. ==BBC director-general==

Greene's appointment to succeed Jacob was announced in 1959. It was received with widespread approval by BBC staff, partly because Greene was the first director-general to have risen through the ranks of BBC management, and partly because his transformation of news and current affairs coverage had impressed the programme makers and made them feel valued as they had not felt previously. Early on, Greene abolished the position of director of news and current affairs, and appointed himself editor-in-chief. In that capacity, Shaw writes, he remained "a working journalist capable, when the need arose, of dealing expeditiously with those editorial issues that were referred to him". and Mary Whitehouse, a campaigner who described herself as "an evangelical Christian and moral crusader", accused Greene of being "the devil incarnate" for allowing the broadcast of dramas with sexual content or bad language. Greene ignored Whitehouse's protestations and commissioned a painting of her naked with five breasts for his office which he threw darts at. Wilson's hostility was harder to ignore. When the chairman of the BBC, Lord Normanbrook, died in 1967, his successor Lord Hill (hitherto chairman of the BBC's rival, the Independent Television Authority) was appointed reportedly at Wilson's request. If, as was suspected at the time, Wilson's motive was to provoke Greene into resigning, the ploy almost succeeded, but Greene's advisers convinced him that if he resigned the whole board of management of the BBC would resign with him, leaving the corporation "at the mercy of its new master" as one colleague put it. Greene and Hill established a working relationship that was uneasy but viable. Nonetheless, after a year Greene began to look forward to retirement. After more than eight years in post, he left in March 1969. To make it clear that the decision was his, rather than Hill's, the latter proposed that Greene should become a member of the BBC's board of governors. He did so, and served for two years before resigning, feeling that his presence was inhibiting his successor. ==Later years==

After he left the post of director general, Greene made some programmes for the BBC and also – causing some disapproval at the BBC – for ITV. He edited several collections of stories about the rivals of Sherlock Holmes, collaborated with his brother Graham on Victorian Villanies (1984) and became chairman of Bodley Head, his brother's publisher. His lifelong hatred of totalitarianism and dictatorship led him to be active in campaigning against the military junta that ruled Greece after the coup of 1967. After civilian rule was reestablished, Greene was adviser to the Greek government on the constitution of broadcasting. ==Personal life==

Greene was married four times. In October 1934, he married Helga Mary (b. 1916), the daughter of Samuel Guinness, a banker, of London. They had two sons; the couple divorced in 1948. In September 1951, he married Elaine Shaplen (b. 1920), the daughter of Louis Gilbert, an accountant, of New York. They had two sons, and divorced in 1969. In May 1970, Greene married the German actress Tatjana Sais (1910–1981); they had lived together in the late 1940s. She died in 1981, and in December 1984, he married Sarah Mary Manning Grahame (b. 1941), a script supervisor from Australia. There were no children of the third and fourth marriages. Greene died from cancer in King Edward VII's Hospital, London, on 19 February 1987. ==Honours==

in Addison Avenue in Notting Hill. Greene was appointed OBE in 1950 and knighted (KCMG) in 1964. The road where the German radio station he helped to organise is located is now named after him (Hugh-Greene-Weg). ==Legacy==

Greene has been praised as one of the BBC's greatest Director-Generals, with Graham McCann stating: Ian Jones wrote that Greene ==Publications==

• ''The Spy's Bedside Book'' (ed., with Graham Greene, 1957) • The Third Floor Front: A View of Broadcasting in the Sixties (1969) • The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Early Detective Stories (ed., 1970) • Cosmopolitan Crimes: More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes; US edition Foreign Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (ed., 1971) • The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (ed., 1973) • The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1976) • The Pirate of the Round Pond and Other Strange Adventure Stories (ed., 1977) • Victorian Villainies (ed., with Graham Greene, 1984) ::Source: ''Who's Who''. ==Notes==

• Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library