Lawrence G. Green

Lawrence ("Laurie") George Green (1900 – 14 May 1972) was a South African journalist and author. Eschewing any grandiose view of his literature and his lifestyle, he wrote for the layman and general reading entertainment as a raconteur. As such his writings, though well populated with researched fact through his wide travels and many hours of research in the South African and British archives, do not constitute in any strict sense historical or academic reference works. Nevertheless, he remains frequently cited as a recorder of little remembered or noted fact of some historical or cultural significance in the southern African domain.

Green was born in Kimberley, South Africa, the only son of George Alfred Lawrence Green (a newspaper editor who went on to become a member of parliament in the first Union of South Africa and editor-in-chief of the Cape Argus) and Katherine (née Bell). He was educated at private schools in Grahamstown and Cape Town, completing his secondary education at South African College Schools.

Against his father’s wishes, he did not gain any tertiary education. In 1917 he was accepted as an air cadet in the Royal Flying Corps at Denham, England. He however never graduated as a pilot, allegedly because of a poor grasp of mechanical aspects of aircraft operation. On his return to SA at the end of World War 1, while contemplating a life in the merchant navy, he settled on a career in journalism with the Cape Argus.

Although Green never married, he maintained a close and well documented platonic relationship with Luise (“Lulu”) Yates-Benyon, the mother of his biographer-to-be, John Yates-Benyon. On his death in 1972 from metastasized melanoma, he was survived by two sisters, Rita and Rosemary. The latter was a successful UK author of adolescent literature, for example Pyewacket (novel), under her married name of Rosemary Weir.

Early signs of Green’s writing talents are evidenced by his winning of an international essay competition at the age of nine with a piece titled, “A Day in the Country”. Little is documented about Green’s subsequent literary ambitions until he drifted into journalism with the Cape Argus during his father’s tenure as editor. While showing talent as a journalist he declined offers of promotion or new postings to advance his newspaper career, being content to fulfil his duties as contributor to the Cape Argus’s daily “Wanderer’s” column, and other assignments, on the proviso he could remain in Cape Town. For a brief period he left the newspaper to try his hand in London as a Fleet Street reporter, but soon returned to the Argus.

In the formative phase of his writing career he experimented briefly with fiction writing but discarded this in favour of travelogues and other non-fiction, claiming to have little of value to offer the reader in the former genre even though an admirer of novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham. Instead, he gained popular renown for his evocative tales on southern African travels, discovery and 18th, 19th and 20th century local history. His first success came with the publication of short stories in foreign magazines from 1929 onwards. His first book was published in 1933 in the UK, as were his next five books.

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