Richard Plunket Greene

Richard George Hubert Plunket Greene (1 July 1901 – 25 March 1978) was an English racing motorist, a jazz musician and author.

Richard George Hubert Plunket Greene was born on 1 July 1901, the son of Harry Plunket Greene, an Irish baritone who was most famous in the formal concert and oratorio repertoire, and Gwendolen Maud Parry, the daughter of Hubert Parry, English composer, teacher and historian of music. His grandmother, Louisa Lelias (Lilias) Plunket, was an author as well (Bound by a spell, or The Hunted Witch of the Forest, 1885).

He attended Oxford University where he formed a long-lasting friendship with Evelyn Waugh, who at one time, in the 1920s, was in love with Plunket Greene's sister, Olivia Plunket Greene. Waugh described him as "a piratical in appearance, sometimes wearing ear-rings, a good man in a boat, a heavy smoker of dark, strong tobacco, tinged, as were his siblings, with melancholy, but also infused with a succession of wild, obsessive enthusiasms. He brought to the purchase of a pipe or a necktie the concentration of a collector. During the next few years I saw him become a connoisseur of wine, a racing motorist, an exponent of the latest jazz, the author of a detective novel". The 1930 novel Vile Bodies, satirising the Bright Young Things, the decadent young London society between World War I and World War II, is partly inspired by the Plunket Greene family. Always at Oxford Richard Plunket Greene made friends with Anthony Powell. He was also friend with Rosa Lewis.

In the 1920s he was a school-master at Aston Clinton School and it was him that introduced Waugh to the school’s headmaster, Albert Edward Bredan-Crawford.

The Plunket Greene's siblings, Richard, Olivia and David, went often to New York City, to have their trousers cut properly and to frequent the Harlem Renaissance clubs. Richard Plunket Green was a jazz musician and composer.

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