Terence Lucy Greenidge

Terence Lucy Greenidge (14 January 1902 – 18 December 1970) was an English author and actor. He was a first generation Barbadian born in England and second son of Abel Hendy Jones Greenidge (who came up to study and remained at Oxford as an academic) and his wife Edith Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of William Lucy, at that time the sole owner of Lucy Ironworks, previously known as the Eagle Ironworks, in Walton Well Road, Jericho, Oxford. The Greenidge family trace their ancestry in Barbados to John of Greenwich who left London on 2 May 1635 on the ship Alexander. Within one generation the etymon, meaning Green Port or Trading Place (cf Norwich, Harwich and Ipswich in England) of the surname had assumed the distinctly West Indian orthographic format of Greenidge, whilst maintaining a very similar phenomic identity.

Greenidge was a friend of Evelyn Waugh, whom he met at Oxford, and collaborated with him in producing the Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama.^[1] Evelyn Waugh in Letters (editor by Charles E. Linck) was published posthumously in 1994, which details many of Greenidge's recollections of Evelyn Waugh.

Early life

Terence Greenidge's parents died within a year of each other in 1906/07 and the young Terence was brought up by his guardian/godfather, Dr Rev. Henry Herbert Williams, who went on to become Bishop of Carlisle between 1920 and 1947. Terence went to Dragon School in Oxford, before going up to Rugby School between 1915 and 1920.

He won a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford where he read Classics and obtained a second in Honours Moderns and a second in Greats. The Trustee of his father’s will was the bursar at Hertford. At Oxford, he was one of the founding members of the Hypocrites Club and kept friends with Evelyn and Alec Waugh and introducing them to the club.

In the summer of 1924, Terence Greenidge, his brother John Greenidge, Evelyn Waugh, and John Sutro, the film producer whom Terence knew at Rugby School,^[2] contributed £5 each to purchase a cine-camera and started filming the Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama,^[3] a collaboration that would only yield a small dividend, some forty-two years later, to John Sutro and Terence Greenidge, since by then his brother John Greenidge (October 1953) and Evelyn Waugh (April 1966) had died.

Written works

Brass and Paint, together with The Magnificent, were among several books published by the Fortune Press to be seized by the police in 1934 and successfully prosecuted for obscene libel.

Acting career

As well as being a playwright, Greenidge was an actor although he only played smaller roles on stage and television. He was still acting at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon until three years before his death in 1970.

References

External links

Full version and direction of "Scarlet Woman" see Evelyn Waugh Newsletter Vol3 No2 Autumn 1969 Biography