Greenidge Dream Time

Philip and the Dictator: A Romantic Story (1938) by Terence Greenidge is another in the sub-genre of fantasies involving imaginary North Atlantic islands, such as The King of Lamrock by V Y Hewson, The Dark Island by Vita Sackville-West and Hy Brasil by Margaret Elphinstone. Others, such as The Master by T H White and the Princes of Sandastre fantasies of Antony Swithin are set on the real, but greatly elaborated, island of Rockall.  

In Greenidge’s novel, a young man, Philip, working in the newsreel industry, cutting and splicing footage, steps out of his Wardour Street workplace for a smoke and is transported through a drain cover to a different plane. He finds himself on a train in St Michael’s Isle, which lies in the mid-Atlantic between Britain and America. It is a former British colony that has achieved independence but retained its own king: the reigning monarch was a schoolfriend of Philip, in England.

Greenidge’s hero (modelled on the author) soon finds himself embroiled in the politics of the island, and a romance with the English-born queen: an influence is clearly Antony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), though with a less swashbuckling panache. The Dictator of the title is a General who leads the dominant party on the island and has autocratic tendencies: a poker-faced note at the start of the book assures us he is not based on Franco.

The idea of the mid-Atlantic island is well-realised, with a plausible sense of how such a territory might develop, and the switches from Philip’s London life to this fantasy realm (he goes to and fro several times) are achieved briskly and without tiresome explanation. The novel has a languid charm, not taking itself too seriously, and the satire on contemporary times is also fairly lightly-worn.

In asides, the author takes the opportunity to praise other books he likes, including Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner and A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys.

Terence Lucy Greenidge (1902-70) was the author of several satirical fantasies, and also of poems, plays and essays. Some titles appear to be self-published from a correspondence address, BM Hegel, and others were with the Fortune Press, often a subsidy publisher, who had an interesting reputation: Timothy d’Arch Smith portrays the Press in an entertaining chapter in his The Books of the Beast (1987).

Greenidge’s first publication, Degenerate Oxord? (1930), a defence of contemporary varsity youth, was, however, with a major publisher, Chapman & Hall, probably through the influence of Evelyn Waugh, who had published Decline and Fall (1928) with them. Greenidge had made an amateur film featuring Waugh and Elsa Lanchester, The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama (1924), a Firbankian satire about a Roman Catholic conspiracy to convert the Royal Family (it is free to view at the BFI).

Greenidge was part of Evelyn Waugh’s aesthetical, camp and louche circle of Oxford friends, somewhat in the Brideshead mode. Waugh recalled in ‘A Little Learning’: ‘He was the orphan son of a don & the ward of the Bursar of Hertford College. An ex Rugbeian, an enthusiastic Greats man, given to declaiming Greek choruses loudly, late at night, in the quad’. 

Another novel, Tinpot Country: A Story of England in the Dark Ages (1937) is described on the dustwrapper as ‘a remarkable account of life in an English film studio. But the film industry is treated merely as a typical institution of post-war England, which—far from being a land fit for heroes—with its false values and its speeding-up of everything threatens to destroy those who have learnt true values and felt the slow march of real progress, perhaps even at an ancient seat of learning. The New Morality certainly enters into the hero’s managing of love affairs, but he was with the ages when he concentrated on Beauty and forgot everything else . . .’

A later publication was Girls and Stations (1952), a book of poems introduced by his friend John Betjeman, who applauds the strong railway interest: there is a sonnet sequence based on the little-known Bletchley-Oxford line. Greenidge ran an informal society of fellow high-spirited young men, the Railway Club, whose purpose was fine dining on obscure trains

A Checklist of Publications by Terence Greenidge

Degenerate Oxford? A critical study of modern university life (Chapman & Hall, 1930)

The Magnificent. A story without a moral (Fortune Press, 1933)

Brass and Paint: A Patriotic Story (Chapman & Hall, 1934)

Tinpot Country: A story of England in the Dark Ages (Fortune Press, 1937)       

Philip and the Dictator. A romantic story (Fortune Press, [1938])

Sonnet sequence on the Oxford and Bletchley branch. By a Master of Arts [i.e. Terence Greenidge] (BM/Hegel, [1947])

Ten poems, mostly amorous. By a Master of Arts (BM/Hegel, [1948])

Girls and Stations, etc. [Poems.] (Fortune Press, [1952])

Four Plays for Pacifists, etc (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1955)

My Philosophy. By a Master of Arts (BM/Hegel, [1955])

(Mark Valentine)

Image: BFI