13 March 2005 Blog Home : March 2005 : Permalink
Greenfield was born in India, the son of Sir Harry Greenfield, of the Indian Civil Service. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, at Rugby School, and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he read Law. He did his national service in Malaya.
He joined The Sunday Telegraph in 1965 and soon became the defence correspondent. He was a genial man with a bushy beard and had a tweedy, shambolic air. He could never bring himself to open his post and the Ministry of Defence press releases piled up on his desk to form a barricade.
Once Sebastian Faulks, one of his colleagues at the time, pulled an envelope from near the bottom of the heap, opened it and said: "Ah Harry, I see Mafeking has been relieved."
He had two Jack Russell terriers, named Chindit and Sherpa. After the death of Sherpa, he often brought Chindit to the office where he would sit on Greenfield's lap as he worked. If anybody approached, Chindit would go for them. Chindit never had his owner's impeccable good manners and had Greenfield banned from most of the pubs in Clapham, south London.
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After his departure from the newspaper, Greenfield became involved in paganism and his former colleagues heard tales of him dancing naked at stone circles. He was 65 before he had his first tattoos and he told a friend that the thing that most embarrassed him about his past was that he had worn a tie-pin.
Standard English chappie with a standard education shows endearing quirks before being banned from all the puns in Clapham and then becoming a pagan "third degree high priest" - really you cannot make these things up.