GREEN WITH ENVY

I was interested to read David Ward’s letter (SR506) about the restoration of Evening Star and the offer of a Mr Green to fund the work but who had gone AWOL when the time came to pay.

He sounds like the same Mr [John Richard William] Green who disrupted the Welsh Highland Light Railway (1964) Company’s attempt to obtain the WHR trackbed from the Official Receiver in 1967/68.

By doubling the company’s £2,500 offer and implying that he was worth over £1 million, he made sure that the OR took him seriously, but his claim was not helped when a bankruptcy order was obtained against him by a third party and he faded from the scene in February 1969.

Another railway venture had been attempted in 1959, when he had been one of two people expressing an interest in the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway, prompting the Keswick Granite Company, which owned the 15in gauge line, to put it up for auction.

He made headlines in the 1960s and 1970s as the absentee landlord of the Hebridean Island of Raasay, which he had bought from the Government for less than £10,000 in 1961/63 and sold back, via the Highland & Islands Development Board, for £135,000 in 1979. He was not a millionaire when he died in 1980 and probably never was. He was probably a fantasist who liked being fussed by officials.

The ‘Ratty’s’ Peter van Zeller told me about Green’s connection with that railway and Raasay a few years ago. The details are in my book, Rebuilding the Welsh Highland Railway (Pen & Sword Transport, 2018).

Peter Johnson, Leicester