Vivian H. H. Green

Vivian Hubert Howard Green (18 November 1915 – 18 January 2005) was a Fellow and Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, a priest, author, teacher, and historian. He was also celebrated for his influence on his pupil at Sherborne School and later at Lincoln College, by John le Carré, who in 1995 acknowledged him as one of the interior models for his spymaster character George Smiley.

Green was born at 101, Thurlby Road, Wembley, Middlesex, England, to Hubert James Green, a law stationer's clerk (son of a master tailor), and Edith Eleanor Playle, née Howard, daughter of a civil servant. The Greens ran a grocery and confectionery shop at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, where Edith Green's family lived, from the late 1920s, formerly having had a confectionery shop at Wembley. After a few years the family settled at Minehead in Somerset; the family were moderately prosperous, and Green's mother took additional work at a home for the elderly to help send her son to Bradfield College, Berkshire. He then won a Goldsmith's scholarship to Trinity Hall, Cambridge (1933), where he achieved a first in the Tripos. At Trinity Hall, he specialised in ecclesiastical history and became the Lightfoot Scholar. Postgraduate work was done on a Gladstone Scholarship to St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden followed by a period of lecturing on ecclesiastical history at St Augustine's College, Canterbury. When asked if he had considered sitting the exams for ordination, he noted that this would pose problems as he was responsible for marking them, but he was ordained in 1939 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang.

'The Lisles in their letters,' History Today vol.32, issue 3, March 1982
'The Count Duke of Olivares: The statesman in an age of decline', History Today, vol.36, issue 12, 1986