Brian and Richard Shepherd
For many years, as the perfect curtain-raiser to the annual autumn Graham Greene International Festival, Brian Shepherd, CBE, led a popular walk for festival-goers around Graham Greene’s birthplace, Berkhamsted, pointing out key Greene landmarks. He was accompanied by readers who delivered aloud fitting and atmospheric excerpts from Greene’s works. Brian, like Greene, had his own links to the secret world of espionage having been trained during his National Service as a Russian interpreter at the Joint Services School for Linguists. Among his classmates were two literary titans: Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn. Brian’s fluent Russian came in useful later when he was a lead negotiator in UK tax treaties with former bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Sadly, Brian passed away in 2024, but to the delight of festival-goers, his son, Richard Shepherd, is now following in his father’s (and Greene’s) footsteps by continuing the Festival walk (see below). Richard, a graduate in English and Drama with a Masters in Field Archaeology, grew up in Berkhamsted, and though now living on the edge of the Cotswolds, he returns home each autumn to lead the Greene walk.
Richard has written a fascinating article on ‘Graham Greene’s Berkhamsted’ which you can read in full here:
As Richard shows, Greene, a writer often associated with paradox, might have been incredibly widely travelled but he was also nostalgic with a connected sense of time and place; nostalgic less in its contemporary meaning of sentimental and/or regretful but in the sense of an acute longing for familiar surroundings. This often showed up in Greene’s life as an urgent need – no matter if he was writing a novel set in an exotic location like Haiti or Vietnam or Cuba – to dial-up memories of his personal history. And often those recollections had a connection to his birthplace.
Annual Festival walk: ‘Graham Greene’s Common’ with Richard Shepherd
Among the many highlights of the Graham Greene International Festival is the first event on the busy schedule.
‘Graham Greene’s Common’ is a 3-mile guided walk through the countryside bordering Berkhamsted so familiar to Greene in his youth. Please note that participants need to be reasonably physically active/fit.
Both walks are illustrated at intervals by readings from appropriate Greene works: from his novels with Berkhamsted connections such as The Human Factor and The Captain and the Enemy and from his autobiography A Sort of Life.
For those with their own transport, the start point is the Common, the carpark opposite the Inns of Court war memorial. Otherwise meet at the Court House, Church Lane, Berkhamsted HP4 2AX.
Booking for the 2026 Festival walk – Thursday 24 September – will open in the summer. Meanwhile for more information email Richard Shepherd at shepherd.rw@gmail.com
Self-guided Berkhamsted / Greene walk
The Trust has produced a self-guided walk, complete with map and descriptors by Sylvia Hall, Bill Willet and Jenny Thomas. As they note, Greene’s early life in Berkhamsted not only moulded his character, his emotions and his memories, but was later reflected or refracted in much of his writing.
Greene and Berkhamsted Castle
Greene mentions Berkhamsted Castle occasionally in his stories set in Berkhamsted. His 1967 short story ‘Doctor Crombie’ is set in a similar town called “Bankstead”. In the story, the old school doctor ‘sometimes on a summer’s day… took a picnic-lunch and sat on the green mound of Bankstead Castle,’ where he enjoys trainspotting. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), Greene recalled one of his own childhood events, when he witnessed an Army dirigible balloon land at the castle in 1913 (see image above). ‘Once an airship, captained by an old boy, came down in the grounds of Berkhamsted Castle and remained there for some days on show. The stationer even made picture postcards of it.’