Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

97 The oldest of them all old. He arrived, in the family home at Ffrydd House at Knighton, 71 on 11 February 1860, the third son (and ninth child) of Richard and his wife Laura. In the following year he was joined by a younger brother, George William Whitmore, who was always known by his third christian name. Whitmore was the last of Richard and Laura’s children, but the first to bear the surname Green-Price from birth. Alfred’s father was by now a seriously big cheese locally. In 1863 he in turn became the Liberal MP for Radnor, giving up the seat six years later to make way for Lord Hartington. 72 As well as being a significant landowner, Richard Green-Price was also an enthusiastic supporter, and indeed promoter, of the spread of railways into central Wales - notably to Presteigne, which was reached by the railway in 1875. The previous year he had been rewarded by Prime Minister William Gladstone in his dissolution honours by being created a baronet - the 1st Baronet Green-Price of Norton Manor. Two years later he served as High Sheriff of Radnorshire, and in 1880 he returned to Parliament, now as MP for Radnorshire, a role he fulfilled for the next six years. By the time of Richard’s death in 1887, the family - though still wealthy by contemporary standards - had to some extent been undone by the cost of his involvement in railway mania. Eventually even Norton Manor had to be sold, though the baronetcy continues to this day, when the 5th Baronet, Sir Robert Green-Price, continues to live just outside Knighton, in the same house as his two predecessors. But Alfred Green-Price was never in line to inherit the baronetcy. His father’s marriage to his mother Laura in 1844 came two years after he had been widowed from his first wife. That first marriage had produced a daughter and a son, and it was that son - Richard Dansey Green-Price - who became the 2nd Baronet. Since then the baronetcy has been passed down through the descendants of ‘Dansey’; the present 5th Baronet is the great- grandson of Alfred’s half-brother. Alfred seems to have been a model Victorian child. In her memoirs, his older sister Laura refers to him as being “very popular by his cheerful manners and good looks, and [he] never caused any anxiety to either my father or mother”. 73 He was destined to make his career in the church, though in his case that doesn’t seem to have been simply the fulfilling of a duty, or expectation, as is reputedly the case for many younger sons of Victorian families. Indeed, his older brother Herbert Chase Green-Price (known as Chase) had preceded him to holy orders, and so there was no ‘obligation’ upon him to take up that role. Rather, it would seem that Alfred’s decision to follow him was taken wholly on spiritual grounds. In March 1886, a month after his 26th birthday, Alfred was ordained as a deacon at Ripon, where a year later he was finally ordained as a priest. He 71 And not at Norton Manor, as stated in some cricket sources 72 A very senior Liberal figure who in due course became leader of the party, as well as succeeding to the title of the Duke of Devonshire. 73 From The recollections of Laura Meredith , published in the Radnorshire Society Transactions, 1985.