Richard John Green was born on the 9th April 1898 in Streatham, London. His father John Green was a tailor but Richard’s mother Mary Jane (nee Arnold) died shortly after his birth possibly from complications during labour.

Richard boarded at Lord Williams’s School in Thame from September 1907 to July 1915 where he was a member of both the cricket and football XIs.

After leaving school he moved to live with his aunt Elizabeth, near Stratford upon Avon, to take up farming, but shortly after reaching his 18th birthday was enlisted with the Royal Sussex Regiment.

Serving with the 4th Battalion, he travelled to Egypt and saw service in Palestine before the battalion moved to France in May 1918. He returned from leave in England, on 16th October 1918 to rejoin his unit on the Western Front.

On the 2nd November he was at a dressing station near Harlebeke attending to the wounded when he was killed by a German bomb dropped in an air-raid over the British lines, this just nine days before the Armistice.

Initially buried in the local Harlebeke churchyard, it was not until May 1950, when along with several other burials, his remains were exhumed and reinterred at the Harlebeke New British Cemetery, West Flanders.

Private Richard John Green was the last Old Tamensian to be killed and is remembered in Thame on the Lord Williams’s School memorial board. In his will, he left over £900, a tidy sum at that time.