The Company of the Green Man

Update February 2024

Membership Enquiries

The Company of the Green Man has grown to nearly 1000 members over the last 15 years.

Applications for membership of The Company of the Green Man are currently closed but I hope to open it up again very soon.

If you would like to register an interest in joining The Company of the Green Man please click HERE, complete the Mailchimp form and follow the instructions on the verification e-mail you receive to prove you are a human and not a robot.

You will be added to our mailing list and will be informed when membership applications re-open.

To our current members wondering where everything is… please bear with me – new leaves are beginning to bud!

In the meantime you can still get in touch with me as usual at: thecompanyofthegreenman@gmail.com

About the Company of the Green Man

The Company of the Green Man was founded by Ronald Millar in 1998.

The Company of the Green Man gathers, archives and makes freely available information, images and folklore about the Green Man and the Traditional Jack-in-the-Green. It supports current traditions that feature the Green Man and the Jack-in-the-Green worldwide. The Company also promotes artists and writers who feature the Green Man and the traditional Jack in the Green in their work and assists where possible the protection and preservation of architectural images of the Green Man. The Company of the Green Man maintains gazetteers of Green Men (and Women) and the Traditional Jack in the Green.

The Company of the Green Man provides a point of contact and discussion for all those fascinated by the enigmas that are the Green Man and the Traditional Jack in the Green.

A History of The Company of the Green Man

Ronald Millar wrote the book “The Green Man Companion and Gazetteer” in 1997 and in a note at the back of the book invited interested people to join The Company of the Green Man and thus (with a little bit of encouragement) The Company Began. Members enjoyed receiving copies of Ron’s Newsletters from Number 1 in September 1998 up until number 27 in September 2005. Many of us assumed that Ron was having some of his usual technological troubles with issue 28 and waited patiently for it to appear, but alas it never did. Sadly Ron passed away in early 2006. His wonderful sense of humour, his aversion to technology and his fascination with what he once described to me as “these mysterious green chaps” will be missed by us all.

It was I, who, keen and eager upon reading his freshly printed book and with an avid interest in Green Men wrote to Ron in early 1998 and asked to join the Company, to be told that I had caught him slightly unprepared. The book had gone out earlier than he had anticipated and the Company did not yet officially exist! Seven Months later it was flourishing!

Three years after Newsletter 27 I felt it my duty to continue the great work that Ron Began and I rebuilt The Company of the Green Man as a completely online digital entity. Since then membership has reached nearly 1000.

Unfortunately in 2019 I was made redundant and had to make the tough decision to limit the time I spent on The Company of the Green Man whilst I started up my own IT help business.

Custodians of The Company of the Green Man

Ronald (Dusty) Millar 1998 – 2006

Ronald was the founder and first custodian of The Company of the Green Man. Of Scottish descent, he was educated at Harrow and Oriel College, Oxford, and Princeton, USA where he read History. After university he began writing professionally, first as a journalist, then as an author. Ronald came to prominence as an author with the publication of The Piltdown Man, a defence of the solicitor Charles Dawson, the alleged forger of the infamous human fossil from Sussex. Ronald wrote a number of books ranging from biography and military history to the lives of the Breton tunny fisherman, a venture in which he was nearly drowned when his sailing schooner was destroyed in mid-Atlantic by a summer hurricane. Five of the crew perished – only he and the mate survived. ‘For a writer there is nothing like first-hand experience,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘it should be avoided at all costs.’ Ron also wrote a number of scripts for stage, films and television in the UK, France, Australia and the United States.

Chris Walton 2009 – Present Day

Chris is the current Custodian of The Company of the Green Man.