(1870
- 1958)
WAG as he was and perhaps still
is known played a significant role in recording for posterity Irish
rural life in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
collection of photographs he took are now in the Ulster
Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra County
Down.
The Green's were a Quaker family
WAG was born in Newry County Down in 1870, his father was a grocery
and tea merchant in Newry, His great uncle's name Foster Green lives
on to this day in the form of a hospital on the Saintfield Road
Belfast which he endowed, after some of his family members succumbed
to tuberculosis
Green attended Friends School
in Lisburn as a boarder. After the death of his parents he moved
to Belfast where he was employed by his great uncle in the tea business.
He became an entheuastic member of the Belfast
Naturalist Field Club and was later a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Antiquaries of Ireland.
Green had a keen interest in photography
and became apprentice to professional photagrapher Robert John Welsh
(1859 - 1936)
In 1910 he started his own photographic business
in Belfast, he continued the business in Antrim after he moved there
in 1924. Her produce educational lantern slides, photographs for
postcards and book illustrations. He published two series of postcards
of "Irish Views", called the "Wagtail" the name
reflecting his initials.
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