The expedition was sponsored by the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the British Natural History Museum in London, and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, and led by French ornithologist Jean Delacour.

Later in the expedition deep inside the Kingdom of Laos, he was awarded the Order of the Million Elephants and the White Parasol in Luang Prabang.

[1] Greenway, who broke from academia and research during his service in WWII, resumed his ornithological work at the MCZ.

Based back at his Greenwich estate, his subsequent ornithological work was carried out in association with the American Museum of Natural History, of which he was a trustee from 1960–61 to 1970–71.

He began work on a list of the type specimens of birds held by the museum, a massive project not completed at the time of his death.

[1] Relatively few other ornithologists had met him in person because an aversion to large gatherings meant that he probably never attended a single professional meeting or congress in his life.

[1] His sometime friend and colleague François Vuilleumier wrote of him: Shy and retiring he was, but his life and career, or at least what can be traced of them, were at times quite adventuresome.

Jim Greenway was so reluctant to leave tracks behind him that, after his death, even his sons did not know important details of their father's academic career.

He should be remembered especially as the person who was in charge of the very rich MCZ bird collection for many years, who helped avian conservation get a solid start, who wrote the classic Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World, who helped publish Peters' Check-list after Peters' death, and who assisted the Department of Ornithology at AMNH in many unrecorded but important ways.

The one key difference is that in the novel, the fictional "Kennoway" mourned "the death of his beautiful wife," who died young.