Obituary


Journalist Jan Morris was renowned for her travel books and news stories, including those written before her gender transition, says Paul Clements


Jan Morris 1926-2020


J


an Morris, who died on November 20 2020 aged 94, was a renowned travel writer and journalist.


As James Morris, before transition in


1972, he was a correspondent with The Times and Manchester Guardian. Morris was best known for his old-fashioned scoop for The Times about the first conquest of Everest in 1953 when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made it to the summit. With a large amount of cunning and


the help of Sherpa runners, Morris used a coded message to get the news down the mountain to Kathmandu and back to London. It caused a sensation and he became a celebrated figure, known as ‘Morris of Everest’. After this success, he was appointed Times Middle East correspondent, fell in love with the Arab world and found it a place of political intrigue, tensions and eternal squabbles. He left the paper in 1956 because


they would not allow him to publish books and joined the Manchester Guardian (1956-61). There he was part of a journalistic coterie that included Geoffrey Moorhouse, Michael Frayn and Michael Parkinson. Morris reported from all five continents, becoming known as ‘correspondent to everywhere’. While reporting on the 1956 Suez


crisis, he uncovered collusion between Britain, France and Israel. Two years later, in the spring of 1958, he went non-stop from covering the Icelandic Cod War to the civil war in Algeria. Even when there was nothing to report, he still managed to file copy. From Reykjavik, he wrote a piece


memorably headlined by the paper: ‘No news from Iceland’. Morris said that he had cabled his story in ‘a moment of cheerful idleness’ scarcely expecting them to print it. His work was anthologised in the Bedside Guardian in 1959, which led Alistair Cooke to write: ‘It is pretty safe to say that Harvard and the London School of Economics… will, in a few decades, make the despatches of James Morris compulsory reading for any student.’ In April 1961, he covered the Adolf


Eichmann war crimes trial in Jerusalem, which was attended by more than 400 reporters from news organisations around the world. Morris linked his dispassionate reporting with the drama of the courtroom and painted a powerful portrait of the lawyers, defence counsel, translators, secretaries, policemen and ‘the gallimaufry of the press seething and grumbling and scribbling and making half-embarrassed jokes in its seats’. Then came his description of the


man on trial: “And there stood the bullet-proof glass box, like a big museum showcase – too big for a civet or a bird of paradise, too small for a skeletonic dinosaur – which was the focus and fulcrum of it all… he slipped in silently, almost shyly, flanked by three policemen. No shudder ran around the courtroom, for hardly anybody noticed. ‘There he is,’ I heard a rather self-confident English voice somewhere behind my shoulder, rather as you sometimes hear mourners pointing out rich relatives at a funeral:


“


He painted a portrait of ‘the gallimaufry of the press seething and grumbling and scribbling and making half- embarrassed jokes’


and sure enough, when I looked up at the glass receptacle, there he was. There was to his movements a queer stiffness or jerkiness of locomotion. He hardly looked at the courtroom – he had nobody to look for – but even in his small gestures I thought I recognised the symptoms: somewhere inside him, behind the new dark suit and the faint suggestions of defiance, Adolf Eichmann was trembling.” Later, as Jan Morris, she continued to be in demand and reported on events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the handover of Hong Kong. Morris left full-time journalism to


write travel and history books. These include a renowned trilogy on the British empire, Pax Britannica (1968- 1978), which she said was the artistic and cultural centrepiece of her life. Morris was always wary of any kind


of state power or oligarchy. ‘Nothing is more boring than a one-party state,’ she wrote about Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore in the 1970s. She had a healthy dislike of authority, detesting officialdom, bureaucracy and the whole apparatus of hierarchy. For aspiring journalists, a key book of


Morris’s reportage is A Writer’s World, 1950-2000 (Faber), a portrait of the seminal moments of the second half of the 20th century.


Paul Clements edited Jan Morris: Around the World in Eighty Years, published by Seren in 2006


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GERAINT LEWIS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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