Jan Morris
Travel writer and historian who broke news of Everest and wrote a landmark memoir of changing sex
JAN MORRIS, who has died aged 94, was a prolific author of history and travel books, distinguished by their narrative verve and scintillating prose. The reliance of her style on surface brilliance was perhaps a reflection of her own complex personality, which for much of her life concealed immense inner turmoil. For having initially found fame as the reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest in 1953, the former James Morris attracted permanent notoriety by changing sex in 1972.
That decision, and the curiosity it continued to provoke, rather detracted from Morris’s standing as a writer. This was at its highest in the 1960s, the period when the best of her travel books were written. They took as their subjects places that suited her romantic disposition, notably The Presence of Spain (1964).
Her style was magpie-like, alighting gleefully on anecdotes and gossip that made for pleasurable reading. These titbits were surrounded by a mosaic of adjectives that often captured the spirit of a place, but which some readers found off-putting. She once described herself as “A wandering swank”. More disciplined were her writing habits; she was a trenchant researcher and never wrote less than 3,000 words a day.
It was cities, her favourite places, that seemed to respond best to her touch. Her most completely successful works were Oxford (1965) and Venice (1960). The elusive, contradictory, rather feminine nature of “La Serenissima” particularly suited her style.
Of her more than 40 books, the most celebrated were her three-volume history of the British Empire. A triptych that took as its centrepiece the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, described in Pax Britannica (1968), it demonstrated Morris’s gift for research and sweeping narrative.
It was, however, more a highly subjective portrait than true history. Its tone, by turns elegiac and scathing, reflected Morris’s confused emotions about Empire. Whatever its academic value, however, it was a well-realised artistic achievement, dictated by an approach Morris summarised (in Farewell the Trumpets, 1978) with the phrase: “If it is not invariably true in the fact, it is certainly true in the imagination.”
James Humphry Morris was born at Clevedon, Somerset, on October 2 1926. His father had been gassed in the First World War and died while his son was still a child. Young James’s earliest memory, aged about three or four, was of sitting under the piano that his mother was playing, convinced – as Jan Morris would describe in Conundrum (1974), one of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality calmly and without prurience, that he should really be a girl.
In 1936, aged nine, James went to the choir school of Christ Church, Oxford, where he would silently add to morning prayers his own plea: “And please God, let me be a girl.” Morris then went to Lancing, which he loathed, and after a brief spell with the Western Daily Press joined the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers in 1944.
He served in Italy and Palestine, acting as the regiment’s intelligence officer. Morris later said that he had always felt apart from the three masculine institutions that had shaped his early life – his school, his regiment and The Times – yet always retained an affection for the least pompous and most tolerant of them, the Army.
On demobilisation in 1947, Morris, a Palestinian sympathiser, stayed in the Middle East, working for the Cairo-based Arab News Agency. Then in 1949 he returned to Oxford, reading English at Christ Church and editing Cherwell, the undergraduates’ newspaper. Morris then joined The Times, working at first on the copy desk, before his talent was recognised and channelled into foreign assignments.
His life changed in 1953, when he was chosen to accompany the Everest expedition. The newspaper was sponsoring the attempt and had sole rights to news of its progress. Morris was expected to report this and prevent other journalists from doing so.
As later related in Coronation Everest (1958), to this end he instituted a system of
Sherpa runners who carried coded reports from Everest to a radio at
Kathmandu; the journey took a week. A novice at mountaineering,
Morris himself had to regularly brave the icefield to bring his copy down from Camp
IV at 24,000 ft so that he could entrust it to his messengers at Base Camp.
His cunning and courage were rewarded with one of the great journalistic scoops when he was able exclusively to report that Everest had been conquered. The news reached London for the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’S coronation.
Morris worked thereafter as a foreign correspondent, initially based in Cairo for The Times, and then with a roving brief for The Guardian from 1956. He knew, however, that he did not wish to make journalism his career. He found, as he put it, that it gave him a grandstand view of events but no time to study them in depth.
Instead he turned to travel writing, and after a first book about America, Coast to Coast (1956), he wrote several on the transformation wrought on the Arab world by oil. Among them was The Hashemite Kings (1959), whose romantic tone and rich texture, studded with impressionistic detail, were the emerging characteristics of Morris’s literary style, one that was to change little.
For all his literary success, his doubts about his gender continued to grow; in photographs taken of the Everest mountaineers, it is Morris who seems most conscious of his beard. He was given hope by finding an account of the first attempt to operate on a transsexual, a Danish painter of the 1930s. Although Morris’s efforts better to understand his condition were initially rebuffed by British doctors, he was finally taken seriously by Harry Benjamin, an American surgeon who was the first to identify transsexuality.
In 1964 James Morris began to take the first of 12,000 female hormone pills and to live a double life, spending half the week as a woman in Oxford, the rest as a man in London. His two identities maintained separate clubs. The porter at the Travellers’ would speed him on his way with a “Cheerio, sir”; five minutes later, having changed his clothes, Morris would be greeted at his second haunt with “Hello, madam.”
Once his children had grown up, in 1972 Morris proceeded to a Casablanca clinic to complete the physical alteration with surgery. He was fortified by his belief that gender was something of the soul rather than the body, and this made it easier for him to slough his outer skin.
The Jan Morris that emerged was a curiously old-fashioned sort of woman. Cheerful and resolute, she resembled nothing so much as a game Victorian spinster, dauntlessly braving foreign parts; no less Victorian were her attitudes, gladly ceding first place in the world to men, particularly those who resembled in outlook the heroes of imperial romances.
There were occasional contradictions: one of her editors noted that at lunch she was all womanly flirtation, but when it came to business she adopted a more masculine attitude, bestriding a chair, her hands on her knees.
Some critics felt, too, that the transition had removed something from her writing. The charges of overwriting became more frequent. Although still capable of evocations of place, most notably of post-imperial cities in Hong Kong (1988) and Sydney (1992), she did not match in ambition or execution the quality of earlier work.
Particularly disappointing was her biography in 1995 of Admiral Jackie Fisher, with whom she confessed to having been in love since childhood, though Fisher had died before she was born. The book was long in gestation, having been initially abandoned in the 1950s, but the result lacked a searching intelligence and tended to be repetitious.
Perhaps Jan Morris herself recognised that she had passed the summit of her powers. Although her only novel, the Borgesian fantasy Last Letters from Hav (1985) was much praised, many of her later books were content to glean earlier harvests; these included The Oxford Book of Oxford (1978), A Venetian Bestiary (1982), The Spectacle of Empire (1982), several anthologies of her magazine pieces and a number of books on Wales.
In 2001 she wrote Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and two years later A Writer’s World: Travels 1950–2000. A collection of essays, Contact! A Book of Glimpses, followed in 2009 and her final travel book, Contact! A Book of Encounters, was published a year later. In 2018, by which time she was a treasured figure in British culture, came In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary, while Thinking Again appeared earlier this year.
Appointed CBE in 1999, Jan Morris was a vocal supporter of Welsh independence, Owen Glendower being a particular hero. She lived near Criccieth on the Llyn peninsula. She shared this home with her former wife, Elizabeth, née Tuckniss, whom James Morris had married in 1949 and with whom he had three sons and a daughter; another daughter died in infancy.
Elizabeth had known of her husband’s plight since they met. They were formally divorced after Morris underwent surgery, but planned to be buried together. Visitors to Jan Morris’s library would see propped against the wall a gravestone, whose Welsh inscription read: “Here are two friends, Jan and Elizabeth, at the end of one life.”
In 2008, however, they reaffirmed their relationship by entering a civil partnership.
Elizabeth survives her with their children.