Jan Morris’s remarkable journey
Jan Morris 1926-2020
In June 1953, James Morris produced “one of the most dramatic scoops of the century”, said The Times: news that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Morris – who was on assignment for The Times, with exclusive rights to expedition leader Brigadier Sir John Hunt’s despatches – was camped at nearly 22,000ft when the climbers came off the peak in the late afternoon of 30 May. The former soldier immediately went back to base camp, typed up a message to his editor at home – in pre-agreed code, to make sure the competition didn’t beat him to the story – and handed it to two Sherpa runners, to take to Kathmandu. From there, it was cabled to London. News finally broke on the morning of 2 June, hours before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. “All this – and Everest too!” read the front page of the Daily Express. It caused a sensation, and overnight Morris went from foreign correspondent to international celebrity. “The effect on my ego was disastrous,” he said later. “I was 26 and sufficiently pleased with myself already.”
Yet Morris was more than just a “gutsy” reporter; in the next few years, he would become known as a brilliant prose writer, before gaining a new level of fame as one of the first Britons to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Having started taking hormone therapy in the 1960s, James became Jan in 1972. She had been married for more than 20 years, and had fathered five children (one of whom died in infancy); and her “sex change”, as the operation was then known, was both dangerous and highly controversial. Yet it did not seem to lead to much domestic upheaval. She and Elizabeth were obliged to divorce, but they never separated.
James Morris was born in Somerset in 1926, to an English mother, who was a pianist, and a Welsh father who had been gassed in the First World War. He died when James was 12. Jan Morris would later recall sitting under the piano, aged three or four, and realising that she was “wrongly equipped” as a boy. James was sent away to school, at Lancing College, where he was miserable. He left at 16, and briefly worked at the Western Daily Press in Bristol, before joining the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers in 1944. He celebrated his 21st birthday on a troop train to Palestine. “I knew life was going to be OK. At last, in the Army of all places, I felt I was free.” He admired military values, he said: “courage, dash, loyalty, selfdiscipline”. After the War, he took an Arabic course in London then worked as a reporter in Cairo, before going up to Oxford, to read English at Christ Church. When learning Arabic, he had met Elizabeth Tuckniss, a former Wren. They felt an instant bond – a love so intense, Morris said, that it overrode “all my sexual ambiguities” – and married in 1949.
Working first for The Times, and later The Manchester Guardian, Morris covered a number of major stories – including the Suez crisis, and the Eichmann trial of 1961 – but increasingly felt that his vocation was as a writer of books, and in particular, of highly personal books about places. His first, Coast to Coast, described a journey across America, and came out in 1956; but it was the success of his books about Oxford and Venice that enabled him to write full-time. In 1968, he started on his trilogy Pax Britannica, a history of the British Empire from 1837 to 1965.
Growing increasingly unhappy with his male form, Morris started taking hormone pills in 1964, and spent half his time dressed as a man, and the rest as a woman. “There was a spice to it, as there is in any undercover work,” Jan Morris recalled. “For a time I was a member of two clubs in London, one as a man and one as a woman, and I would sometimes, literally, change my identity in a taxi between the two.” In 1972, once his children had grown up, he went to Casablanca for the surgery. He felt, he said, “no flicker of disconsolance, no tremor of fear, no regret and no irresolution”. Elizabeth had always sensed Morris’s discomfort in a man’s body, and supported him throughout. In her 1974 memoir Conundrum, Jan wrote that their relationship had had no right to survive, “yet it worked like a dream, living testimony... of love in its purest sense over everything else”. She noted that after her surgery, she was more prone to tears, and “ludicrously susceptible to flattery”. Some observed that she seemed less feminine when talking business. But as she once told The Observer’s Tim Adams, “I did not change sex; I really absorbed one into the other. I’m a bit of each now. I freely admit it...”
“I did not change sex; I really absorbed one into the other. I’m a bit of each now”
Well into old age, Morris continued to travel widely: she claimed to have visited every major city in the world. Her first port of call, she said, was always the law courts. These offered insights into “the social, political and moral condition of a place”. She wrote more than 50 books, not all of which were well received. With typical candour, she admitted to being pained by the bad reviews – and to her own vanity. “I am shamefully disappointed if, having paid in a bookshop with a credit card, I find the assistant does not recognise my name.” She was not exactly a feminist, said The New York Times. If they are honest, she wrote, most women will admit that they like feeling “cherished” by men; yet she detested being patronised. “Just because I’m a woman, there are people now who think I haven’t got a mind anymore.”
Morris – a Welsh nationalist – spent the last 50 years of her life living with Elizabeth on the Llŷn Peninsula, at the north end of Cardigan Bay. She described them as living as “sisters in law”, but in 2008, aged 81 and 84 respectively, they became civil partners at a no-fuss ceremony witnessed by a local couple, who invited them to tea afterwards. “It is rather nice to be legal again,” Elizabeth said afterwards. “Do I feel wonderful? Of course I do.” Visitors to their home would sometimes be shown the headstone they had commissioned for their burial plot. Its inscription reads: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”