Jan Morris
Travel writer
THE WORLD- RENOWNED ravel writer Jan Morris, who has died at 94, was responsible for dozens of books in a career spanning six decades, including the famous trilogy Pax Britannica on the British Empire.
She also had a successful career in journalism during which she reportedly broke the story about the first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953.
Yet none of her adventures was as dramatic as her personal journey, which saw her transition in 1972 from a man to a woman. One of the first highprofile figures to undergo gender reassignment, the revelation was greeted with shock and even, in some quarters, revulsion. Even her doctors were sceptical, one telling her that the change might affect her ability to write. Her book Conundrum, published two years later, reflected on the experience.
Born James Morris, to an English mother and a Welsh father in Somerset, she served in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers towards the end of the Second World War, before going up to Christ Church, Oxford, where she attended English lectures in fluttering white gowns.
But if Oxford was, as she said, the making of her, the question
of her identity had troubled her for much longer. It was at just three or four, she recalled, while sitting under the family’s piano, that she had decided she was “wrongly equipped” as a boy and that she should have been a girl.
She had begun writing during the war, training on a newspaper in Bristol and interviewing the victims of bombing raids.
Once in the army, a spell at Sandhurst was followed by a posting as an intelligence officer that saw her serve in Italy, Palestine, Venice and Trieste.
The wanderlust never left her, and following her time at Christ Church she took up a year- long fellowship at the University of Chicago, during which time she visited every American state. The result was her first book, Coast to Coast.
At around the same time, she
married Elizabeth Tuckniss, a tea planter’s daughter. It was a partnership that would produce five children and last 70 years, even though the two were legally required to divorce following her change of gender.
Resuming her journalistic career, she took a job at a news agency in Cairo and then gravitated to The Times, for whom she travelled with Edmund Hillary to the base camp at Everest and reported back on his successful ascent, using a secret code to prevent anyone else intercepting her messages and beating her to the scoop. As it was, the news reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.
Three years later, she covered the Suez crisis for the Manchester Guardian, uncovering the truth behind
the misinformation fed to parliament about Britain’s ignorance of the Israeli invasion of Egypt.
It was a second remarkable exclusive, but her last. By the early 1960s she had reinvented herself as a travel writer, or, as she preferred to be known, “a writer who travels”.
Basing herself in a corner of north- west Wales – where she inherited her father’s Welsh nationalism – she turned out more than 40 volumes. Her accounts of Venice, published in 1960, and of post- war New York, were among her most successful works.
She also wrote fiction, including her novel Hav, published in 2006.
Made a CBE in 1999, she is survived by Elizabeth and four of their children.