Roger Morgan
Brought the House of Lords library into the digital age
ROGER MORGAN, who has died aged 91, was the Librarian of the House of Lords who between 1977 and 1991 transformed it from a parliamentary backwater into a hi-tech source of information for the increasing number of expert, working life peers.
He took over in the wake of a report from a panel headed by Viscount Eccles recommending root-andbranch modernisation of a library used mostly by peers for an afternoon snooze. It advocated setting up a research service, acquiring books relevant to the issues of the day, hiring qualified librarians for the first time, and dipping a toe in information technology.
Morgan already knew the scale of the challenge, having spent 25 years in the libraries, first of the Commons and then of the Upper House, where shelves bearing some 120,000 books – most of them unread – lined the walls. He was also aware that the new generation of peers expected their library to furnish them with information.
Lacking even a typewriter at the start, Morgan moved fast. Research staff were recruited, and a start made on transferring the library’s index from cards on to microfiche.
During the summer of 1978 the Queen’s Room – traditionally little used except when peers robed for the State Opening – was equipped with microfilm readers, a camera processor and two computer terminals, plus a Prestel machine to receive up-todate information.
Throughout the 1980s Morgan brought the Lords library steadily into the digital age, and by his retirement in 1991 the entire catalogue was online.
Roger Hugh Vaughan Charles Morgan was born on July 8 1926 into a literary household. His father, Charles Morgan, wrote a number of well regarded novels and plays including The Flashing Stream, Sparkenbrooke and The River Line and was a good friend of Dylan Thomas. The Morgans kept a cottage in Thomas’s home village of Laugharne, and, to his pride, Roger Morgan in 2004 was elected a burgess.
His mother, Hilda Vaughan, wrote 10 novels which sold less well in their time but were rediscovered during the resurgence of Welsh literature in the 1980s. But it was his father’s American royalties from The Fountain that paid for the house at Campden Hill where Roger spent his childhood with his sister Shirley, who became Marchioness of Anglesey; she died in 2017.
After war broke out Charles Morgan sent his family to America, Roger spending two unsettled years at Phillips Academy, Massachusetts. In the summer of 1942, the threat of invasion having abated, he came home to finish his schooling at Eton.
Leaving in 1994, Morgan was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, and, postwar, served in Germany in the rank of captain.
In 1947 he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read History. After graduating, he studied for the Bar while working as a photographer for the Tatler.
In 1951 Morgan took what he expected to be a temporary job in the library of the Commons. He moved to the Lords in 1963.
Temperamentally conservative, during the late 1970s, alarmed at the state of the country, he invested in Krugerrands and buried them in his garden. Unlike Alan Turing, who bought silver bars when invasion was threatened and hid them around Bletchley Park, Morgan remembered where he had put them. To him, the advent of Margaret Thatcher came as a relief.
Morgan was a trustee of the Garrick Club for 20 years, and a member of its library committee. He was appointed CBE in 1991.
Roger Morgan married Harriet Waterfield in 1951. The marriage was dissolved and in 1965 he married Susan Vogel Marrian. She survives him, with a son and a daughter from his first marriage and a son from his second. Two other sons from his first marriage predeceased him.