Rear-admiral Roger Morris
Officer who rose to become Hydrographer of the Royal Navy
REAR-ADMIRAL ROGER MORRIS, who has died aged 87, commanded a flotilla of survey ships in the Gulf during the Iranian Revolution and later became Hydrographer of the Navy.
In early 1979, as the Iranian Revolution gained momentum, Morris in his flagship, the hydrographic survey ship Hydra, surveyed the south-eastern Iranian coast for a new seaport at Chabahar, which had been proposed by the Shah. As tensions grew, Morris, a scholar as well as a notable surveyor, who kept a translation of the Koran in his cabin, selected an excerpt from the sacred text to be painted on the nose of the ship’s helicopter.
While construction of the new port facilities faltered and international workers were arbitrarily detained, Morris liaised with the British resident naval officer ashore. He kept his four unarmed ships, in their distinctive white liveries, close inshore as a visible reminder of his presence, until the authorities began to release their hostages from house arrest.
Morris seized the chance to pluck several hundred Americans, British and others from the shores of Bandar Abbas (on the Gulf coast) and from small boats in the Gulf of Oman, and commenced a shuttle across the Gulf to the United Arab Emirates and to American warships further out to sea.
When Morris needed to replenish his ship, Foreign Office representatives in Dubai and Abu Dhabi vacillated, obliging him to make his own arrangements at Muscat. No journalists witnessed events, there was little reporting in the UK, the thanks of the British government were muted, and no awards were made.
Later that year the US embassy in Tehran was occupied. It was also the end of a long era when the Gulf had been an area of British influence and peace had been maintained by a small squadron of the Royal Navy. Morris had the satisfaction that he had acted in the highest traditions of his predecessors.
Roger Oliver Morris, a doctor’s son, was born on September 1 1932 and grew up within sight of Devonport dockyard. He was taught at Mount House, Tavistock, before joining Dartmouth in 1946.
He began specialising in hydrography in 1956. After surveys in ships in home waters and the Far East, three months under canvas on South Georgia, and then more surveys in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, his first command, as a lieutenant-commander, was the inshore surveying craft Medusa in 1964.
In 1968-70 he was given command of the brandnew Beagle, then sent to command Hydra on a survey in the Malacca Strait. There, he joined the relief operation in East Pakistan after the 1970 Bhola cyclone which killed 500,000 people, finding and marking channels for small craft to ferry in food and supplies; for his success he was promoted to commander.
Subsequently, he commanded Fawn in 1972, Hecla 1975-77 on the west coast of Scotland and at the Jubilee Fleet Review, and Hydra 1978-80.
After the Iranian episode, Morris took Hydra to conduct surveys in the Minches between the Hebrides and the west coast of Scotland, as well as charting a shoal between St Kilda and Harris which he named Whale Rock, for a minke whale which watched over his work.
Morris came ashore for the last time in 1980 to go first to the Hydrographic Office at Taunton, and then to Whitehall, before being promoted to rear-admiral.
In 1985 he succeeded Rear-admiral DW Haslam, who had taught him his craft, as Hydrographer of the Navy, an appointment established more than two centuries earlier.
He was made CB and in 1990 retired to Somerset, where he wrote Charts and Surveys, in Peace and War (1995). Morris studied heraldry, was an ornithologist and a talented watercolourist, with some of his paintings used to update Admiralty Sailing Directions.
Rear-admiral Roger Morris, born September 1 1932, died April 18 2020