Jan Morris: life from both sides

JAN MORRIS

A journalist, writer, and broadcaster, Paul Clements is the author of five travel books and a biography of Richard Hayward, adapted for BBC television. He knew Jan Morris personally for thirty years, edited a collection of tributes to her on her 80th birthday, and spent four months at Oxford University where he wrote the first critical study of her work, published by University of Wales Press (1998). A former BBC assistant editor, he is a recipient of the Reuter Journalist’s Fellowship Programme, a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a member of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives with his wife and son in Belfast.

Scribe Publications

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18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

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Published by Scribe 2022

This edition published 2023

Copyright © Paul Clements 2022

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Quotations from letters written by Jan Morris to Elizabeth Morris and Alastair Hetherington appeared in previous editions of this book without the permission of the estate of Jan Morris.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

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Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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There is properly no history; only biography.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, ESSAYS

Contents

Author’s Note

Chronology

Jan Morris Bibliography

PROLOGUE:

North Wales, October 2016

CHAPTER 1:

Watching the Ships Go By

CHAPTER 2:

‘Morris! Morris! You’re in!’

CHAPTER 3:

Shy and Unworldly Youth Goes to War

CHAPTER 4:

Never One of the Boys

CHAPTER 5:

‘A Bold and Risky Venture’

CHAPTER 6:

The Sensual Pleasure of America

CHAPTER 7:

Correspondent to Everywhere

CHAPTER 8:

A Stir Down Under

CHAPTER 9:

Whizz Kid on the Hop

CHAPTER 10:

The Far End of the World

CHAPTER 11:

In Search of the Empire

CHAPTER 12:

Imperial Wanderer

CHAPTER 13:

The Long Road to Casablanca

CHAPTER 14:

‘Let the Trumpets Sound for Jan’

CHAPTER 15:

The Conundrum Effect

CHAPTER 16:

Hav Plane, Will Travel

CHAPTER 17:

‘More Welsh than the Welsh’

CHAPTER 18:

‘Please Don’t Call Me a Travel Writer’

CHAPTER 19:

‘As Many Retirements as Sinatra’

CHAPTER 20:

Last Dispatches from Llanystumdwy

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography of Works Consulted

Acknowledgements

Afterword

Endnotes

Author’s Note

Jan Morris originally lived and wrote as James Morris, undertaking a gender transition that became public knowledge in the early ’70s. Her chosen pronouns were ‘she’ and ‘her’ and this choice is honoured throughout the book.

The exceptions to this are cases where historical sources are cited; occasionally, these use pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him’. Such quotes have been reproduced in the interest of depicting Morris’s historical context accurately, including the challenges she faced as a transgender pioneer.

Attitudes towards gender identity are changing and the vocabulary used to discuss it continues to evolve. Recognising the impact that some of the material quoted or reported in this book may have had then and may have now, I have made efforts to use sensitive and appropriate language elsewhere, including when viewing through a modern lens the period in which Morris lived. I hope readers will forgive any shortcomings.

The images used in this book have been chosen to reflect a rounded picture of Jan Morris’s life. They cover her early years, the period in the Army, and her adventurous reportage for newspapers, as well as the decades spent travelling the world and her later years living in Wales.

Chronology

All publication dates refer to the British editions of Morris’s work.

1926: Born 2 October, Clevedon, Somerset, England, the third of three children

1930–34: Attended kindergarten in Clevedon

1935–40: Chorister, Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford

1941–43: Lancing College, Sussex (based in Shropshire during World War II); contributed features, reviews, and poetry to the school magazine

1943: Trainee journalist, Western Daily Press, Bristol; met and interviewed James Cagney, Irving Berlin, and Cary Grant

1944: Signed up for the Home Guard in Bristol while waiting to join the army

1945: Trainee cadet at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst

1945–47: British Army: joined 2nd Hussars, then 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, serving in Venice, Trieste, Egypt, and Palestine as intelligence officer after World War II; edited satirical magazine Lighter Lancer

1948–49: Journalist, Arab News Agency, Cairo

1949: Married Elizabeth Tuckniss

• Lived in Marylebone, London

1949–51: Undergraduate, Christ Church, Oxford; editor of student magazine Cherwell

• Lived in Appleton, Berkshire (later Oxfordshire)

• Attained Bachelor of Arts degree

1951: Editorial staff, The Times, trainee sub-editor on foreign desk

1952: Birth of first son, Mark

• Times stand-in as foreign correspondent in Suez Canal Zone; covered the Black Saturday riots and the rise of revolutionary nationalism

• Acting foreign editor of The Times

1953: Accredited Times correspondent on Mount Everest expedition, achieving a scoop for the newspaper using coded message

• Birth of second son, Henry

• Began book reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement

1954: Harkness Trust Commonwealth Fund Fellow, United States, studying international relations at the University of Chicago; toured America covering 70,000 miles by car, train, ship, and plane

1955–56: Middle East correspondent for The Times

• Crossed south-east Arabia with the Sultan of Oman

• First book, Coast to Coast, won Café Royal Literature Prize, and was runner-up for the John Llewellyn Rhys Literature Prize

• Lived on a houseboat in Cairo; family later lived in the French Alps

• Wrote The Market of Seleukia

1956–62: The Manchester Guardian part-time foreign correspondent; reported on Suez Crisis, Algerian War of Independence, and apartheid in South Africa

• Family moved to Ickham, Kent, in 1957

• Wrote eight books during this period, including Coronation Everest

1959: Television films made for BBC Panorama and journalism for ITN

• Freelance writing for magazines and BBC Home Service

• Lived for six months in Venice

1960: Baby daughter, Virginia, died in hospital, aged one month

• Venice published

1961: US George Polk Memorial Award for Journalism

• Master of Arts conferred by Oxford University

• Moved to Waterperry, Oxfordshire

• Birth of third son, Tom (later Twm)

• Royal Society of Literature Award for Venice

• Elected Fellow of the RSL

• Covered Adolf Eichmann trial for Manchester Guardian

1963: Toured Spain for six months for travel book

1964: Birth of daughter, Susan (known as Suki)

• The Presence of Spain published

1965: Acquired Plas Trefan, Caernarfonshire

• Moved to Llanystumdwy, near Cricieth

• Oxford published

1966–72: Travelled widely for British Empire trilogy

• Began preparing physically and psychologically for gender confirmation surgery while living intermittently in Jericho, Oxford

1968: Pax Britannica: the climax of an empire (Vol. 1) published

1972: Gender confirmation surgery in Casablanca at age of forty-six

• Nominally divorced Elizabeth

• Moved to live in Bath

1973: Heaven’s Command: an imperial progress (Vol. 2) published

1974: Publication of Conundrum, landmark memoir of gender transition

1974–80: Contributor to Rolling Stone magazine

• Moved to live in Trefan Morys, Llanystumdwy

1977: Elected Visiting Senior Associate Member, St Antony’s College, Oxford

1978: Farewell the Trumpets: an imperial retreat (Vol. 3) published

1984: The Matter of Wales: epic views of a small country published

1985: Last Letters from Hav shortlisted for the Booker Prize

1986: Visiting writer-in-residence, San Francisco Examiner

1989: Pleasures of a Tangled Life (autobiography) published

1992: Honorary Doctorate of Literature, University of Wales, Cardiff

1993: Elected to the Gorsedd of Bards

1996: Honorary Doctorate of Literature, University of Glamorgan

• Presented with the Glyndŵr Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts in Wales

1997: Reported on the handover of Hong Kong to China for Evening Standard

1998: Honorary Fellow of Royal Institute of British Architects

• First study of her writing published in Writers of Wales series

1999: Appointed CBE for services to literature

2001: Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere published as final book; longlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize

• Announced retirement from writing

• Targeted, along with others, as part of hoax anthrax scare

2002: A Writer’s House in Wales published

2003: A Writer’s World: travels 1950–2000 published

• Honorary Fellowship, University of Wales, Bangor

2004: Thomas Cook Travel Book special award for outstanding contribution to travel writing

2005: Golden PEN Award for a lifetime’s distinguished service to literature

• Portrait commissioned for National Portrait Gallery

2006: Publication of Hav; shortlisted for Arthur C. Clarke Prize for science fiction

• Festschrift tribute Jan Morris: around the world in eighty years published, containing twenty-one essays

• Travelled widely writing features for Financial Times

• Became seriously ill; survived brain surgery

2008: Remarriage to Elizabeth in civil partnership ceremony

• Chosen by The Times as fifteenth in a survey of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945

• Traveling Genius, a critical study of her writing, published in North America

2009: Contact! Brief encounters in a lifetime of travel published

2014: Publication of Ciao, Carpaccio! An infatuation

2015: Elected Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales for public service

2016: Celebrated ninetieth birthday party at art gallery in North Wales, with invited guests and exhibition ‘A Journey for Jan Morris’, in which fourteen artists responded to her life

• Contributed pen-and-ink drawings to a critical study, Ariel: a literary life of Jan Morris

• Awarded Medal of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion for distinguished service to Wales

2017: Began to write first-ever diary; excerpts published regularly in Financial Times and O’r Pedwar Gwynt

• Portrait chosen by Oxford University for Diversifying Portraiture Initiative

2018: Accepted Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award for contribution to an outstanding life of travel writing

• Two new books published: Battleship Yamato: of war, beauty and irony and In My Mind’s Eye: a thought diary

• Presented at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with The Times William Howard Russell prize for excellence in her writing

2020: Awarded the Lawrence J. Burpee Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for inspirational writing on a sense of place

• Thinking Again, second book of diaries, published in February; began work on third volume

• Health declined during summer; admitted to hospital

• Died at the Bryn Beryl Hospital, Pwllheli, 20 November

• Farewell ceremony, Bangor, Gwynedd, 27 November

2021: Elizabeth moved into care home in Aberystwyth

• Final book Allegorizings published posthumously in November

• Portrait by Dan Llywelyn Hall unveiled in Machynlleth, Powys, at literary festival dedicated to Morris’s memory

• Ashes spread over the River Dwyfor in Llanystumdwy

Jan Morris Bibliography

Coast to Coast, Faber, 1956

Sultan in Oman, Faber, 1957

The Market of Seleukia, Faber, 1957

Coronation Everest, Faber, 1958

South African Winter, Faber, 1958

The Hashemite Kings, Faber, 1959

Venice, Faber, 1960

The Upstairs Donkey (with Pauline Baynes), Faber, 1962

Cities, Faber, 1963

The World Bank: a prospect, Faber, 1963

The Outriders: a liberal view of Britain, Faber, 1963

The Presence of Spain, Faber, 1964

Oxford, Faber, 1965

Pax Britannica: the climax of an empire, Faber, 1968

The Great Port: a passage through New York, Faber, 1970

Places, Faber, 1972

Heaven’s Command: an imperial progress, Faber, 1973

Conundrum, Faber, 1974

Travels, Faber, 1976

Farewell the Trumpets: an imperial retreat, Faber, 1978

Destinations, Oxford University Press, 1980

The Venetian Empire: a sea voyage, Faber, 1980

A Venetian Bestiary, Thames & Hudson, 1982

Wales: the first place (with Paul Wakefield), Aurum, 1982

The Spectacle of Empire, Faber, 1982

Stones of Empire: the buildings of the Raj (with Simon Winchester), Oxford University Press, 1983

The Matter of Wales: epic views of a small country, Oxford University Press, 1984

Journeys, Oxford University Press, 1984

Among the Cities, Viking, 1985

Last Letters from Hav, Viking, 1985

Scotland: the place of visions (with Paul Wakefield), Aurum, 1986

Manhattan ’45, Faber, 1987

Hong Kong: Xianggang, Viking, 1988

Pleasures of a Tangled Life, Barrie & Jenkins, 1989

Ireland: your only place (with Paul Wakefield), Aurum, 1990

Over Europe, Times Books, 1991

Sydney, Viking, 1992

Locations, Oxford University Press, 1992

O Canada!, Hale, 1992

A Machynlleth Triad (Triawd Machynlleth, with Twm Morys), Viking, 1994

Fisher’s Face, Viking, 1995

The Princeship of Wales, Gomer Press, 1995

Fifty Years of Europe: an album, Viking, 1997

Wales: epic views of a small country (revised edition), Viking, 1998

Lincoln: a foreigner’s quest, Viking, 1999

Our First Leader: a Welsh fable (Ein Llyw Cntaf, with Twm Morys), Gomer Press, 2000

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Faber, 2001

A Writer’s House in Wales, National Geographic, 2002

A Writer’s World: travels 1950–2000, Faber, 2003

Hav: a novel, Faber, 2006

Contact! Brief encounters in a lifetime of travel, Faber, 2009

Ciao, Carpaccio! An infatuation, Pallas Athene, 2014

Battleship Yamato: of war, beauty and irony, Pallas Athene, 2018

In My Mind’s Eye: a thought diary, Faber, 2018

Thinking Again, Faber, 2020

Allegorizings, Faber, 2021

Books edited by Jan Morris

The Oxford Book of Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978

My Favourite Stories of Wales, Lutterworth Press, 1980

John Ruskin: the stones of Venice, Faber, 1981

The Small Oxford Book of Wales, Oxford University Press, 1982

Travels with Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, 1993

Booklets by Jan Morris

The Story of the British Everest Expedition, Everest Colour Supplement, The Times, 1953

South America, Guardian pamphlet, 1962

James Morris in Australia, Guardian pamphlet, 1963

Christ Church Oxford: a brief history and guide (with James Ferguson), Christ Church, 2011

Portmeirion, Portmeirion Ltd, 2012

Prologue

North Wales, October 2016

Slightly unsteady on her feet and with the aid of a walking stick, a prim ninety-year-old with a thick white cumulus of hair carefully picks her way up the steps of a Victorian Gothic mansion, hidden from the road outside by towering trees. Once inside, she is greeted by a large crowd of friends who have come from Betws-y-Coed and Blaenau Ffestiniog, from Portmeirion and Porthmadog, from Cricieth and Caernarfon, and from Llanbedrog and Llanystumdwy.

They have packed into a wing of the Oriel Art Gallery in Plas Glyn y Weddw (Widow’s Glen) overlooking Cardigan Bay. This is the heartland of Welsh Wales, and those present bring to the proceedings a vigorous sense of Cymreictod, or Welshness. They are here for a weekend celebration, paying homage to Jan Morris on her ninetieth birthday. Seventy-five friends and neighbours have gathered for dinner in a long room of the gallery to honour her and reflect on her achievements.

Morris has lived in this part of Wales for more than fifty years and, although her travels have taken her to many exotic locations, this corner of the world has been her chief delight. The first language of the majority of those present is Welsh, spoken by some in a soft sing-song lilt. Morris’s commitment to the country, and to its culture and literature, has been formally recognised: she has just joined an illustrious group of recipients who have been awarded the Medal of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, for a lifetime of distinguished service to Wales.

The event marks the official launch of the exhibition ‘A Journey for Jan Morris’, a specially commissioned body of work comprising pieces by fourteen artists. Hanging on the walls of the room and in the adjoining central hall are paintings, installations, and photographs in which Welsh, Scottish, and American artists have responded to her writing. Their work is as diverse as Morris’s prodigious oeuvre, which embraces history, travel, biography, fiction, autobiography, memoir, literary criticism, architecture, and art.

From the slopes of Everest to Oxford, Venice, Trieste, and New York, she appears in different guises. A watercolour, ‘The Passionate Sightseer’, by Ivor Davies, depicts her dressed in white, riding a red dragon boat through a tempest, guided by a propitious moon; another painting by Davies, ‘The Matter of Wales’, fills a huge canvas with grainy textures, suggesting oceanic stretches, with hills in the distance. The figurative artist Annie Morgan Suganami has painted two giant charcoal portraits, ‘Jan at Home, 2016’, and ‘Jan at 90, 2016’, which hang side by side, showing her in a pensive mood.

But one work above all sums up the scale of her ceaseless life of travel, observation, and writing. ‘Ystad Jan: A Studio Byd — Jan’s Estate: Studying the World’ is a mixed-media composition on Khadi paper by Iwan Bala, featuring a large staring eye at its centre, surrounded by Morris’s book titles, written in fountain pen. This single artwork, depicting a life of constant curiosity and perpetual motion, showcases an extraordinarily fluent sixty-year career that has resulted in more than fifty books. Apart from the artists’ work, there is also a small display of exhibits from Morris and her family. These include Jan’s long sketch ‘A Picture of Venice’, a watercolour drawn by her partner Elizabeth of the house in Kent where they lived in the 1950s, and work relating to some of the interests of her children.

In her tenth decade, Morris still evinces a generosity of spirit and has a ready laugh. She is witty, inquisitive, and knowledgeable. Her skin is veined, but her eyes are sparkling, her gaze clear. Dressed in her trademark outfit of polo shirt, yellow cardigan, grey trousers, and plastic beads, she is by turns bemused, overwhelmed, and delighted by the occasion.

The guests dine on home-made chicken liver pâté, Welsh lamb hotpot with red cabbage, and bread-and-butter pudding. Over dinner, Jan relaxes beside Elizabeth, their shared history stretching back sixty-seven years. In clipped English tones, Morris expresses her delight at being honoured and, with a catch of deep emotion in her voice, talks of her home, declaring, ‘What I have done for Wales is infinitesimal compared to what Wales has done for me.’ Her greatest pleasure, though, she states emphatically, is that her neighbours are present. She has known three generations of six families who live near her in Llanystumdwy, an area redolent of an older, gentler age and a village where she has spent more than half her life.

The dinner is followed by a Jan Morris Celebratory Day, filled with discussion and opinion from writers, poets, academics, and artists. They speak of the sharpness of her instincts, her sense of openness, and of what ennobles her writing. Many allude to the tricks they have learned from reading her books: to go alone, to walk city streets aimlessly in the early morning, to explore the pages of the phone book, read the gossip of the local newspaper, visit the dentist, walk through a graveyard, and seek out esoteric details. They discuss her polymathic versatility, shrewd observation, and ardent wit, as well as the indefatigable pleasure she takes in her work. Morris’s writing is an encounter between her sensibility and the world, and ultimately this is what they value most.

No one refers to what is arguably the most extraordinary fact of her ninety years, which is that for half that period she lived as a man. By now the question of whether her gender transition affected her writing — the prickly ‘Jan Morris Memorial Question’ — has already been dealt with scores of times by critics, journalists, writers, and broadcasters, and she is weary of speaking about it.

Among those present is her third-born son Twm Morys, a Welsh-language poet, aged fifty-five, who has translated some of her work. He takes over the microphone and launches into songs and a poem that he wrote to celebrate Elizabeth’s ninety-second birthday on 31 August. In the afternoon, he runs through a list of famous names of those born, like Jan, in 1926, including Queen Elizabeth II, Marilyn Monroe, Miles Davis, Fidel Castro, Allen Ginsberg, and Harper Lee. He speaks about Jan’s love of marmalade and the fact that kindness means so much to her, then sings a specially written song, ‘Kindness and Marmalade’, for which the audience joins in the chorus. Morris has had a long obsession with marmalade, enjoying a different variety at breakfast each day of the week. Sometimes, she says, she runs out and has to have the same brand on Friday as she has had on Tuesday. Morris’s sense of humour goes down well, and laughter ripples around the audience of diehard local admirers seated in the gallery’s central hall.

Her son moves on to interview his subject about the matter of allegory. She speaks about a book she has written called Allegorizings, which will appear posthumously: ‘I don’t know if such a word exists, so I made it up. The book will be published and I hope you enjoy it, but not too soon!’ Twm asks her, ‘Does the marmalade have an allegorical meaning?’

Outside in the grounds, alongside yuccas and blue hydrangea, stands the tallest tree in Llŷn, a Wellingtonia gigantea, which still continues to grow. Autumn has arrived in the woods surrounding the house. The trees are a rich array of red, orange, and russet, their tips burnished with the sun, and a wind is blowing light showers. The views stretch from the beach at Llanbedrog across Tremadog Bay and over Barmouth Bay to the hills of mid-Wales, where the eye lands on the three humps of Cadair Idris (‘the Chair of Idris’), the highest mountain of central Wales. Those who climb it and spend the night on it are said to be either mad, dead, or poets.

Morris has never slept on Cadair Idris, but she has turned her hand to poetry. She has contributed ‘A Touching Poem for Monday Morning’, about herself and Elizabeth, to the exhibition catalogue, and reads it to the audience:

In the north part of Wales there resided, we’re told.

Two elderly persons who, as they grew old,

Being tough and strong-minded, resolute ladies,

Observing their path towards heaven or hades,

Said they’d still stick together, whatever it meant,

Whatever bad fortune, or good fortune, sent.

They’d rely upon Love, which they happened to share,

Which went with them always, wherever they were.

And if it should happen that one kicked the bucket,

Why, the other would simply say Bother!

(Not F---it! for both were too lady-like ever to swear…)

Twm rounds off the afternoon with more music. Jan’s favourite hymn — ‘although’, he says, ‘thank God she is an atheist’ — is ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is Ended’, which is sung by all present. Still an irrepressible force, despite signs of tiredness, Morris exercises a magnetism on the guests. She is all light-hearted jollity, warmth, and charm, and readers hover around her as she happily signs books with a flourish. At seventy-five, she said she was tired of the glare of public life and the merry-go-round of talks, launches, and festivals; fifteen years on, she is a dashing nonagenarian giving every sign of enjoying this public appearance. Only recently, she has declared a new writing project: for the first time she will keep a diary of her life. After the event, she wrote to thank the organisers ‘for the truly wonderful festival you made of my anniversary … It has had a terrible effect upon my ego, but I hope the conceit will wear off a bit during the next decade.’

Morris was highly influential, over the second half of the 20th century and early decades of the 21st, as a major prose stylist. From her years as one of the world’s most celebrated journalists — not only recording, but also at times shaping, key events — to becoming a groundbreaking transgender pioneer, her life was one in which endless frontiers were surpassed, constraints escaped, and contradictions synthesised. Morris’s name flits through the letters, diaries, and memoirs of luminaries such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Whicker, Wilfred Thesiger, Bruce Chatwin, Laurie Lee, and Michael Palin. Among those who have acknowledged her influence on their own work are Simon Winchester, Pico Iyer, and Jim Perrin. But her prodigious literary output is not her only legacy: as much as for her writing, she will be remembered for her truly remarkable life.

Chapter 1

Watching the Ships Go By

(1926–1934)

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good-bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

GEORGE ORWELL, ‘RIDING DOWN FROM BANGOR’

Located in a tight tangle of streets, Herbert Road is in a tranquil part of Clevedon, a once-popular Somerset seaside resort twelve miles south-west of Bristol. When the road’s villas were built in the Victorian era, Clevedon was a place to see and to be seen. Its famed pier opened in 1869 and was described by Sir John Betjeman as the most beautiful in England. From it, visitors could catch steamers to Ilfracombe in north Devon, to South Wales, and up the Bristol Channel, where the tides are the second highest in the world.

The third child of Walter and Enid Morris was born in 1926 in a terraced house on Herbert Road, a ten-minute walk from the esplanade. The date was 2 October, a day in the Christian calendar dedicated to guardian angels. Her mother had first given birth more than six years earlier, on 13 May 1920, to Gareth Charles Walter. With curious synchronicity, two years later to the exact day, on 13 May 1922, Enid’s second baby boy, Christopher John, was born. The Morris children’s heritage was a mixture of Norman and Welsh, with a strong Quaker tradition. Their father Walter, born on 10 January 1896 in Monmouth, a few miles over the Welsh border, had enlisted as a private in the Royal Corps of Engineers at eighteen and served in World War I. Their mother Enid (née Payne), ten years his senior, was a music teacher, and daughter of Charles Payne, the manager of Lloyd’s Bank in Monmouth. The children arrived into a world riven by political turmoil and a society overwhelmed by the loss of a generation of men in World War I. Many people, including their father, had been marked deeply by the war, and continued to grapple with its aftermath. The international order was changing; the Austro-Hungarian Empire had fallen, and a smaller Germany without colonies survived but was no longer a monarchy, while the Poles and Baltic nations claimed their independence. Britain’s influence abroad was still significant after the war, but it was soon to commit itself to leaving India, which for many signalled the beginning of the empire’s end.

Despite this, in 1926, Clevedon — sometimes known as Classy Clevedon — still wore an air of imperial-era prosperity. The cynosure of the town centre was the Clock Tower at the Triangle, which was given to the town by Sir Edmund Elton for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. A comparatively wealthy town where locals had a strong sense of civic pride, Clevedon was often chosen as a place of retirement, and the refreshing sea air appeared to boost longevity. A local joke held that people came to the town to die, then found they could not because Clevedonians lived to such a great age. ¹

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the resort had been visited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Later on, town officials would use local nomenclature to draw attention to the town’s literary associations: Coleridge Road, Shelley Avenue, Tennyson Avenue, Thackeray Road, and Wordsworth Road. A concerted effort was made in 1929 to emphasise the town’s poetic links by laying out a signposted trail from the Marine Lake to the cliffs, named Poets’ Walk.

However, no one at the time could have known that one of Britain’s most highly regarded writers had recently been born in Clevedon. Much less could they have imagined that she would rise to fame through journalism and travel writing. The BBC had started broadcasting only four years earlier — at a time when horse-drawn transport had not quite disappeared. Perhaps most notably of all, few would have suspected that she would also come to be known as a gender revolutionary.

The new baby arrived into the busy household of a lower middle-class family without pretensions, where music frequently flooded the rooms. The Morrises lived in a three-storey terraced house, the last in a symmetrical row of twelve, a short walk from the town centre or a two-minute stroll to the fashionable shops on Hill Road. It was a home where books were important, even if money was sometimes scarce. The family were well-off enough to afford some domestic help, and Welsh housemaids were often employed. Later on, Morris described how they used to arrive ‘direct from the Carmarthenshire valleys to pilfer the silver and impregnate the second floor with sixpenny face powder’. ²

The children’s father, Walter Henry, had been in the Royal Engineers during the Great War. Later, he drove taxis and hearses to help pay the bills, while his wife concentrated on teaching music and on her work as a church organist. ³ Walter liked playing with his children, and when they were small, he used conjuring tricks to keep them amused. ⁴ Traditional games were popular in Somerset, and Walter enjoyed playing skittles as a hobby. As well as being musically talented and having a sense of humour, he was known in the family for being clever and forthright. ⁵

But the war had left its mark on Walter. He had been gassed in France and, like tens of thousands of others, he suffered from ‘gas neurosis’. The ravages of the war never left him, and Morris recalled how even twenty years later it haunted Walter’s sleep when he was resting during the day: ‘In his dreams the war was raging still, and when I crept awestruck into his bedroom he cried out warnings, tossed and turned, moaned and coughed uncontrollably and sometimes bitterly laughed, so alive in his nightmare that I heard the guns myself.’ ⁶

Morris’s mother’s side of the family had also been affected by the war. Morris later recalled her ‘poor Uncle Geraint’, who, ‘fresh from his cello at Monmouth School, was whisked away to the Indian Expeditionary Force in France, and never came home again’. ⁷ Geraint Payne, Enid’s brother, had planned to be an architect but, at the outbreak of war, joined the 28th Battalion of the Artists Rifles. He was commissioned in January 1915 and served in the 1st Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry. On 12 March 1915, he became a tragic casualty of life in the trenches during intensive fighting at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in the Artois region of France, and he was buried close to where he was killed. Kitty Clausen had been Geraint’s fiancée, and her father was the renowned artist George Clausen. Geraint’s death inspired Clausen to paint ‘Youth Mourning 1916’, a stark work reflecting the grief suffered by Kitty, which came to symbolise the despair of war. He used the nakedness of the figure and the barren landscape to emphasise the emptiness of death. The painting now hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London.

Apart from their shared connection to the Great War, the two sides of Morris’s parentage had little in common. This formed a divided lineage that contributed to Morris’s lifelong sense of falling between different categories and combining conflicting identities. She wrote of their differing backgrounds:

My father’s family has been, so far as I know, living in Wales since the beginning of time, bred from peasant stock not so long ago, proud of itself and its simple style, and devoted down the generations to that seminal Welsh art, music. My mother’s family on the other hand had prided itself upon its Norman origins, which brought its forebears, not so long after the Conquest, to their manor house in the Somerset Mendips — where their brass-plated tombs, with armor and swords and little dogs at their feet, look as remote from the idea of Welshness as the Conqueror himself. Could any lines of descent be more disparate? ⁸

The differing cultures of the two families were perfectly summarised in their attitudes to the war:

Both families suffered a terrible loss in that war, one by shellfire, one by gassing, but as their letters from the front reveal, they had made their sacrifices in very different spirits. My English uncle had gone to battle like a Rupert Brooke and wrote proudly of it to his father – exalted by the honor of the challenge, head high, with a copy of Tristram Shandy in his jacket pocket when the fatal blow struck him. I found a letter from one of my paternal uncles to another, though, conscientiously advising his younger brother how best to find a cushy billet when he crossed over to France to be asphyxiated. Both were good men, I do not doubt, both were surely brave, but while one was proud to die for King, Flag and Empire, the other was chiefly concerned to see that all Morrises got safely home to Wales. ⁹

Walter’s grandfather, born on 1 February 1826, and his father, born on 3 January 1861, were both called James Morris. They had been town criers, also known as bellmen, and mace bearers in Monmouth during the mid- and late-19th-century. A kind of precursor to Morris’s work as a reporter in the 20th century, the job of town crier involved making pronouncements of important events and breaking the news of royal proclamations.

The Morris family lived in a variety of locations around Monmouth, including the Seven Stars Public House in Weirhead Street. Walter came from a large family of thirteen siblings, and to this day his name can be seen on the wooden panel of the town scholars board in the Boys’ National School in Priory Street, which he left in 1909. Walter won a scholarship to Monmouth Grammar School, which was part of the Haberdashers’ Company. With its motto ‘Serve and Obey’, it had an excellent reputation, and Walter was an academically talented pupil.

Idyllically positioned between the Wye and Monnow rivers, Monmouth owed some of its status among the gentry to the fact that it housed the Courts of Assize. By far its most illustrious scion was Charles Rolls, the co-founder of Rolls-Royce and pioneering aviator, who, on 12 July 1910, at the age of thirty-two, became the first person in Britain to die in a plane crash; Enid’s father played the organ at his funeral. Decades later, Jan Morris developed a love of driving old cars and took particular delight in being the owner of several vintage Rolls-Royces.

As a young woman, Enid Payne taught music at Monmouth Girls’ High School and played the organ at St Mary’s Collegiate Church in Monmouth, where she trained the choir, and where her future husband was head chorister. In June 1911, a few days before the coronation of King George V, the twenty-five-year-old Enid organised a concert of sacred music at St Mary’s Church in aid of the Choir Fund and played organ and violin solos. When playing the violin, she was accompanied by her father on the organ, while the other performer singled out by name was fifteen-year-old Walter Morris, who sang the soprano solo of Handel’s ‘Rejoice Greatly’.

Walter was demobbed at the age of twenty-two; just after the war, he had come out of hospital, where he had been treated for the effects of his ‘gas neurosis’, and rekindled a friendship with Enid. One of his tasks in church was to stand at the organ turning the sheet music pages for her, and he would often get jealous if anyone else did this job. ¹⁰ A good-looking woman, Enid attracted a number of potential suitors, but despite the unconventional age difference, she knew that Walter was the man for her. They fell in love and married at the beginning of 1919 in Long Ashton, Somerset. The couple settled on the coast at Clevedon, where they lived in various locations over several years before moving to Herbert Road. The house overlooked a small, birdsong-filled park, Herbert Gardens, where their children grew up playing on a patch of open grass surrounded by mature trees.

By the autumn of 1926 and with Morris’s birth, Enid was mother to a trio of children under six and had her hands full. Walter would sometimes help out in the kitchen and, if Enid was late home from teaching, he would leave her two hard-boiled eggs wrapped up in a tea towel — which, according to family lore, she hated, but never told him. Two of the children had nicknames: Christopher, the middle child, was known in the family as ‘Kit’, ¹¹ and Walter was especially fond of the youngest, who he referred to as ‘Him’, which according to Trish Morris (Gareth’s wife) was the third child’s self-selected baby name. ¹²

Enid was a cultivated woman who pushed her children to work hard and instilled a love of music in each of them. She also managed to maintain her musical career, which had got off to a glamorous start in the years immediately before the war. While she was still single and in her mid-twenties, Enid went to Leipzig to study the piano at the Königliche Konservatorium der Musik. Leipzig was a showplace of German art, literature, and music, and had a unique heritage; Bach had been the Cantor of St Thomas’s Church there from 1723 to 1750. Founded by Felix Mendelssohn in 1843, the conservatory was one of the most celebrated music schools in the world. Enid’s music professor was Robert Teichmüller, a German concert pianist and gifted teacher.

Enid spent three happy years in the city, moving in musical and artistic circles. She made many friends in Germany and retained them throughout her life, despite living through two wars with the country and losing her brother to a German sniper. As a young woman abroad in Leipzig, she enjoyed considerable independence, developing a life away from her home and family — although at one point her father did come to visit, bringing with him a brace of Monmouthshire pheasant. ¹³ Her adventurous spirit was evident one evening when, forbidden to go to the Richard Strauss opera Salome because it was thought unsuitable, she climbed out of a window and went anyway.

Later, Enid regaled her children with stories about long happy evenings spent in Leipzig with fellow students and how they dined outdoors at cafés in ancient squares. Morris grew up with ‘a vague but indelible reverence for the place [Leipzig] that coloured my childhood and was permanently to affect my attitudes’. ¹⁴ Given Enid’s background, it is not hard to see how music came to be imbued in her children or why listening to Bach, Beethoven, and Sibelius was a vital part of their formative years. Enid also enjoyed listening to opera, especially late at night with the windows open — a fact that was not always appreciated by her neighbours in Clevedon. ¹⁵

As an adult, Morris rarely mentioned her mother publicly, until — fourteen years after her death — she went on a pilgrimage to Leipzig in 1995. Once there, she retraced Enid’s footsteps, in search of the Königliche Konservatorium, which had moved to Grassistrasse. When she found it, with the help of a choirmaster and maps in a 1913 Baedeker North Germany, it looked just as it did in the engraving on her mother’s diploma: ‘the very image, acme and epitome of a music conservatoire … the statutory bearded busts of eminent musicians.’ In a piano room, Morris found a student playing a Chopin prelude, ‘and just for a moment I thought it really was my mother, young and smiling in a lacy dress, looking up at us expectantly from her keyboard. On the windowsill, I am almost certain, lay a brace of pheasant – and I’m sure they were wrapped in a copy of the Monmouthshire Beacon!’ ¹⁶

Enid returned to Britain in the early days of broadcasting and became a well-known recitalist in South Wales and the west of England. She established herself on the music club circuit and continued to play after her marriage, using her maiden name professionally. She broadcast from a radio station in Bristol and became organist at St John’s Church in Clevedon and St Paul’s at Weston-in-Gordano, a few miles east of the town. One of the organs was blown by a water-powered engine, which Gareth Morris later recalled gave her some trouble:

She was a woman of devout beliefs but was not blessed with any understanding of mechanical contrivances and at the elaborate ceremonial on the highest feast days was wont to pull out all the stops. The unfortunate engine in the bowels of the organ invariably succumbed at the loudest climax of my mother’s triumphant performance; it had to be encouraged to renew its efforts by a churchwarden. During his descent through a trapdoor beneath the organ-seat my mother could be heard apologizing: ‘I am sorry, wretched thing; thank-you so much!’ ¹⁷

In 1929, at the popular Curzon Cinema on Old Church Road, Enid Morris played the inaugural recital after the installation of a new pipe organ. She also accompanied silent films, playing both organ and piano, and when the ‘talkies’ came in, her children were given free tickets to go along and enjoy them. A highlight of Enid’s career was a song that she wrote and sent to Buckingham Palace in the spring of 1935 to commemorate the silver jubilee of King George V on 6 May. ‘An Ode to Queen Mary’ was a short tribute to the Queen, and received an acknowledgement from the Palace, which read: ‘The Lady in Waiting is commanded by the Queen to thank Enid Payne most warmly for the charming song she has written, which her Majesty accepts with very great pleasure.’ ¹⁸

Enid’s musicality and cosmopolitanism were just two facets of Morris’s upbringing. Encouraged to follow her instincts, Morris was also curious about the countryside, wandering alone in the hills overlooking the coast near her home, while the much older Gareth and Christopher were at school or off together on long exploratory cycle rides. A solitary child, Morris walked along the Clevedon coast from the Pill (a local name derived from the Welsh pwll), an inlet where two bodies of water meet the Severn Estuary, to Portishead coastguard at the other end, where ships had to wait before proceeding to Bristol city docks. The estuary was made up of islands, rock platforms, sandflats, and mudflats, while the Channel was a busy maritime thoroughfare. On long summer days, the young Morris drank in the sea air, peering through a telescope across the Bristol Channel to Wales.

A youthful delight for Morris was admiring the ships going by, making sketches and carefully recording their names. As the vessels sailed up to Newport or Avonmouth, she tried to recognise them from the silhouettes in her Dumpy Book of Ships. It was a treasured memory:

Only a grassy hill separated my home from the sea, and few anticipations have been more urgent for me than the climb up its flank, carrying my telescope, to see what vessels would reveal themselves for me on the other side – a plume of smoke first showing itself about the ridge, then a mast or two, or a funnel, until finally panting with exertion and expectancy I would throw myself on the grass, opening the slides of my telescope as I did so, to survey the morning’s traffic. I can see those ships now. There were handsome white banana boats making for Bristol, and freighters from West Africa, and French wine ships, and ships piled high with timber flying the flags of Latvia and Lithuania, and fleets of blackened colliers coming and going perpetually from the coal ports of Glamorgan, and swift paddle-steamers taking holiday-makers to the piers of Penarth or Weston-super-Mare. ¹⁹

The instrument gave the young child a private insight into distant worlds and even provided a title for her childhood notebook: Travels with a Telescope. And it was not only ships that Morris watched, but planes too. She later described how a ‘lumbering old De Havilland biplane used to fly heavily over each morning on its way from Bristol to Cardiff, and its slow passing gave me my very first intimations of hiraeth’. ²⁰

The Welsh word hiraeth means a longing for something unobtainable, a condition that long afterwards would become familiar to her. Morris frequently wondered what lay beyond the horizon, and a love of high places and the high seas was taking hold; mountains and seascapes would play a significant role in her future. Along with dreams of travel, though, came a fascination with her ancestral home: ‘If I looked to the west I could see the blue mass of the Welsh mountains … beneath whose flanks my father’s people had always lived – decent proud people as a cousin once defined them for me, some of whom still spoke Welsh within living memory, and all of whom were bound together, generation after generation, by a common love of music.’ ²¹

In a different way, the nearby Mendips, a myth-laden range of limestone peaks south of Clevedon, honeycombed with caves and filled with ancient monuments, excited the young child: ‘They seemed to me hills of queerness, tantalizing hills, more disturbing by far than the stately old mountains of Wales that sheltered my father’s people. I thought of them as mysterious places, and I imagined wild beasts and hermits up there … the uneasy allure of the Mendips always made me think of outlaw lives, lives on the fringe.’ ²²

A four-year-old’s innermost feelings in 1930 cannot be known, but Morris later said that troubling thoughts about her identity started when she was very young and preyed on her throughout her childhood, becoming deep-rooted. Her conviction that she was a girl, ‘unfaltering from the start’, remained a secret for twenty years, and it was to be forty years before she first publicly discussed.

For now, Morris concentrated on school, developing a love of books. At kindergarten she got into trouble when she was caught reading under the desk; happily, the teacher forgave her when she heard it was Morris’s grandfather’s book. ²³ Morris’s literary diet included some unconventional reading for children. She claimed she was not ‘weaned on The Water Babies or Swallows and Amazons and thus brainwashed into the belief that being young was being organically separate from everyone else’. She despised books that were aimed at children — taking particular aim at Noddy — and instead was ‘thrown into the deep end of literary life with all its squalors, excitement and romance’. ²⁴

Books were the main leisure activity in the 1920s, the golden age of English detective fiction. Novels by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Edgar Wallace were popular with the public. Morris’s maternal grandfather read widely and had a passion for Walt Whitman, while the family had a literary connection in the writer Edward Verrall Lucas (known as E.V.), born in 1868, who was a cousin on Morris’s side. A prolific journalist and belletrist in the early decades of the 20th century, Lucas reviewed books for the TLS, wrote on art, literature, and travel, and was on the staff of Punch. Under the title ‘A Wanderer in …’, he wrote a series of travel books on London, Paris, Venice, Florence, and Holland. His work included biographies, novels, and romances, although one reference to him states that his ‘life combined hard work and amateur inaccuracy’. ²⁵ Lucas was also known for his epigrams and quotations, including ‘I hold that it is the duty of a man to see other lands but love his own.’

The family’s literary heritage loomed large, but Morris’s grandfather took a somewhat unfavourable view of Lucas, Morris recorded: ‘[My grandfather] used to say, Ah well, E.V. Lucas – he’d be a good writer if he’d only suffered a bit. His life had been so easy. And I have to say when I pick up one of his books, they do remind me of me. There’s a feeling that he never had to try terribly hard; it came naturally to him.’ ²⁶

Lucas went on to become a publisher’s reader with Methuen, being appointed the company chairman in 1924, and Enid Morris was extremely proud of the connection. She was an omnivorous and polyglot reader. Known in the family for her ability to multi-task, she preferred to read seven or eight books simultaneously, in two or three languages, and could sometimes be found reading a novel in German while at the same time washing up. She was also infamous for leaving books in different rooms of their house, ‘propped above washbasins, recumbent on sofas, or unexpectedly on the piano music-stand’. ²⁷ Morris speculated that her mother’s reading habits fed her own love of books later in life, leading to them becoming a ‘ubiquitous delight’.

The first book Morris remembered reading was a family copy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written in 1884 and published in the Chatto & Windus edition. The American vernacular language, characters, and colourful descriptions seemed exotic, ²⁸ and Morris later recalled how Twain’s observational perspective and humanistic values were qualities that later came to define her own literary ambitions. ‘You are not expected’, she wrote, ‘to identify yourself with its hero, as readers of children’s books so often are: instead, you watch from the river banks, with unalloyed detached pleasure, as Huck and his renegade slave, Jim, pole, swim, negotiate and wheedle their way down the mighty Mississippi … If I loved it as a child for its picaresque adventures, I revere it now as one of the great novels of the humanist tradition.’ ²⁹ Another book about exploration and travel that she favoured during childhood and continued to revisit later was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, as well as its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:

I was taught to regard it as a classic … and to realize that while it was most certainly a book to be laughed with, it was never one to be laughed at. Its nonsense was art, its characters were serious, its verses were poetry, its Tenniel illustrations could never be replaced, its humour was a universal benchmark. Getting to know it was, I was led to suppose, a sine qua non of a fortunate and civilized childhood – a child without Alice was a child deprived. ³⁰

Morris also developed a childhood love of maps. She was born just in time to see her schoolroom maps emblazoned pole to pole in red with the ‘immense organism’ of the British empire. A memory of when she was a five-year-old child concerned the much-publicised twelve-week visit to England in the autumn and winter of 1931 by Mahatma Gandhi. Clad in his customary dhoti and sandals, Gandhi attended a Round Table conference and took tea with King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. On 2 October — Gandhi shared a date of birth with Morris — the Indian leader attended a lunch at Westminster Palace to mark his sixty-second birthday. ³¹

Perhaps because of the coincidence of their birthdays, Morris never forgot Gandhi’s visit. Decades later, on research trips to India, Morris followed in Gandhi’s footsteps, through Calcutta, to Ahmedabad, to Poona, where the British had jailed the Mahatma, and to Delhi, where he died in 1947. She loved to tell people in India that they shared the astrological sign of Libra; Gandhi’s element was Air, his Ruler, Venus, his lucky number, six, and his sign, the Heavenly Balance. She was sent on her way with a gentle Gandhian benediction and frequently told: ‘You are very fortunate, fortunate indeed.’ ³²

Outside of books, maps, and news stories, real life in Clevedon itself offered more modest opportunities for travel and adventure. The three children would sometimes call into the bakery, where they bought buns called ‘penny busters’, and then make their way down to Clevedon pier, where they enjoyed tucking into them as they watched the boats pass by. ³³

With a growing family, the Morrises decided they needed a bigger house, and in 1931 they moved just a few streets away to the secluded Madeira Road in the same Victorian knot of streets. The parents chose a turn-of-the-century, semi-detached, two-storey villa with bay windows and a side garden. The move was a mark of upward mobility; the houses on the road were originally occupied by families of professional men, such as doctors and lawyers, who preferred to live in the tranquil streets away from the seafront and railway station.

By now nearing school age, Morris could be solitary and, throughout childhood, would continue to follow her own interests rather than joining groups. She never became a member of the Scouts, having been put off, at least in part, by her grandfather, who did not like the movement: ‘My grandfather, cherishing a probably quite unreasoned prejudice against the Scout Movement, habitually insisted upon getting their name wrong, and referring with a fastidious distaste to those Scout Boys. In this bigotry, if in no other, I take after him. I never could like the Scouts.’ ³⁴

Morris’s relationships with Gareth and Christopher were happy, and they often played together. Gareth collected pictures of cathedrals, and Christopher decided to collect pictures of bishops, while their youngest sibling later collected stamps. The three would remain in touch, keeping in contact throughout their lives. All three were gifted musically, though they ultimately blazed separate youthful paths. As a young boy, Gareth had discovered a fife in an old trunk and, after learning how to play it, determined when he was ten that he would be a professional musician. He pestered the conductor of Clevedon Silver Band until he was allowed to join, becoming the youngest member and lone woodwind player, spending the summers of the late 1920s on the bandstand at the seafront entertaining visitors and locals. Gareth often played from parts written for other instruments, which gave him a solid grounding in sight-reading and transposition. ³⁵

In 1931, aged eleven, Gareth joined Bristol Cathedral School as a chorister and started to play the flute. A determined but unenthusiastic pupil, he did not enjoy being told what to read or study, since he had already made up his mind that his future would be in music. He ultimately contrived to leave school without taking any exams. ³⁶ He began travelling on his own to London from the age of twelve to pursue his musical studies. On one memorable trip home from London, the returning train did not stop in Clevedon, but the driver was persuaded to slow down so that the boy could be thrown into the arms of his waiting father. ³⁷ Gareth eventually graduated to taking lessons with Robert Murchie, professor of flute at the Royal College of Music and one of the leading flautists in the capital. Meanwhile in Bristol, his career took off when, still a teenager, he was asked to play in Bach’s St Matthew Passion with Léon Goossens, then perhaps the world’s premier oboist.

Not to be outdone, Christopher applied in 1933, also at the age of eleven, for a chorister scholarship at Hereford Cathedral, where the director of music was Dr Percy Hull. After several interviews, he found himself one of two finalists. Both boys were asked if they played the piano. Christopher’s rival did but was too shy to say so. Christopher, who did not, volunteered that, taught by his mother, he could accompany ‘D’ye ken John Peel’, but ‘only if you sing’, he told the director. Dr Hull agreed and Christopher’s ‘Oom Pa’ accompaniment earned him the scholarship. Christopher took part in the Three Choirs Festival and through this was able to work with the London Symphony Orchestra. At one point, he sang under the baton of Sir Edward Elgar, but his attempts to obtain the composer’s autograph were unsuccessful, being brusquely cast aside with ‘Go away, boy.’ ³⁸

Both older brothers went on to have distinguished musical careers with their chosen instruments of flute and organ. When he was eighteen, Gareth won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music and became an internationally renowned flautist, making his debut as a soloist at the Wigmore Hall in 1939, aged nineteen. He went on to become principal flautist of the Philharmonia Orchestra, serving for twenty-five years, and returned to the Royal Academy of Music as principal professor of flute. In 1966, he was appointed chairman of the New Philharmonia. He later performed with Arturo Toscanini and Otto Klemperer, and rubbed shoulders with Herbert von Karajan. A standout of his musical life was playing as a member of the orchestra at the Queen’s Coronation in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953.

Meanwhile, Christopher studied