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Jan Morris 1945.
James Humphry Morris was born in Clevedon, Somerset, on 2nd October 1926. His father had been gassed in the Great War and died soon afterwards. He was educated firstly at Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford, where he was a chorister, and later at Lancing College. After leaving school and awaiting conscription, he worked briefly for the Western Daily Press before entering Sandhurst. Commissioned into the 7th Hussars in November 1945, Morris served on internal security duties in Palestine, where he was the regiment’s intelligence officer.
Demobbed in 1947, Morris, a Palestinian sympathiser, remained in the Middle East, working for the Cairo-based Arab News Agency for two years before returning to Christ Church to read English. After editing the college newspaper as an undergraduate, he joined The Times at first on the copy desk and then as a foreign correspondent. In 1953, the newspaper sponsored the Everest expedition and Morris was tasked with ensuring the newspaper had sole coverage of the attempt. He set up a series of Sherpa runners to carry coded messages to a radio station in Kathmandu and frequently scaled the ice field to Camp IV at 24,000 feet to obtain first-hand progress reports. He was rewarded with one of the great journalistic scoops of the century when he exclusively reported that Everest had been conquered. The news reached London on the morning of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Spending the next few years as a roving reporter for several newspapers, Morris was in the thick of the action during the Suez Crisis in 1956. After interviewing French pilots who had been dropping napalm in support of Israeli ground troops, he provided The Guardian with irrefutable proof of the involvement of Israel, which proved to be another nail in the coffin of the Eden government. However, Morris’s true passion was travel writing, and, in 1956, he published Coast to Coast, a description of travel in America, with Sultan in Oman the following year.
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