Category Archives: Biography

June 17, 2021 · 5:24 pm

The Anniversary of HV Morton’s Death

(Previously issued as HVM Society Snippets – No.282)

HV Morton and his wife, Mary, on his 80th birthday

Today, the 17th June, is the aniversary of HV Morton’s death in 1979 at his home in South Africa.

A number of obituaries appeared at the time but this one, from the Canberra Times of Saturday 30th June 1979 is one of the most touching, at once praising him for his extensive writing and his influence on others while at the same time acknowledging the sad fact that even at that time Morton was becoming ‘unfashionable’ in his home country.

Well, we know better – no one ever accused me of being fashionable!

With best wishes,

Niall Taylor, Glastonbury, Somerset, England

(Many thanks to the excellent Trove archive)

How many remember H.V. Morton?

LONG before there were sky trains and cheap fares, generations of people on the other side of the world did their travelling in Britain through the eyes of one man, H. V. Morton.

Henry Vollam Morton, author and journalist, did his job so well there was scarcely a book club or book shelf from Wagga to Waimate 40 years ago without well-thumbed copies of his travel books.

Old-time Australian journalists accumulated vast stores of knowledge of the geography and history of the British Isles from Morton’s writing.

When someone would remark on their encyclopaedic knowledge of London they would say, ‘I’ve never seen the place, but I’ve been hooked on it for 50 years from Morton’s books’.

Morton’s first book ‘The Heart of London’ was a collection of newspaper stories he wrote for the Daily Express on his return to Fleet Street from service with the Warwickshire Yeomanry in World War I.

His books on London were a taste of the success that was to come when he moved into a broader field with his first book of a series on the British Isles – ‘In Search of England’.

In the hard-up 1930s he had an unheard-of advance of £10,000 (equivalent to at least $A190,000 in today’s values) to write ‘In the Steps of the Master’, which sold something over 150,000 copies and put him into a top royalty rate of 33 per cent.

No one has figures on his total book sales for two publishers, but it must be millions. He wrote 35 books for Methuen’s.

After World War II Morton bought a fruit farm in Somerset West, in the Cape Province of South Africa, and lived there for the rest of his life.

It was strange to reflect, when his death, at the age of 86, was barely noticed in the British Press this week that if his passing had occurred 40 years ago, before the travel boom he helped to create, it would have been front-page news throughout the English-speaking world.

Archbishop Fulton J Sheen

by Kenneth Fields

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In the late fifties H.V. Morton departed from his more personal style of travel writing when he teamed up with the American Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and the Armenian-born photographer Yousuf Karsh. Together they produced two volumes, “This is Rome” (Hawthorn Books, New York, 1959) and “This is the Holy Land” (Hawthorn Books, New York, 1961) that were described as ‘pilgrimages in words and pictures’.

Covers 1

These two books were published in the USA, UK and Canada. They were, respectively, the second and third in a series of four books published by Hawthorn Books of New York. The other two titles in the series were: (the first) “This is the Mass” (1958), as celebrated by Fulton Sheen and described by Henri Daniel-Rops, photographed by Yousuf Karsh, and translated by Alistair Guinan; and (the fourth) “These are the Sacraments” (1962), by Fulton Sheen, again with photographs by Yousuf Karsh.

You may be interested to know than in recent years a campaign has begun that is hoped will lead to the beatification of Fulton Sheen, which is the route to sainthood.

Fulton John Sheen was born in El Paso, Illinois in May 1895, his grandparents having originated from Ireland. He grew to become a brilliant scholar but he turned down a university scholarship to follow his vocation into the priesthood, being ordained in 1919. He went on to receive a degree in Canon Law in America followed by a Doctorate at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Then, after spending a period as a priest in a rural parish, he began teaching at both the Catholic University of America and at St Edmund’s College, Ware, England. He had substantial links with the UK, being a friend of G.K. Chesterton.

Covers 2 The covers of three special editions

During this time it became apparent that he had a great gift for communication, which has resulted in him now being regarded as one of the greatest preachers of the last century. In 1930 he began the Catholic Hour broadcast on radio which ran for twenty-one years, and on Easter Sunday 1940 he spoke on the first televised religious service in the USA.

But he is perhaps best remembered for his series of 129 programmes of Life is Worth Living, which went out in the 1950s, and his anti-communist message. In 1951 he was consecrated as a Bishop of the Church and on his retirement in 1969 the Pope appointed him Titular Archbishop of Newport in South Wales.

Although outwardly he was a serious person he was also very fond of humour and laughter, so no doubt he shared many a joke with H.V. Morton during their whistle-stop tours through Rome and the Holy Land. He died aged 83 in 1979, the same year in which HVM also died.

In 1999 the late Cardinal O’Connor of New York formally initiated the lengthy process that may in time lead to Fulton Sheen’s sainthood.

(This article was originally circulated as HVM Society Snippets – No.29 on 19 October 2004)

Happy Morton Day!

HVMorton

This post is an expanded and adapted version of HVM Society Morton Family History Note – No.11, by Peter Devenish, originally circulated in 2012.

Chester square, Ashton UL Chester Square, Ashton-under-Lyne (The Mortons’ house is shown
fourth from the right of the row houses.)

Today, the 26th of July, marks the 128th anniversary of the birth of HV Morton, indisputably one of the greatest journalists in the English-speaking world and the most popular travel writer of his time.

Henry Canova Vollam Morton (Harry) was the first-born child of Joseph Thomas Vollam Morton, a journalist born in India, and his wife Marguerite (Margaret) May Constance McClean Ewart from Invergordon in Scotland. Baby Harry was delivered on 26 July 1892 in one of the large row houses at 17 Chester Square, next to the Ashley Arms pub, in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, England. He died at his home in South Africa on 17 June 1979. The house in which Morton was born has long since been demolished for redevelopment of the area.

Harry’s sister, Marguerite Ann Morton, was born at the same house in Ashton on 14 August 1895 and she survived Harry by two years. There were no other children from the marriage of Joseph and Margaret.

Joseph and Margaret Morton Joseph & Margaret Morton

Much has been written elsewhere (not least in many HVM Society bulletins) about Morton’s outstanding career in journalism and his pre-eminent position as a travel writer but a brief summary might be of interest here.

After being inspired by a small Egyptian statue in Birmingham Art Gallery, Morton wrote an article about it which to his delight was published in The Connoisseur magazine in 1914, earning him two guineas. Following this early success, to use Morton’s own words his fate was cast, and he went on to become the best-selling travel writer of his day, selling millions of copies of his books and producing uncountable numbers of newspaper and magazine articles. His writings between the wars and in the immediate aftermath of the second world war brought comfort and hope to millions of readers during times of great hardship. Even now he is referred to in many a modern book or essay on the subject of travel in Britain, the Middle East and elsewhere and he continues to be celebrated today by the HV Morton Society.

A blue plaque acknowledging the town’s distinguished son was unveiled at Ashton-Under-Lyne on 21 May 2004. Because the Morton home had long been demolished for redevelopment of the area, the plaque was subsequently mounted on a marble base in the up-market renovation now known as Henry Square, 100 metres from the site of Morton’s birth.

The blue plaque in recognition of HV Morton

On this special day I and countless others give thanks for the many hours of pleasure that HV Morton has given and continues to give through his writing.

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Filed under Biography, Literature

Tagged as Birthday, Blue Plaque, Family History, Morton Day, Morton's Birth

June 7, 2018 · 11:59 am

‘In Search of H.V. Morton’, by Michael Bartholomew

Methuen, London, 2004. 248 pages with illustrations, notes and index. Also now available in paperback. From major booksellers and on-line through Amazon UK, etc.

The first and most important thing to say about Michael Bartholomew’s “In Search of HV Morton” is that this is an excellent read. The text flows, it is accessible and, unlike some biographies, it has a good structure and narrative. The reader is taken from Morton’s childhood, cycling around the lanes of Warwickshire and discovering a passion for place and history through his journalistic career, finding his niche as the foremost travel writer of his time and then, finally his gradual disillusionment as England began to take a different direction from the country he had known and loved.

Early in the work Bartholemew takes time to explain the distinction between the droll, urbane narrator of his tales (‘HV’ Morton) and the real man (‘Harry’ Morton) behind the books. Morton’s contemporaneous diary writings are contrasted with his works of literature throughout as a device to move through Morton’s life and explore the motivation behind both narrator and author. Any reader coming to this work hoping to read about the simple, solitary, companionable traveller of Morton’s books is in for a disappointment. Like the top rate journalist he was, Morton knew how to deliver precisely what his audience wanted and went to great lengths to maintain the illusion and charm of his books by keeping a low public profile. Fortunately for us (and perhaps less so for the reputation of ‘HV’) Morton left a large number of notes in the form of diaries and half written memoirs which formed the basis for much of Batholomew’s book, enabling his story to be told.

This account of the life of Morton is even handed and largely non-judgemental (despite the occasional spin placed on some of Bartholemew’s words by other reviewers).

Bartholemew obviously admires Morton’s talents as a master of descriptive prose and he presents Morton’s questionable political views as more naive and simplistic rather than anything more sinister; ‘more prejudice than politics’. Morton’s womanising and racism are presented, mostly in the form of extracts from his diary, and the reader is left to judge for him or her self. We are told of a man who, while privately contemptuous of the direction Britain was taking at times, was prepared to put his talents to work, on occasion for no financial return, to support the governmnent in its efforts during the war. Morton wasn’t without a social conscience and his 1933 social commentary “What I saw in the slums” is compared favourably with the better known “Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell; Bartholomew suggests that Morton’s depiction of women in the slums is ‘just as powerful and… less patronising’ than Orwell’s. We are told of Morton’s quiet bravery – castigating himself in his diary on the one hand for his cowardly feelings during the London blitz yet, despite his fear, going into the city to cover stories for his paper. At a time in Britain’s history when invasion appears imminent Morton writes about the distinct possiblility of being killed defending his village against the Nazi foe while at the same time is enraged as his gardener is enlisted into the armed forces.

This book is a sympathetic, ‘warts and all’ portrayal of the real man behind the public persona; above all it is a balanced account. It is direct and unstinting, delivering praise and criticism alike where they are due. By the conclusion any Morton admirer will be the better for having read it and will have an understanding of the real depth behind both ‘HV’ and ‘Harry’.

Niall Taylor

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Filed under Biography, Book reviews, Literature

Tagged as books, journalism, Literature, review

May 8, 2016 · 9:58 am

Dewar McCormack interviews HV Morton

In HVM Society Snippets – No.192, distributed in September last year (and now available on the blog) the featured article, from the 1974 Cape Town Weekend Magazine, made mention of HV Morton being the subject of a series of half-hour television interviews by one of the South African Broadcasting Company’s star broadcasters, Dewar McCormack.

And that is the subject of today’s post – an interview by Dewar McCormack of HV Morton. At least that’s my best guess – there is a slight element of mystery surrounding the interview.

The original cassette tape was sent to me by the author of Morton’s official biography, “In Search of HV Morton“, Michael Bartholomew, after an appeal I made a while back for audio-files featuring HVM. I am more grateful to Michael than I can say for his generosity in sending me the tape, I know he went to some considerable trouble to find it after it had temporarily disappeared, as these things do!

“In Search of HV Morton” by Michael Bartholomew

The original recording from which the tape was made was in the BBC archives and the tape was labelled: Interview with D McCormack, BBC, June 75. After a deal of googling I failed to find a likely candidate of that name working for the BBC in 1975 who might have interviewed Morton. It must be – particularly given we know HVM was the subject of media interest in South Africa at the time – the interviewer is Dewar McCormack and the original interview was done by the SABC, possibly sold for distribution to the home market by the BBC, and then happened to end up (happily for us) in the archives. If anyone knows anything to the contrary I would be delighted to hear from them.

Being a computer whizz-kid (not!) it took me a mere twelve months or so to finally work out how to convert the audio recording to digital form and edit out some of the lengthy gaps in it. Once I’d done that it was a simple matter to transcribe it and make it available to all. It is a short piece and begins, quite unusually, with Morton himself speaking and with no introduction or context. It is clearly a fragment from a longer piece so inevitably leaves one wondering where the rest is and how it could be got hold of. One of these days when I have a bit more time I will trot along to the BBC archives myself and try to find it:

Interview with D McCormack, BBC, June 75. Length – 2 min 49 seconds, file size 2,642 KB

Morton: I was a rather lonely little boy (I was an only son) and (laughs) I was always wandering off alone and exploring things and discovering things. My sister reminded me once that I was in the habit of stopping when we were out on walks and saying “Stop! On this very same place, if you dug down, down, down, down, down, down; you might come to a Roman.” I’ve always been interested and always been curious and I’ve always been fascinated by history.

Before I write a book, I make a long list of all the people who are likely to appear in it – men and women – and I then make a chart of their lives and these charts are quite big, sometimes five foot square and I like to be able to say “oh, yes, Julius Caesar was born at that particular moment”. Then I look along the chart and see who else was alive at that moment, who else was just about to die, who else was just about to be born, and it gives one a great sense of history.

McCormac: I suppose every writer encounters his share of difficulties, his own particular ‘ration’ of problems. What’s the most difficult aspect of your writing?

Morton: Well, the wind and the weather, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frustrated by weather conditions. From going to see remote places on the southern coast of Turkey, for example, and an island which I’ve never yet seen, called Crete, where wind and gale conspired to keep the place a secret from me.

McCormac: What is the genesis, so to speak, of this present book?

Morton: My book “In Search of England” was published… well, jolly nearly fifty years ago (laughs) and it’s gone on in various languages all over the world and it occurred to Methuen that they would like to make a selection from it and produce it in the most modern way which they have done, I think very attractively.

McCormac: This embraces just the England book, nothing more?

Morton: Yes, but it’s going on to the others – to Scotland and Ireland. And I think I ought to say that since these books were written nearly fifty years ago they have never been out of print!

Keen Mortonites may have guessed the subject of the interview is the publication, by Eyre Methuen, of “HV Morton’s England” on 5 June 1975. This is a delightful, large-format volume edited by Patricia Haward with many photographic illustrations in colour and black and white, which comprises extracts from “In Search of England”, “The Call of England” and “I Saw Two Englands”.

It is readily available second hand and makes an excellent introduction to Morton’s works as well as bringing some of the places he described in the 1920’s to life and showing how they have changed (or in some cases stayed the same) over the years.

Niall Taylor, Glastonbury, Somerset, England

(This post was originally circulated as HVM Society Snippets – No.199)

HV Morton on the television

In this bulletin we take a look at a particularly personal piece of Mortoniana.

The newspaper clipping below was sent to me by founder-member and Morton biographer Kenneth Fields. Kenneth informs me it was originally sent by HVM to his sister Piddie in 1974 and later passed on to Kenneth by Jo Walters, Morton’s niece. Kenneth points out that Morton’s age is corrected in his own hand – even at the age of 82 (or 83) this was a journalist who wanted to get the facts correct!

By way of background, it seems South Africa had no television until 1976 and this article was an account of the preparations by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) for their television network. They proudly declare they have (by 1974, when the article was written) accumulated 50 hours of programmes ready to be broadcast.

The person who was to interview Morton was Dewar McCormack, head of the English service of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in Cape Town. He was described by Pamela Coleman (who ran the SABC equivalent of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour with him as her boss) as a good-looking man in a craggy, Robert Mitchum sort of way, a part-Irish South African who had travelled around and done a stint broadcasting in New Zealand. An old-fashioned, professional broadcaster, he was friendly but stern and didn’t approve of ‘larking about’!

The print of the scan is quite small so I have transcribed the relevant section:

The Cape Times Weekend Magazine, Saturday, July 20, 1974

SHOW SCENE

Television: a taste of things to come
by Ian Forsyth

He’s an old man now, 83 [HVM has corrected this to 82 in his own hand! Ed.]. And he sits in his study, inevitably book-lined, remembering – for SABC television. As a television personality, Robin Knox-Granger, manager of the SABC television service, thinks he’s “just tremendous”.

This television personality of South Africa’s pre-television era is Author-journalist H.V. Morton who lives at Somerset West. And some time after January 1976 South Africans will see six programmes in which Morton talks of things that fascinate him and memories he has of a lifetime of writing and reporting.

He is interviewed for the English television service by Dewar McCormack at half hour stretches.

“It’s very, very seldom, if ever that you get someone who can just sit and talk and be interviewed in this way,” Knox-Grant told me in Grahamstown this week. “Once, perhaps twice only, we have had to stop the cameras, and this was only for technical reasons – for cut-ins, where you have to move to something which he has been talking about and will show you. He comes across superbly. You can just sit and watch him without any kind of interruption.”

Knox-Grant and a television team travel from Johannesberg to Somerset West for their filming sessions, which almost never exceed the allotted 30 minutes of time for which the programmes are scheduled. And it is only a small facet of the work now being done by the television service, which now has about 50 hours of viewing material available for English and Afrikaans viewers – about 25 hours for each language…

Many thanks go to Kenneth for providing us with this delightful insight into HVM’s later years.

With best wishes,

Niall Taylor, Glastonbury, Somerset, England

This article was originally distributed as HVM Society Snippets – No.192 on 26 September 2015

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Filed under Biography, HV Morton, Magazine Articles

Tagged as media, radio, Somerset West, South Africa, television

January 10, 2016 · 9:07 am

Collie Knox Remembers H.V. Morton

by Kenneth Fields

Perhaps the most important milestone in HV Morton’s writing career was his period at the Daily Express during the early twenties. His colourful articles on the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb had put his name on the front page of the newspaper for the first time, and this quickly established him as a star journalist. Fortunately we have a number of fascinating personal observations of him at this period from the writings of his colleagues.

The following is taken from “It Might Have Been You” (Chapman and Hall, 1938), the autobiography of Collie Knox (1897 – 1977). Collie Knox had joined the staff in the news room at the Express in 1926 in a junior position, after a short but eventful military career. He recalls that ‘In those days the offices in the Express looked out on Shoe Lane, a dingy little street from which came sounds of hammering most of the waking hours.’

‘… Often when I was in a tussle with some refractory copy and Wilkins was demanding how much longer I’d be, such gods as H.V. Morton and Hannen Swaffer descended from their thrones and entered the news room. With longing eyes I gazed at them. For here indeed were names with which to conjure. They were in receipt of more money per week than I earned in a year….. Would I ever be like them? Would anyone ever nudge his – or indeed her – neighbour and whisper, “That’s Collie Knox, you know”? My copy was forgotten and I followed these men with envious eyes as they stood surveying the room. Lords of all they surveyed.

‘Harry Morton is a wonderful writer. He has the gift of description tremendously developed. He will attend a national ceremony with every other newspaper star writer, and will notice that a shy little woman in black with a medal ribbon pinned on her breast is sobbing in a corner. While the other writers will concentrate on the obvious highlights, the pomp and splendour, Harry Morton will hang his story on the little woman in black. Instantly she will stand out as the central figure and she will live before the reader.

‘I remember once Morton was sent to write the experiences of a man who had climbed to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral. When I read his description the next day in the paper I literally felt giddy… so vivid is his power of writing.

‘His books sell in millions, and he is unequalled in his own field. He remains the same quiet, charming man. Unspoiled. I knew that Baxter had a few tussles with H.V. If he did not think that a story was worthy of his time or his talent, he would refuse to go out on it. Baxter once said that he would rather deal with a temperamental prima donna than with H.V. when he was in that mood. But Baxter was eminently capable of dealing with any prima donna. He could wheedle a cork out of a bottle.‘

After six years at the Daily Express Collie Knox moved to the Daily Mail where he established himself as a popular columnist, musical lyricist and a patriotic writer during the Second World War. In his anthology, “For Ever England” (Cassell –1943), he includes an extract from the postscript of HVM’s “I Saw Two Englands” (Methuen -1942) which he named The Vigil Splendid. This outstanding example of HVM’s descriptive writing vividly explains what it was like to live in England during the Battle of Britain.

With best wishes,

This article was originally distributed on 21 November 2015 as HVM Society Snippets – No.194

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Filed under Biography, HV Morton

Tagged as books, I Saw Two Englands, journalism, Literature

Category Archives: Biography

The Anniversary of HV Morton’s Death

Archbishop Fulton J Sheen

Happy Morton Day!

‘In Search of H.V. Morton’, by Michael Bartholomew

Dewar McCormack interviews HV Morton

HV Morton on the television

Collie Knox Remembers H.V. Morton

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