Marlene Wagman-Geller

Sep 24, 2025 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“I had visited and portrayed, during thirty years of more or less constant travel, all the chief cities of the earth." ~Jan Morris

As one of the most acclaimed foreign news correspondents of the twentieth century, Jan Morris was forever on the move: Nepal, Jerusalem, Cuba… However, the most danger fraught border she crossed was burying her former self to enable her new one to live.

A world traveler and writer came from a house that resonated with music rather than words. James, (later Jan), Humphrey Morris, the younger brother of Gareth and Christopher, was born in Clevedon, a town in Somerset, England. Her mother, Enid, a gifted pianist, had studied at the Leipzig Conservatory. His father, Walter, was a Welsh-born engineer who Jan said, “did not do very much-” a result of being shell-shocked during World War I. As a toddler, Jan was sitting under his mother’s piano while she played “Sibelius” and recalled her notes “falling around me like cataracts and realizing I had been born in the wrong body and should really be a girl.” Her angst may have contributed to being a loner in her youth. What helped with the torment was her parents provided their children with a wonderful childhood. At age nine, Jan won a music scholarship to Christ Church Cathedral School at Oxford. Part of his morning prayer included his plea, “And please God, let me be a girl.” She confided she felt “a yearning for I knew not what, as though there were a piece missing from my pattern, or some element in me that should be hard and permanent, but was instead soluble and diffuse.” Jan transferred to a public school in Lancing College where she “thrilled to the touch of a prefect’s strong hand surreptitiously under the tea shop table,” “enjoyed being kissed on the back stairs.”  Doctors assured her she was unqualifiedly male.

In her pre-Jan life, James was the essence of British manhood. As color blindness prevented her from joining the navy during World War II, she enlisted in the elite Ninth Queen’s Royal Lancers and served in Italy as an intelligence officer. At one juncture, she oversaw boats on Venice’s canals, a city with which she harbored a life-long love. While stationed in Egypt, Jan lived on the Nile on the houseboat of British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery. Her twenty-first birthday was on-board a troop train departing Egypt. After an additional military stint as an army lieutenant in Palestine, (then a British protectorate) her superiors described her as “a good intelligence officer.” Jan recalled, “I have always admired military values. Courage, dash, loyalty, self-discipline and I like the look of soldiering.” Jan said she had seen enough of her fellow officers off-duty behavior to know that sleeping with women was not his cuppa. 

The Morris children inherited their mother’s musical gene; Christopher became an acclaimed organist, Gareth, a renowned flutist. A Manhattan mugging left Gareth with an injured lip that terminated his career. Jan’s love of music was manifest: even when away from home, her record player was on. She recalled, “I have often been embarrassed when, stopping the car for fuel and switching the engine off, I have found my own cassette music blaring fortissimo as any ghetto-ghetto blast over the forecourt.”

After a military discharge, in her early twenties, Jan worked as a cub reporter and interviewed celebrities Cary Grant and Irving Berlin; later, a celebrity herself, she was a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. Her career as a serious journalist began with her position in the Arab News Agency in Cairo. While taking a course in London on Arabic, Jan met her soulmate, Elizabeth. She was from Sri Lanka, (then Ceylon), where her father, Austen Cecil Tuckniss, ran a tea plantation on which she raised a baby elephant. Putting her sexual cards on the table, Jan confided to Elizabeth, “each year my every instinct seemed to become more feminine, my entombment within the male psyche more terrible to me.” She went onto assure Elizabeth, “still the mechanism of my body was complete and functional, and for what it was worth was hers.” Two months after meeting, they wed in 1949. The Morris’s had an “open marriage” with the caveat that they would abide by “an agreement of superior affection and common concern.” The couple had three sons, Twm, Mark, and Henry, daughters Virginia and Suki. 

Although circumspect on his lovers, Jan once pointed to a bust of Lord John “Jacky” Arbuthnot Fisher of Kilverstone, an Admiral of the Fleet during World War I and stated, “This is who I am going to have an affair with in the afterlife.”  Lord Fisher was possibly the first to use the acronym OMG, as evidenced in a 1917 letter to Winston Churchill.

In 1951, Jan enrolled in Oxford and worked as the editor of the university’s undergraduate magazine, “Cherwell.” As a career, Jan determined to earn her living with an amalgam of her two loves: travel and writing. She was to transform to a lionized literary legend.

After earning her degree in English literature, Jan became a reporter for The Times of London. The editorial staff consisted of men who preferred dining at their gentlemen’s club, Boodles, and taking after-dinner snuff, than grueling foreign assignments. As treading water was anathema to Jan, the newspaper sent her to Europe, the Middle East, Algeria, South Africa, Japan, and the United States. The New York Times critic, Orville Prescott, praised Jan as a “poet and a phrase-maker with a fine flair for the beauties of the English language.” What cemented her reputation as one of the greatest journalists of her generation was covering Sir Edmund Hillary’s attempt to become the first person to scale the summit of Mount Everest. The Times had secured the exclusive rights to the historic expedition after it had agreed to pay half the expedition’s costs. The newspaper chose Jan as its reporter due to her writing ability and physical stamina, despite the fact she had never climbed a mountain. Leaving Elizabeth with their fourteen-month-old baby, Mark, and with another on the way, Jan packed her blue Olivetti typewriter and The Oxford Book of Greek Verse and set her compass for the Himalayas.

While waiting to make his ascent, Jan recalled, “I am in a filthy state, like everyone else… The most unpleasant part… is the breathlessness that overcomes one. One pants at the slightest exertion, such as tying a shoelace.” As he later wrote in Coronation Everest, “to ensure rival publications did not muscle in on The Times coverage, he braved the icy mountain to deliver his articles from Camp IV, situated at 24,000 feet, to his messengers at Base Camp. Sherpa relay runners then carried coded reports from Everest to the nearest telegraph office in Kathmandu. Even the fastest took five days to navigate the “roadless, wheeless, horseless, telephone-less and largely mapless’ miles.” Eventually, the dispatches made their way to London, England. If the expedition was a success, the coded message would read, “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.” The decoded message: “Summit of Everest reached on May 29 by Hillary and Tanzing.” Of the apogee of the adventure, when Hillary and Tanzing arrived from the pinnacle of the world, Jan recalled, “‘I shall never, as long as I live, forget the transformation that overcame the camp when the summit party appeared and gave us the news of their victory. It was a moment so thrilling, so vibrant, that the hot tears sprang to the eyes of most of us. The day was so dazzlingly bright – the snow so white, the sky so blue; the air was so heavily charged with excitement; and the news, however much we expected it, was still somehow such a wonderful surprise; and it felt to all of us that we were very close to the making of history.” The event marked the last time a major world news story relied on long distance runners. Of his determination that no one else would muscle in on his coup, he vowed, “The news from Everest was to be mine, and anyone who tried to steal it from me should look out for trouble.”

Jan’s articles painted pictures of sweat trickling down the explorers’ backs, their faces burning from cold, ice, and wind. In a spirit of sportsmanship, Jan did not ascend the summit so that he would not steal the thunder from the New Zealand born Edmund Hillary, and the Nepalese born Tansing Norgay. Of his journalistic coup undertaken at an altitude of 22,000 feet, Jan wrote, “I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest.” She added, “I heard from the radio that my news had reached London providentially on the eve of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. I felt as though I had been crowned myself.” For Britain that was losing her grip on her empire, the conquest of Everest unleashed a torrent of nationalist fever and spread the journalist’s acclaim. In Jan’s words, “I went up an unknown,” and came down the most famous journalist in the world.” Being on the rooftop of the world made for an everlasting link amongst the band of brothers of Everest. Hillary served as the godfather of Jan’s second son, and when the mountaineer passed away in Auckland in 2008, the New Zealand government flew Jan to the country for the funeral. A secondary result of the expedition: “The effect on my ego was disastrous. I was 26 and sufficiently pleased with myself already.” A homing pigeon for news, Jan was in Hiroshima to report on the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb.

Seven years later after the historic expedition, Jan was in Moscow to cover the trial of Francis Gary Powers, the American spy pilot whose plane went down in the Soviet Union. Months later, Jan was in Cuba where she interviewed revolutionary leader Che Guevara, who she described in her future memoir as “sharp as a cat.” In a 1970 New York Times dispatch, Jan offered a grim prediction what Cuba would be like under the reign of Fidel Castro. On a return trip to Moscow Jan met the British intelligence defector, Guy Burgess, who she described as “swollen with drink and self-reproach.”

Eight years later when The Manchester Guardian sent Jan to Jerusalem, Israel, to cover the trial of Nazi war criminal, Adolph Eichmann, charged with the murder of 6,000 Jews at Auschwitz. During the proceedings, Eichmann sat behind a bullet-proof glass booth. Of the proceeding that exemplified “the banality of evil” Jan observed “a queer stiffness or jerkiness of locomotion. Eichmann was trembling.” His death by hanging was the only execution carried out in Israel’s history. With his journalistic star in the ascendancy, Jan interviewed the famous: Mary Pickford, TS Eliot, Walt Disney, President Truman.

Wanting to make her name more permanent than one on a newspaper’s byline, the journalist turned author. Dedicated to her craft, Jan never wrote less than 3,000 words a day. She garnered a huge fan base in the United Kingdom and the United States, especially due to her trilogy on the history of the British Empire, Pax Britannica. Highly prolific, Jan wrote more than forty books, including portraits of the places that had left a niche in her soul. Loathe to be apart, despite the challenges of travelling with two toddlers in tow, the family accompanied Jan. In 1954, they embarked on a 40,000-mile road trip to research information for Jan’s first book, Coast to Coast, an exploration of the United States. (One of the perks is Elizabeth discovered her love of pizza). The peripatetic family lived in a residence in the French Alps, a houseboat in Egypt, and a palazzo in Venice where the British ambassador’s governess taught their two sons. Given the sexual dynamics, the Morris marriage should have floundered, “yet it worked like a dream, living testimony…of love in its purest sense over everything else.”

As their family increased, they needed to put the brakes on their gypsy lifestyle; however, before they did so, they took a 1963 trip to Spain in their camper van. Upon their return, they lived in the Old Rectory, Waterperry, Oxfordshire. They shared their home with their cat, Ibsen, which Jan said was “one of the joys of my life.” Tragedy darkened the Morris’s door when their infant, Virginia, passed away from a hornet’s sting. A son, Twm, and daughter, Suki, were their last children.

In The Market of Seleukia, she depicted the impact of the Suez Crisis and the death knell of Britain’s colonial regime. A labor of love was her volumes on La Serenissima, of which she dedicated four books: Venice, A Venetian Bestiary, The Venetian Empire, The World of Venice. Other volumes depicted Oxford, Whales, Venice, Spain, Oman, New York, Sydney, Cairo, Hong Kong, and South Africa. While many travel books are snapshots of geographical gems, Jan blended her narrative with personal reflections. Unlike other authors in the travel genre, the pronoun “I” did not dominate; readers never felt the author was the “sage on the stage.” Another unique aspect of Jan’s wanderings was her habit of attending court proceedings, as she felt that the legal systems offered insights into “the social, political and moral condition of a place, but better than that, there is the pure pleasure of offering the accused a smile of sympathy, while eyeing judges, court clerks and self-satisfied barristers with a deliberate look of mordant ridicule.” In her memoir, Jan expressed her need to travel, “I spent half my life traveling in foreign places. I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately recognized that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey.” Reviewers liked Jan to legendary authors George Orwell, T. E.  Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad.

Jan seemed to have it all: famous writer, world traveler, tightknit family. Moreover, Jan had accomplished adventures of which Walter Mitty had merely fantasized. Yet all that paled when Jan decided she could no longer live “a life distorted.” In the early 1960s, after meeting with Dr. Harry Benjamin, a prominent New York endocrinologist, over the next eight years, Jan took 12,000 female hormone pills. Of this no man’s land period, Jan lived a double life, spending half the week in Oxford as a woman, half the time in London as a man. The porter at his Travelers’ Club would wish him “Cheerio, sir;” after changing clothes, a second club greeted her, “Hello, Ma’am.”

In 1972 Jan underwent gender reassignment surgery at a clinic in Casablanca, Morrocco. Before anesthesia, Jan worked on The Times crossword puzzle and said goodbye to himself in the mirror. She harbored no second thoughts, “Powers beyond my control had brought me.”  A rhinoplasty followed as her nose, which she deemed fine for a male, was too obtrusive for a female.

 

In a decade when blacks and women were fighting for acceptance, the gay liberation movement was not even a twinkle in society’s eyes, and Jan and Elizabeth girded for battle. A repercussion was rather than being heralded as a brilliant writer, Jan became mainly known as a transgender- “disordered and delusional.” One who did not know of the transition was Queen Elizabeth II who was perplexed at a 2001 palace reception when she met a white-haired old lady who told the royal she was the one who had brought news from Everest on the eve of her coronation. Jan groused that the headlines on her obituaries would read, “Sex-change author dies.” As British law made same sex marriage illegal, the couple had to divorce. The former husband and wife referred to one another as sister-in-law.

While Jan and Elizabeth were willing to weather the storm, their daughter Suki suffered collateral damage. Her parents told her she was never to call her father Daddy, only Jan. When Suki piped up that Jan was a girl’s name, her parents informed her that in Scandinavia it applied to both males and females. Perhaps Jan had chosen the name as an allusion to the Roman God Janus, whose profiles looked to the left and the right, symbolizing both the past and future. While Jan’s workaholism had always made her an absentee parent, after the transition, she retreated further from her family. Suki felt that Jan had left Elizabeth a single mother and made the Morris’s figures of public ridicule. Suki further eviscerated Jan and spoke of her “drip, drip, drip of unkindness…undermining everything, making me look and feel inferior and worthless.” Mocking his daughter’s weight, Jan told her, “You’re looking very substantial today.” Mark moved to Alberta, Canada; Twm bonded with Jan over a shared love of Welsh poetry.

In 2008, as same sex marriages had become legal, Elizabeth and Jan were able to renew their vows in a civil ceremony in Pwllheli Council Office. Elizabeth stated, “I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them. We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.” A local couple served as witnesses; afterwards, they invited the newlyweds to their home for tea and biscuits.

 

The couple found their forever home in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, (translates to the Holy Place on the Water’s Bend), where Prime Minister Lloyd George grew up, and whose tomb lies near the Dwyfor River. The Morris’s eighteenth-century home, Trefan Morys, held floor to ceiling books, and their “untamable” Abyssinian cat; Tym lived next door. On the wall was a portrait of Admiral Jack Fisher in uniform. Another displayed a photograph of the summit of Everest, of which Jan would remark, “That wasn’t a bad story was it?” What marred Jan’s ninth decade was her wife’s dementia. Jan also mourned his inability to travel, and rued, “Old age is a great mistake.” When describing eternity Jan wrote, “I shall be wandering with my beloved along the banks of the Dwyfor: but now and   then you may find me in a boat below the walls of Miramar, watching the nightingales swarm.”

 

The most poignant item in Trefan Morys was a stone marker designated as Elizabeth and Jan’s headstone. They owned a small island on the Dwyfor River that flowed by their house; upon their deaths, they directed their ashes scattered in that sacred spot with the gravestone marker that bore the inscription in Welsh and English: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

 

An alternative epitaph for Jan, the self-described “wandering swank,” could be the title of her memoir where she described her soul’s tug of war between remaining a man or transitioning to a woman: Conundrum.

 

 

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