H. V. Morton(1892–1979)

Henry Canova Vollam Morton was born at Ashton-under-Lyne in July 1892, the son of Joseph Morton, a journalist on the *Manchester Guardian* who soon moved the family to Birmingham as managing editor of the *Birmingham Gazette*. He was schooled at King Edward's, Birmingham, joined his father's paper at sixteen as a junior reporter, and moved to London in 1912 to work first on the *Daily Mail* and then, from 1921, on Lord Beaverbrook's *Daily Express*. He covered the post-war reconstruction beat across England and gave the *Express* in 1923 the first English newspaper interview with Howard Carter at the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb. He was thirty-one and was the rising star of British popular journalism.

The book that made him came out of an illness on assignment. Taken ill with what was diagnosed as a possibly fatal cerebral condition while reporting from Palestine in 1923, lying in a Jerusalem hotel room expecting to die, he made an internal promise that if he recovered he would go home and see his own country before he saw any more of anyone else's. He recovered. He drove a Bullnose Morris around England through the autumn of 1926 on assignment from the *Express*, filed weekly columns, and collected the pieces in 1927 as *In Search of England*. The book sold something over a million copies across thirty-nine printings before the war and rewrote what an English popular travel book could be: chatty, anecdotal, antiquarian, ready to stop the car at every market cross and pub sign, and addressed directly to a lower-middle-class motoring readership who had not previously been written for. The follow-ups, *In Search of Scotland* (1929), *In Search of Ireland* (1930) and *In Search of Wales* (1932), sealed the formula.

The 1930s extended the range. *In the Steps of the Master* (1934) retraced the gospel sites of the Holy Land; *In the Steps of St Paul* (1936) did the Mediterranean Pauline journeys. *A Stranger in Spain* and *A Traveller in Rome* came later. The publishers Methuen kept him in print continuously from 1927 to his death, and the cumulative sales across the catalogue ran to over three million copies before the war and many more after. He was the most-read English travel writer of the inter-war years by a wide margin, and the figure through whom a generation of English readers first saw their own country and the wider world of European Christianity.

He left England for South Africa in 1947, ostensibly disenchanted with the Attlee Labour government's post-war Britain and persuaded by his fourth wife, the South African Mary Hannan, to live the rest of his life there. The diaries he kept across the 1930s and 1940s, deposited with his papers at the National English Literary Museum at Grahamstown after his death and made available to the biographer Michael Bartholomew for the 2004 *In Search of H. V. Morton*, revealed a private record at sharp variance with the warm hearth-and-cathedral register of the books. The 1930s entries record deep antisemitism, admiration for Hitler and Mussolini through to the late 1930s, sympathy with the British Union of Fascists and Sir Oswald Mosley, and approval of National Socialist racial doctrine in language that the published travel writer never sounded a note of. The shock of the diaries, for the post-war reader who has loved the books, is part of how the Morton name now reads: the inter-war travel-writer whose public voice was the most generous popular celebration of England between the wars, and whose private mind held views that the public voice was structured around concealing.

He lived his last thirty-two years on a farm at Somerset West in the western Cape, wrote a further six books from there, watched apartheid consolidate and approved of it. He died at the farm on 18 June 1979, eighty-six years old, and is buried in the Anglican churchyard at Somerset West. The books remain in print. The Morton name today, the moor-farm settlement scattered across the Midlands and the north, carries him as the popular travel-writer head of the surname, with the diary disclosure as the qualification that any modern biographical paragraph has to fold in.