Henry Vollam Morton

For the Australian politician, see Henry Morton (politician).

Henry Vollam Morton
Born	1892 Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire
Died	1979
Occupation	Journalist and writer
Nationality	British
Citizenship	British South African
Genres	Travel writing, Journalism
Notable work(s)	In Search of... series
Spouse(s)	Dorothy Vaughton Violet Mary Muskett
Children	Timothy Morton
www.hvmorton.co.uk

Henry Canova Vollam (H. V.) Morton, FRSL (26 July 1892–18 June 1979) was a journalist and pioneering travel writer from Lancashire, England, best known for his prolific and popular books on Britain and the Holy Land. He first achieved fame in 1923 when, while working for the Daily Express, he scooped the official Times correspondent during the coverage of the opening of the Tomb of Tutankhamon by Howard Carter in Egypt.

Early life

Morton was born at Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, the son of Joseph Morton, editor of the Birmingham Mail, and of Margaret Maclean Ewart. He was educated at King Edward's School in Birmingham.

Later life

In the late 1940s he moved to South Africa, settling near Cape Town in Somerset West and became a South African citizen.

Private life

He firstly married Dorothy Vaughton (born 1887) on 14 September 1915; they divorced and he then married Violet Mary Muskett, née Greig (born 1900), herself a divorcee, on 4 January 1934: she survived him.

Journalism career

After leaving school, Morton entered journalism on the staff of the newspaper edited by his father, the Birmingham Gazette and Express. After two years, he became its assistant editor in 1912. He then moved to London, and spent most of the rest of his British career there, on various national newspapers and magazines. His first job in the capital was as a freelance lineage reporter for the Evening Standard.

He served in the Warwickshire Yeomanry during World War I, but saw no action. After the war, he returned to London and journalism, from 1919 on the Evening Standard, and from 1921 on the Daily Express. His columns on London life in the latter became very popular. In 1923 he achieved worldwide fame for his reports on the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun^{[citation needed]}, as he successfully out-manoeuvered the official Times journalist who had been given exclusive rights to the story. From 1931 to 1942, he was "special writer" at the Daily Herald.

Travel writing

Morton's first book, The Heart of London, appeared in 1925, and was a development of his popular Daily Express columns. In 1926, as motoring was becoming established in the UK, he set off to drive around England in a bull-nosed Morris, an early mass-produced motor-car. His account of these travels and of the England of the 1920s was published in 1927 as In Search of England, a best-seller that established him as one of the leading travel-writers of the age. A number of similar books dealing with different regions of the UK followed.

Even greater acclaim greeted Morton's first foreign travel book, In the Steps of the Master (1934), which sold over half a million copies.^{[citation needed]} The Master was Jesus, and the book an account of Morton's travels in the Holy Land. This was soon followed by In the Steps of St. Paul (1936), which presents a picture of Ataturk's Turkey.

This was followed by Through Lands of the Bible (1938) in which he visits Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq, and gives a marvellous picture of this now vanished scene. Extracts from all three books were combined and published as Middle East during World War II for the servicemen stationed there.

After the war, Morton turned his attention to South Africa, publishing In Search of South Africa in 1948. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he wrote a number of books dealing with Italy. A Traveller in Italy deals with North Italy.

A biography, by Michael Bartholomew, based on Morton's private papers, titled In Search of H.V.Morton was published by Methuen in 2004.

Honours

Morton became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). Greece made him a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix in 1937 and he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1965.

H.V. Morton Society

The H.V. Morton Society ( http://www.hvmorton.co.uk/hvm_society.html ) aims to promote interest in, and provide a means for the exchange of views and information on, the life and work of the travel writer and journalist H.V. Morton.

Publications

Listed below are the titles of the books and pamphlets written by H.V. Morton. He was a prolific writer and his body of work contains many hundreds of newspaper and magazine features and articles, the total of which may never be fully catalogued.

Title	Year
The Heart of London	11 June 1925
The Spell of London	11 February 1926
London	June 1926
The London Scene	1926
The London Year, A Book of Many Moods
The Nights of London	11 November 1926
When You go to London	1927
May Fair: How the Site of a Low Carnival Became the Heart of Fashionable London	1927
In Search of England	2 June 1927
In Search of Scotland	1 August 1929
The Soul of Scotland	1930
In Search of Ireland	4 December 1930
In Search of Wales	16 June 1932
Blue Days at Sea, and Other Essays	20 October 1932
Glastonbury, the Jerusalem of England	1933
What I Saw in The Slums	1933
A London Year	1933
In Scotland Again	26 October 1933
In The Steps of the Master	October 1934
Our Fellow Men	7 May 1936
In The Steps of St. Paul	October 1936
London: A Guide	1937
Through Lands of The Bible	27 October 1938
The Ghosts of London	16 November 1939
Travel in War Time	circa 1940
H.V. Morton's London	31 October 1940
Women of the Bible	21 November 1940
Middle East	5 June 1941
I, James Blunt	1942
I Saw Two Englands	15 October 1942
Atlantic Meeting	1 April 1943
Travels in Palestine and Syria	September 1944
In Search of South Africa	21 October 1948
In Search of London	24 May 1951
In The Steps of Jesus	1953
A Stranger in Spain	3 February 1955
A Traveller in Rome	29 August 1957
This is Rome	1959
This is the Holy Land	1961
A Traveller in Italy	24 September 1964
The Waters of Rome	1966
The Fountains of Rome	1966
A Traveller in Southern Italy	1969
H.V. Morton's Britain	February 1969
H.V. Morton's England	5 June 1975
The Splendour of Scotland	11 November 1976
The Magic of Ireland	17 August 1978
In Search of The Holy Land	April 1979

External links

• H.V. Morton ebooks