BOOKS

Two Eagles and a lot of birdies

Bevis Hillier

LIVING WITH EAGLES: MARCUS MORRIS, PRIEST AND PUBLISHER by Sally Morris and Jan Hallwood Lutterworth, £25, pp. 311 When I was an undergraduate, a new Oxford magazine was launched called Parson's Pleasure, named after the stretch of the River Cherwell where, in those days, male dons and students bathed nude. The editors, who included lain Sproat, late Conservative minister for sport, devised a clever series of fraudulently enticing head- lines for the front cover. One week the cover blared: 'VICE IN OXFORD!' and the newspaper shops sold out in a morning. The article inside reported on a visit to the city by Anthony Vice of the Observer. Another time, the magazine trumpeted: `MANSFIELD CLERIC FORESEES SECOND COMING!' That article was about a don at Mansfield College who told one of his pupils, 'If you don't work harder, Mr Smith, I'm afraid you will only get a Second in your Finals.'

The title of this book is similarly mislead- ing. Living with Eagles suggests some nature-loving nut like Dian Fossey, the ani- mal-rights activist whose dottiness about big hairy primates was portrayed by Sigour- ney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist. You might picture a lone figure perched on a mountain crag, screeching eagle love-calls and feeding morsels of raw meat into fearsome beaks with his fingers. The Rev. Marcus Morris was not like that. His idea of bliss was more a blonde tottie, two bot- tles of Dom Perignon and the tape machine rapping out the news that Harper's circulation was hugely ahead of Vogue's.

Of course I can see why Living with Eagles seemed like a neat title. Morris was the founding editor of the comic Eagle, and he went on to become vice-gerent in Britain of the Hearst publishing corpora- tion, whose logo is a stylised eagle in flight. The second career made him more money, but it is for the first that he will always be remembered. As Sir Tim Rice writes, in a foreword: The influence of Eagle upon almost every British boy (and plenty of girls) growing up in the 1950s cannot be overestimated it was truly a remarkable enterprise, a creation of genius. .. [It had] a cultural impact as significant in Britain as the Beatles' was to be a decade or so later.

What a remarkable man Rice's father must be. In April 1950, when Tim was five years old, Rice pere brought home the first issue of Eagle. Was the infant Rice allowed to paw it and feast on the adventures of Dan Dare? Not on your life. Sir Tim recalls:

He kept every issue in pristine condition and as a result I now have every one of the first

15 years of Eagle in my study today.

The Noll me tangere edict of the elder Rice seems almost inhuman. I mean, comics are there to be grubbily fingered and messed up by kids. But, to be fair, Rice fils was hardly of an age to be fed Eagle. He can barely have graduated to Chicks' Own. I hate to pull chronological rank, but I was ten in 1950 — the very bull's eye of Mor- ris's target readership. According to this book, the desired age-catchment was eight to 12.

My father did not bring home Eagle. If he had noticed it at all on the station news- stand, it would probably have struck him as a bit garish and racy. The comic I was bought at that time was Knockout, a cheery compromise between, on the one hand, the jolly japes of Beano and Dandy, and, on the I think this is more your size, Sir!' other, the virile sagas of Wizard and Hot- spur, which tended to be about skuldugge1•Y in the football leagues or attempts to climb Everest — something that had still not been achieved by 1950. Luckily for me, Dominic Harper, my best friend in Merstham, Surrey, where we then lived, took the Eagle from the first issue. We climbed to his eyrie of a bedroom to pore over it. I should have gone home and clamoured for my own subscription. I am not gilding retrospect or revving up nostal- gia when I recall the rush of excitement we felt in devouring this publication. Eagle burst upon dingy post-war Britain with a great splash of colour in that year before the Festival of Britain made bright nursery tints the fashion It was only five years since fire engines had been painted red again, after the years of grey wartime camouflage. Rationing was still in force. But the look of Eagle — the brilliant colours, Dan Dare's flying-buttress eye- brows, the Mekon's tumescent green head — was not the first thing that struck you. The first thing you noticed — it is not men- tioned in this book — was the smell. I sup- pose it was some kind of oil in the print that gave the comic its unique bouquet —.a pungent but not unpleasing smell, which to its unfamiliarity somehow synched with the mysteries of space, rather as incense goes with a Gothic church interior. Maybe that analogy is apt. The editor of • this far-out publication was a Church of England vicar, and the comic itself was a curious hybrid, with Dan Dare zapping the Mekon on the front, while the adventures of St Paul or Wilfred Grenfell, the mission- ary to Labrador (misspelt Grenville in the book) were strip-cartooned on the back. In 1950 that didn't seem such an Alan Ben- nett double act as it would now. Most Mer- stham people, including Dominic, went to church on Sunday. Eagle locked on to the zeitgeist like a docking spaceship. Signifi- cantly — almost symbolically — it folded in 1969, the year man landed on the moon• With astronauts capering about in moon- dust, who needed Dan Dare? And by then the C of E was in careering decline, too. Marcus Morris deserved a biography. The story of the parish prist who became a magazine mogul (but still remained in holy orders) is one of the weirdest chansons de geste in 20th-century journalism. Terry Mansfield, for years his employee and then his successor as head of Hearst's National Magazine Company, remarks how discon- certing it was to work for 'a man who [could] christen you, marry you, bury you and fire you'. The authors who have taken on the task of writing Morris's life are two of his three daughters. (There was a son, who -was expelled from Marlborough for drugs, then killed in a car crash.) One of the daughters, Sally Morris, has always been known as 'the Mekon', because it was on her hairless head, as a baby, that the devilish space lord's was modelled. In general, it is as bad an idea for children to write their parents' lives as for husbands to teach their wives to drive. To paraphrase Noel Coward, 'Don't let your daughters write your life, Mr Wor- thington. . . ' Affection or resentment erodes objectivity. And those who knew the parents will naturally tend to pull punches when answering the offspring's questions. Some of the contributions are a little syrupy, but alongside them are verdicts so harsh that you feel sure the authors cannot have censored much. There are a few ama- teurisms which no Holroyd or Glendinning would perpetrate — for example, the link- ing of the subject's life with irrelevant his- torical events (`John Marcus Harston Morris was born on 25 April 1915 — the day the Allied forces landed at Gallipoli') and the tendency to round off a quotation from somebody else with a slightly tnalapert authorial aside CA wise old bird, was Gramp.'). But, as a whole, the book is extremely well researched, very open, very fair and capably written. Morris was the son of a clergyman. He was a shy boy, self-conscious about a squint, later corrected. (One of the snappi- est lines in the book is, 'His eyes no longer squinted, they roved.') At 17 he made the decision to enter the Church. From Dean Close Memorial School, Cheltenham, he Won a classics exhibition to Brasenose, Oxford, where he discovered girls, read a paper on 'Free Love' and was known as 'a rather flashy dresser'. He was vivaed for a First but took a Second. He entered Wycliffe Hall in 1938; and hated its puritanism. God had invented pleasure, including sex, for us to enjoy, he argued. He was appointed assistant curate at a parish on the outskirts of Liverpool. He learnt how to take services,

firmly crossing out the prayer 'From fornica- tion and drunkenness, at home or in the field Good Lord deliver us' from the special wartime litany.

He became engaged to a beautiful London model, but she dumped him for a naval officer. Instead, he married the actress Jes- sica Dunning, who fell in love with his 'fas- cinating cigarette-shop smile'. He became an 1?,,AF chaplain, but it did not work out. To the surprise of many, he was allowed to resign. It is typical of the authors' diligence and open-minded approach that they have made best efforts to find out if he was asked to resign — 'Had he made a pass at the CO's wife?' (He was not asked to resign.) In 1943 the Morrises and their first baby daughter arrived at Weeley, Essex, where he was to be priest. He stirred the villagers with an Easter sermon in the form of a detective story, 'The Empty Tomb'. But `rumours of immoral goings-on circulated; Marcus was suspected of having affairs.' The rumours got to him: he devoted a ser- mon to the plague of 'endless, futile, dan- gerous, interminable gossip'. Evidently Jessica believed the tattle, as she left him; but she returned to him and the children after a short absence. They moved on to Birkdale, a prosperous suburb of South- port. Morris began revitalising the parish magazine. He renamed it The Anvil, com- missioned illustrations and cartoon covers and wheedled an article from C.S. Lewis. One of the artists he took on was the supremely talented Frank Hampson, the future illustrator of the Dan Dare serials, who was just finishing his course at South- port College of Art. Morris also got expert advice on typography from Ruari McLean, then an advertising man, who was to mastermind Eagle's lay-out.

In 1949 Morris and his friends began dis- cussing the idea of a Christian children's comic. At first the central cartoon hero was to be Lex Christian, a tough, fighting par- son in the East End of London. Then Mor- ris hit on the idea of sending him into space. 'Get him to Venus,' he told Hamp- son, 'and I will take over from there.' Hampson's wife Dorothy thought up the name Dan Dare. The heroic element of Morris's own story is that at this stage he was paying Hampson 53 per cent of his church stipend to retain his services. Near- ing bankruptcy and unfrocking, Morris hawked (or eagled) a dummy of the comic round Fleet Street. He had no success until he went to Hulton's. Tom Hopkinson, edi- tor of Picture Post, was asked his opinion. He recalled in his autobiography:

`I've been looking at dummies on and off for the last 15 years,' I said, 'but this is the first I've ever seen of which I'd say, "Hire all the people who produced it and start publishing as soon as possible. " '

Hulton's circulation manager thought he could sell a million copies a week. Some of Morris's merits were beginning to emerge: his persistence, his spotting and hiring the best people, his making sure (like Mont- gomery before a battle) that he was fully prepared before making his big push. But it was a tense time. One of his parish secre- taries recalled: He wasn't a person who walked about with a smile, he was quite serious looking. I remem- ber Marcus and Jess going to a garden fête.

When they got back I said, 'What did you do, walk about looking pleasant?' Marcus replied, 'I just walked about.'

Morris eventually had to resign from the parish as Eagle took wing. It was launched with a great fanfare. A fleet of Humber Hawk cars, mounted with gold eagles, roared down the streets in a 'Hunt the Eagle' campaign. One of the cars was driv- en by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu — his first job, at £3 a week. In Liverpool the drivers got bricks thrown at them and didn't dare stop; the vouchers were thrown out of the windows. After a slow start on publication day, 14 April 1950, the message came back from the newsagents, 'Eagle is selling.' In all, 900,000 copies were shifted. Soon an Eagle Club was founded: 60,000 children applied to join. Anticipating the so-called 'classless society' of the Sixties, Eagle reached all classes. Max Hastings, whose father wrote for the comic, remem- bers that the Eagle Club badge was worn `even at quite snobbish prep schools'. And David Hockney of Bradford, aged 15, was runner-up in an Eagle art competi- tion. (The first prize went to Gerald Scarfe, aged 16.) Morris was living it up. 'His expense account over a weekend could look like the national debt.' Champagne flowed like water. Both Morris and his wife 'strayed from the marital bed'. David Langdon drew, for private consumption, a cartoon showing a nervous artist waiting with his portfolio outside a door labelled 'Revd Marcus Morris, Editor'. The secretary is saying, 'And don't worry. You needn't watch your language.'

People sniggered or frowned at what a bishop might regard as rather more than peccadilloes, but Morris's achievement as an editor could not be gainsaid. In 1959 he was appointed managing director of the National Magazine Company, in charge of Harper's Bazaar (as it then was), Good Housekeeping, The Connoisseur and other magazines. This part of the book makes less beguiling reading than the Eagle sec- tion, but Morris's success was no less impressive. He merged Halper's with Queen (the authors fail to note the charm- ing suggestion that the new magazine should be called Queepers, and introduced Cosmopolitan to a British readership. Inevitably there were snide comments about a vicar presiding over a magazine that offered articles on 'How to turn a man on when he's having problems in bed' and `I was a sleep around girl'.

Private Eye took to calling him 'the dirty vicar'. It was alleged there was a separate in-tray on his desk for pornography. In researching the book, Sally Morris asked Auberon Waugh why, in his Private Eye column in 1973, he had described her father as 'a sanctimonious and dirty-mind- ed clergyman'. Waugh telephoned Sally to ask, didn't she know she had an illegitimate half-brother called Tom? He alleged that Morris had had an affair with Nancy Spain, the predominantly lesbian columnist killed in an air crash in 1964. (The sick joke of the day was 'Nancy Spain falls mainly in the 'plane'.) Nancy Spain, an old adversary of Waugh's father, had been the lover of Joan Werner Laurie (known as Johnnie), Morris's editor of She — she too was killed in the crash. Enquiries established that Tom's father was not in fact Morris, but Pip Carter, husband of the mystery novelist Margery Allingham. Waugh wrote to Sally to apologise ('What an embarrass- ment. . ').

I worked for Morris in the 1970s as editor of The Connoisseur, and can confirm what many of his staff have told the authors. He chose the person he thought right for the job, then let him or her get on with it, with the minimum of interference, He rarely gave praise, tut when he did, you felt you had been given a million dollars'. You equally knew it on the few occasions he was annoyed: as one editor says, 'He was the only man I knew who could shout without raising his voice.' And, with all his foibles, he was a man of some principle. When Eagle was near the launch I hate him — he's so two-faced.' date, a Hulton's executive suggested St Paul be dropped from the back page. 'ff that is not included,' Morris said quietly, `then I shall not produce the magazine.' I experienced his integrity. In 1974 Bran' iff Airlines, which serves South America, had the idea that they would like to show the world that South America was 'not all bananas and revolutions'. They would flY me wherever I wanted to go, first class, if I would run a special South American issue. I said I would, but on this strict condition: while I would state in a preface that Braniff had flown me gratis, the airline was to have absolutely no control over the contents of the issue. I would recruit the writers --- mainly South American. There was to be no interference of any kind. I went to Brazil, Argentina (where I met Jorge Luis Borges), Ecuador, Colombia and Peru — wonderful trip. As I was putting together the special issue, Morris summoned me to his office. Braniff had been in touch with Hearst, v,111°, were demanding of Morris that he should order me to publish in the issue a photo' graph of Braniff's 'Flying Colours' aircraf; decorated with squiggles by the 'mobiles artist Alexander Calder. I said I was not prepared to do that and would have to resign if it were insisted on. Morris's face twitched. He suggested we should both think it over and meet again after lunch. That lunch-time, there was a press reeer tion at Margaret Duchess of Argyll's May" fair house. I bumped into Harold Evans and, in confidence, told him the situation. He at once said, 'If Marcus insists, you Will have to resign. And there's a job waiting f°r you at the Sunday Times if you do.' With this nice safety-net in place, I went to Mori' ris's office in the afternoon. Before I could say anything, he told me he had telephoned Hearst and had said the photograph would not appear in The Connoisseur and that I had his full support. With their usual conscientiousness, the authors obtained this story from me, but they tell it in such 3 drastically truncated form that I think few readers will grasp the principle that was at stake.

Morris retired in 1989. An excellent sue' cessor was found in Terry Mansfield, but Morris — for once showing a lack of saw* faire — hovered around obtrusively, loth to shrug off his authority. He died in 1989. There was a thanksgiving service at St Bride's, Fleet Street, the journalists' church, of which he was an honorary chap' lain. The spirit of Eagle lived on. peter Brookes, the Times's cartoonist, noted that Tony Blair had the same rictus of a grin as Dan Dare and launched the strip 'Dan Blair', with John Prescott as the astronauts homespun henchman Digby and William Hague as a dead ringer for the Mekon, leading the `Toreen' (the green-faced Treen). And when Professor Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) was asked what influ- ence Dan Dare had had on him, he replied, `Why am I in cosmology?'