Christopher Morris (born 28 March 1938) is an English news presenter, journalist and author. His most high-profile roles were those of television newsreader and special correspondent for BBC News and senior news presenter and foreign correspondent for Sky News, the first 24-hour satellite television news channel in the United Kingdom launched by British Sky Broadcasting in 1989.
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Early life
Christopher Morris was born in Luton, Bedfordshire, and grew up there and in Penrith, Cumberland. As a jazz enthusiast and drummer, he formed the Delta Jazz Band and opened the Delta Jazz Club in Luton where he played alongside famous traditional jazz groups of the 1950s including Ken Colyer, Chris Barber, Cy Laurie and Humphrey Lyttelton. While also playing guitar, he formed a skiffle group within the band and recruited John, Duke of Bedford to play the washboard and tea-chest string bass at a time when he was trying to pay off £4 million in death duties on his stately home, Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, England. In his autobiography, A Silver Plated Spoon, the Duke wrote: "I played the washboard for a visiting skiffle group which has made more people regard me as a human being than anything else I have ever done".
Morris was educated at St. Albans School, in Hertfordshire, Britain's oldest public school, before joining the Luton News in Luton as a proof reader at age 15. After an apprenticeship of five years training as a news reporter and also writing regular weekly columns reviewing films, jazz and pop records, he joined the Daily Sketch, where he was the youngest reporter in Fleet Street. In 1962, he left his career in Fleet Street to gamble on setting up a British freelance news agency in Spain, then under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
Career
For the next 10 years, based in Madrid, he established his reputation as a foreign correspondent for British national, evening and Sunday newspapers including the Daily Mail and Daily Express, The Evening News and Evening Standard, The Sunday Times, Sunday Mirror and News of the World, and for Independent Television News (ITN) and for BBC News as a television and radio reporter. In 1966, Francisco Franco ordered Morris to be expelled after he broke the story to the world of the worst nuclear accident in America's military history when a US Air Force B-52 on a Strategic Air Command patrol at the height of the Cold War was involved in a mid-air collision with a refuelling aircraft. The B-52 jettisoned four H-bombs as it crashed bringing terror and spreading radioactivity around the Mediterranean village of Palomares when two of the nuclear devices cracked open on impact spilling lethal plutonium over a vast area. Only hours later when the Pentagon in Washington admitted the radioactive contamination on Spain's Mediterranean coast was the expulsion order revoked.
Work with BBC and Sky News
In 1972, Morris returned to London and joined the BBC staff, soon to be sent back to Spain to report on first, the assassination by the Basque terrorist group ETA of Franco's chosen successor, deputy prime minister admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, and, then later, on Franco's own death and funeral. His first war assignment in Cyprus was to end in disaster when a press convoy strayed into a minefield. The Press Association (PA) newsflash on the morning of 8 August 1974, caused chaos and confusion in the BBC Newsroom. It read: "BBC newsman Paul Morris has been killed in a minefield explosion in Cyprus". In fact, Morris was critically wounded. It was a BBC TV News colleague and sound recordist, Ted Stoddard, who had been killed and six other British and American journalists injured when five anti-personnel mines exploded. Morris came close to death after shrapnel hit him in the chest, collapsing a lung, shattering ribs and paralysing his left arm. After spending months in hospital, and with his arm permanently disabled, he returned to work a year later, and more war assignments for the BBC in the Western Sahara, Chad, Ghana. Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, Nicaragua and the Lebanon
Among many major stories he reported for BBC TV News was the world's worst oil tanker spill at the time off the Brittany coast in France when the Amoco Cadiz split in two, and the car bomb explosion at the Houses of Parliament in London that killed Airey Neave the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary and war hero who was the first British prisoner to escape from Colditz
On 23 February 1981, he was back in Madrid, and by chance the only journalist inside the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, when rebel civil guards burst in during an attempted coup to oust King Juan Carlos. Along with more than 300 Spanish MPs, Morris and his BBC TV crew were held hostage at gunpoint for several hours before being released. His eyewitness account and film of the shoot-out has become an historic record of the day democracy defeated dictatorship in Spain.
Throughout the Falkland Islands conflict Morris was in Buenos Aires, one of only a handful of British journalists allowed into Argentina to report from the enemy side during a war. Immediately after the war ended, he was assigned to Israel to cover the invasion of southern Lebanon. When the BBC decided to switch him to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) side he was trapped inside West Beirut with the guerrilla forces of Yasser Arafat and under daily shellfire from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). While in Beirut, Morris broke the news of the massacre of 3,500 Palestinians by Lebanese Phalangist militias in Sabra and Shatila. He managed to smuggle video-recorded evidence of the event to Damascus in neighbouring Syria where the pictures were sent by satellite to London. The pictures caused worldwide protests and almost led to the downfall of the Israeli government. Defence minister Ariel Sharon, later to become Prime Minister, was forced to resign over complicity in the refugee camp attacks.
Family
Morris is married to Mary (née Frawley), retired Operations Director of Knightsbridge, a care village, nursing home and medical centre in Trim, County Meath, Ireland.
Awards
Golden Nymph, Monte Carlo International Television Festival, 1983
Silver Award, International Film and Television Festival of New York, 1983. Refugee Exodus from Nigeria.
Gulf War medal, 1991. Ministry of Defence accredited war correspondent with Royal Air Force throughout air attack missions, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Liberation of Kuwait medal, Saudi Arabia, 1991. Sky News reports accompanying Saudi forces on day of liberation, Kuwait City
Kuwait Liberation Medal, Kuwait, 1991
BAFTA, 1995, Television, Children's Programme, Factual: As Seen On TV
Works
The Big Catch, published by the Angley Book Company, Maidstone, Kent. 1966
The Day They Lost The H-Bomb, published by Coward-McCann, Inc. New York. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number : 66–29688
El Dia Que Perdieron La Bomba, published by Plaza & Janes, S.A. Barcelona. Deposito Legal: B. 20.033 – 1967
Documentaries
BBC
Do They Know It's Christmas – Bob Geldof in Africa, BBC-1. 26 December 1985.
Omnivision
Only Food and Forces, OmniVision. 6 x 30 minutes TV series. 2002.
Sir John Mills : A Century in Films, OmniVision. 2005.
Kate Winslet : Starmaker to Superstar, OmniVision. 2009.
The Curse of America's H Bombs, OmniVision. 2012.
Sky News
Bosnia : The Tragic Divide, Sky News. 31 May 1993.
Caught Between The Lines, Sky News. 21 June 1993.
Northern Ireland : The Unholy Divide, Sky News. 15 November 1993.
South Africa : The Road to Multi-Racial Democracy, Sky News. 1994.
The Flight of Trevor Jones, Sky News. 1994.
Rwanda : War and Exodus, Sky News. 1994.
The Trial of O. J. Simpson, Sky News. 42 x 30 minutes TV series. 1995.
One Man One Vote, Sky News. 28 April 1996.
From Opium to Opulence, Sky News. 23 June 1997.
Hong Kong Handover, Sky News. 6 July 1997.
Elvis 20 Years On, Sky News. 23 August 1997.
Filmography
This is England '86 (Morris appeared as himself in this movie)