Major Charles John Morris CBE (1895 – 13 December 1980[1]) was a British mountaineer, anthropologist and journalist, and controller of BBC Radio's Third Programme.
[2] On the latter, his personal servant was Tenzing Norgay, who made the first ascent of Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953.
As time went on, Morris was increasingly critical of colonial attitudes towards race and the subject peoples of empire, informed by his experience as a gay man who had several long-term relationships with indigenous partners.
[6] He was repatriated by the Diplomatic corps after Japan's entry into the Second World War and joined the BBC, running their Far East service.
He wrote an article about Orwell, "Some are more equal than others", for Penguin New Writing Number 40, September 1950 which was reprinted in Orwell Remembered with the title "That Curiously Crucified Expression": George Orwell always reminded me of one of those figures on the front of Chartres Cathedral [-] my inability to enjoy his filthy cigarettes was symbolic; it represented other things which made any sort of intimacy between us quite impossible.Stephen Spender described Morris in his Journals as:[8] A not very daring promoter of the cause of culture, cruelly teased by his friend E.M. Forster, who referred to him as 'the pudding'.He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1957 New Year Honours, and appeared as a castaway on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs on 16 February 1959.