H. V. Morton

Henry Canova Vollam Morton FRSL (published as H. V. Morton; 26 July 1892 – 18 June 1979) was a British journalist and famous travel writer. He first achieved fame in 1923 as an employee of the Daily Express when he reported on Howard Carter's opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

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Quotes

In the quiet Derbyshire village of Eyam, men still talk about the Plague of London as though it happened last week. Eyam is the last place in England with a vivid memory of the terrible pestilence of 1665.
Eyam is a mile-long street of fortress-like stone houses set in a cosy cleft of the wild Peakland moors. There is a church, a manor-house behind a wall, and the remains of the village stocks. I went into the church, where the elderly caretaker began to talk, as they all do in Eyam, of the Plague ...
(She might have been talking about that year's influenza!)
- The Call of England (2nd ed.). Methuen & Company. 1928. p. 170. (206 pages; 1st edition 1928)

Shakespeare's London was a small walled town whose gates were shut each night with the coming of darkness. His contemporaries went a-Maying and gathering primroses where now are tramcars and gasometers. A Londoner was to Shakespeare a man who was born probably within sound of Bow Bells, who worked and slept within the ancient town wall of London, and would probably die there and be buried in one of the city churchyards. London three centuries ago was a small comprehensible cathedral city standing behind its wall, and its citizens could look at it and walk all round it, as men can walk round York and Chester.
A mile or so away was the royal City of Westminster, where the King lived. There were two ways to it, one by river and the other along the strand of the Thames. To the north of the Strand were meadows and hedges, a Convent Garden, a Long Acre and more fields stretching up to a rural lane that led to Reading and was to become known by the odd name of Piccadilly.
- "Chapter One". In Search of London. Hachette Books. 2009. pp. 1–49. ISBN 9780786749843. (quote from p. 2; 448 pages; 1st edition 1951; 3rd collection of Morton's series of sketches of London — the essays were 1st published in the London newspaper Daily Express.)

At the highest point of the Vatican Gardens stands the Vatican Radio Station and the Pope's private walk. At this part of the hill has never been built over, or shaved off and lowered, like so many of the famous Seven Hills, it preserved its original height. ...
I do not know of a more beautifully situated radio station, unless it is Radio Andorra on its Pyrenean mountain, whose insistent voice dominates the air over southern France and northern Spain. The immensely powerful Vatican Radio broadcasts on twenty-four short, and three medium, wave-lengths and in every language.
- A Traveller in Rome. Methuen Publishing. 1957. pp. 313–314. ISBN 0416589707. 1st part of quote (p. 313); last part of quote (p. 314)

What appeals to me about Morton's work is that you are reading two histories at once. As he recounts stories of the classical and biblical eras, he is also giving a contemporary account of a world that has entirely vanished. He writes with a crisp matter-of-factness about his faith and his place as an Englishman abroad in the 1930s. I don't mean in a colonially superior way, but just with a certainty that I think few could express today.
In the book he is mostly exploring the youthful nation state of Atatürk's Turkey. For Morton, visiting what remains of the places where Paul stayed is often a case of begging a ride from a local. It is still an age when traveling in the near East is more an expedition than a holiday.
When Morton visits the site of the Temple of Diana in Ephesus for example, it is a waterlogged ruin, where he imagines the frogs to be croaking out her name. A plate image in the book shows a desolate empty location, and he laments the mutilated statues on the road from the village of Selçuk.
- Martin Belam, (18 August 2011) "Summer readings: In the Steps of St Paul by HV Morton". The Guardian.

With the 1927 publication of In Search of England, H. V. Morton began to establish his name as the most popular travel writer in Britain. Part of Morton's appeal, particularly to the lower middle class, was that he engagingly interwove human interest accounts of his journeys with potted historical and literary vignettes to convey the sense of an enjoyable holiday. Yet beyond these seemingly casual aspects lay serious ideological purposes, and these are of importance in exploring interwar views on national identity. Morton insisted that the nations's strength ultimately depended on the health of its rural areas. Yet the urban and industrial revolutions had inflicted fundamental damage on the fabric of the nation. Morton called for renewed recognition of the central continuities, especially Christianity, in British history.
- Charles Richard Perry, (1 January 1999) "In Search of H. V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy". Twentieth Century British History 10 (4): 431–456. DOI:10.1093/tcbh/10.4.431.

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H. V. Morton