Christopher Morris

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. During a career in broadcasting and journalism spanning 65 years he has reported from 120 countries, including 16 wars, and nearly lost his life in a series of minefield explosions while covering the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Career 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. 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 the age of 15. After an apprenticeship of 5 years training as a news reporter and also writing regular weekly columns reviewing films, jazz and pop records, he joined the Daily Sketch, aged 20, where he was the youngest reporter in Fleet Street. However, 5 years later in 1962, much to the shock of his family, friends and colleagues, 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.