Out Spotlight XXXXIV

"Jan Morris is one of the finest travel writers and historians in Britain. Now, late in life, Jan has gone through a civil ceremony with the woman he married nearly 60 years ago."

Today's Out Spotlight is James Morris/Jan Morris, CBE

James Morris accompanied the 1953 Everest Expedition as correspondent of The Times, making a dash from the mountain to wire the coded news of the success to London in time for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1972, James Morris completed a change of sexual roles after a years of transitioning culminating with gender reassignment surgery in Morocco and, returned as Jan Morris.

James Morris was married to Elizabeth Tuckniss at the time. The couple have never been apart they stayed together after Morris's trip to Morocco in 1972. He went as a man, and came back as woman. The law, then, did not allow same sex marriage, and they were were forced to divorce after Jan's reassignment. Morris used to describe her as her "sister-in-law", but on BBC Radio 4's Bookclub, Morris revealed that the relationship was closer and more enduring than that implied.

The first time that Elizabeth Tuckniss walked down the aisle, in 1949, her groom was a dashing undergraduate. This past may her civil partner was an elderly lady recently voted the 15th greatest British writer since the war.

"I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them," Elizabeth told the Evening Standard. "We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on."

Elizabeth has said that she "always" knew of her husband's belief that he should have been born female. It did not stop them having five children, one of whom died at the age of two months. They are also grandparents to nine grandchildren.

Jan Morris went on to write some 40 books of history, travel writing, fiction, and autobiography, including the Pax Britannica trilogy about the rise and fall of the Victorian Empire, six volumes of collected travel essays, major studies of Wales, Spain, Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Trieste, and a novel, Last Letters from Hav, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Her short book Conundrum, written in 1974, two years after her sex change illustrates the depth of their relationship that enabled them to survive the trauma of a sex change and remain devotedly together as a couple and, more significantly, as a family.



Most of their years spent in the Welsh village close to where Jan's father grew up.

They have specified that when they die, their headstone will say, in Welsh and English:

"Here are two friends, at the end of one life".