Desmond Morris obit

Desmond Morris obituary: natural world expert

Zoologist, broadcaster and author best known for The Naked Ape dies aged 98

 

He was not on the list.

Desmond Morris once remarked that it was possible to divide the animal kingdom into two different groups: specialists and opportunists. A poisonous snake was an example of the former, he said: “It has one big trick, its venom.” Conversely, he added, “opportunists — monkeys, jackals, wolves and of course, people — are animals who depend on a thousand little rewards rather than one big one”.

Morris, who effortlessly combined Oxford academia with television stardom, was both a specialist and an opportunist. His one big idea, by no means original but carried off in an enthusiastic and accessible manner, was that “man is a risen ape and not a fallen angel”. He argued that humans are inextricably enmeshed within the natural world, with our animal instincts dictating much of our behaviour in the social sphere. He took evolutionary behavioural psychology and applied it to popular fields, writing copiously on how our animalist nature plays heavily on the way we work together, raise children, drink in pubs, watch football, keep pets and even celebrate Christmas.

A casual remark at a party in 1963 to Tom Maschler, then a young publisher at Cape, about how it might be interesting to write of people as if they were animals, led four years later to The Naked Ape, the book that made Morris’s name and his fortune. Despite its lengthy gestation period, the book took him only four weeks to write. It was translated into at least 27 languages and has since sold about 20 million copies.

This foray into looking at humans as creatures that are governed by instinct and biology offered little in the way of advancing Darwinist theory; nor was his explicit approach of studying man as a mere ape a novel one. What ensured the popularity of The Naked Ape was first its clarity of prose, and second, the era in which it was published, where a popularised “back to nature” philosophy and sexual liberation were all the rage.

Morris’s idea that humans are primates was attacked as strongly as it was applauded. “During a television programme in Canada I revolved my chair to discover a battery of clergymen facing me who, until that moment, had been hidden behind a curtain,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “One of them asked me if I believed that man had a soul. I countered by asking if he believed that a chimpanzee had a soul. ‘Perhaps a very small one,’ he replied. ‘In which case,’ I said, ‘I’m happy to believe that a risen ape has a very large soul.’ ” Elsewhere, Christian groups burnt copies of The Naked Ape.

Nevertheless, the salacious manner of the book helped to guarantee it success. During copulation, he wrote, “the female breasts … shows a significant increase in size. By the time orgasm has been reached, the breast of the average female will have increased by anything up to 25 per cent of its normal dimensions. It becomes firmer, more rounded and more protuberant.” Elsewhere, Morris would tell readers that the human penis is the largest of all primates, and the only one without a bone, making it harder to achieve an erection.

Early critics were unimpressed by such titillation, with one remarking of The Naked Ape’s author: “Sensationalism is as necessary to the manufactured bestseller as mustard is to a good ham sandwich, and Dr Morris shows himself to be a veritable Colman’s.” Others considered his work to be facile and reductive. Yet Morris, who denied that he ever “peppered up” the facts, insisted that he simply wrote about the “human animal” as he saw it. “I knew I couldn’t be too academic or no one would read me,” he said. “So my aim has always been simplification without distortion.”

Undaunted, Morris continued producing books and television series in a similar vein, reaching a climax, so to speak, with The Human Animal, a much-publicised six-part BBC series in 1994 that in one episode used an endoscopic camera to screen for the first time an internal perspective on the female orgasm. “It was just two minutes in a six-hour series,” he shrugged, pretending not to understand what all the fuss was about. The tabloids had a field day, even more so when they discovered that the two participants in the filming were married to other people.

After seeking advice from the BBC, Morris decided to abandon plans to film gay men cruising and prostitutes plying their trade in Amsterdam. “It wasn’t the copulatory detail that I was interested in,” he said. “It was the nature of the transaction. It is a piece of human behaviour and, as a zoologist, I just say: ‘It happens. I want to look at it.’ ” He also concluded that there was no point in trying to break television’s erect penis taboo; instead he lectured in front of a giant sculpted phallus in an art gallery.

The Naked Woman (2004) was a similar blend of zoological observation and detailed titillation, with an analysis of women’s backs (“even at rest … naturally more arched than a man’s back”), legs (“part of the sexual fascination … is that they focus attention on the point where they meet”), buttocks (they “transmit a powerful gender signal”) and breasts (which “operate first as visual stimuli and then as tactile ones”).

Never short of ideas, Morris also advanced the theory that female breasts had developed as imitation buttocks “to shift the interest of the male to the front”. Challenged about why in that case buttocks do not have nipples, he carefully deflected the question. “In other primate species breasts go flat when they are not lactating,” he said. “So you have to figure out why women’s breasts don’t go flat, because they are a bloody nuisance, as any woman running for a bus will tell you.”

Desmond John Morris was born in the village of Purton, Wiltshire, in 1928, the son of Captain Harry Morris, and his wife Marjorie (née Hunt) who lived to the age of 99. His parents had wanted their only child to become a doctor. “They were horrified at the idea of my becoming a zoologist,” he said. His father had been gassed in the First World War and the suffering left his son with a deep distrust of politicians.

The family lived in a large house in the Wiltshire countryside before moving to Swindon, where Harry Morris serviced cigarette vending machines while failing in his desire to become a successful author of children’s fiction. Meanwhile, Desmond was amassing a large menagerie including crows, jackdaws, lizards, newts, cats, dogs, tortoises, fish, rabbits, 200 toads and two foxes. On one occasion he painted his bedroom black to intensify his dreams, later dotting the walls with highly coloured images.

Sent to board at Dauntsey’s School, Wiltshire, he edited a natural history journal with HG Wells’s grandson and at the age of 13 produced an essay in which he described the human species as a monkey with a diseased brain. “As far as I remember, I got rather a good mark for it,” he said. He was 14 when his father died from his wartime injuries, but the boy was not permitted to attend his funeral, an experience that increased Morris’s distrust of authority to include practitioners of religion.

The Second World War was no less gruesome. He told how one day early in the conflict he and his parents were having a picnic in a field by the Thames. “There were two planes above us, twin-engined trainer aircraft,” he said, recalling how suddenly their wings touched and both came down in front of their party. “We’re sitting there with our strawberries and there’s blood all around us,” he said. “I remember the arm, just a hand, sticking out of one aircraft, and moaning coming from the other one.” The effect was to deter him from boarding a flight until he was in his forties.

Meanwhile, among the effects of his great-grandfather, William Morris, an enthusiastic Victorian naturalist who had started the local newspaper, he found a microscope and was soon rushing off to collect and inspect things from the water. He would lie for hours on a raft on the family lake, staring at the fish. At the age of 17 he rowed a girlfriend, Diana Fluck (later better known as the actress and singer Diana Dors), who was three years his junior, to an island. He showed her how to fish and she taught him the jitterbug, which she had learnt from American GIs. “She taught me how to kiss,” he once said.

In 1946 he was called up for National Service with the Royal Army Educational Corps, which sent him to lecture in fine arts at Chiseldon Army College. While there he began to paint seriously and his first one-man show was held at Swindon Arts Centre in 1948.

After demobilisation Morris read zoology at the University of Birmingham, where he was awarded a First and became a member of the Birmingham Seven, a group of surrealist artists who gathered fortnightly at a house in Edgbaston.

The London Gallery, where an assistant curator was the young George Melly, mounted his first London exhibition, a joint show with Joan Miró in which he exhibited a series of surrealist paintings.

Having graduated he moved to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study for a PhD, looking at the sex life of the ten-spined stickleback, notably its reproductive communication systems. In his first five years he produced a dozen academic papers, about double the number that might have been expected, and he went on to produce a great many more.

Academic life led to a longstanding reluctance to buy new clothes. “I spend more money on old books,” he explained in 1999, adding that the habit dated back to his early days as a scientist. “You just begin to dress like a boffin. If you want to find the least colourful, least imaginative clothes, go into any laboratory. The point is, a scientist isn’t interested in himself, he’s interested in what is happening in front of him in his experiments, in his observations.”

Even marriage in 1952 to Ramona Baulch, an Oxford history student, failed to change his dress sense. They had met three years earlier when she was still a sixth-former. “It started because we both enjoyed sex so much,” he somewhat ungallantly told The Mail on Sunday in 2004. Like his teenage sweetheart, Fluck, Ramona was a blonde, which to Morris made perfect sense. “A black-haired woman may have small black hairs on her arms, which is a pseudo-masculine quality,” he once said. “Blonde hair is finer and softer; for stroking, it’s more sensuous. Blondes have fewer sweat glands per inch of skin.”

Throughout their marriage they slept in separate rooms. “We found it impossible to sleep in the same bed,” he explained matter-of-factly in 1987. “Chimps sleep separately; so do gorillas. I don’t know where this habit of sharing a bed came from … I’m fascinated how people manage to sleep in each other’s arms at night. I really couldn’t.”

Overcoming his crippling shyness, Morris joined Granada Television in 1956 and by 1959 was combining his broadcasting with the post of curator of mammals at London Zoo. For about a decade he presented the weekly television programme Zoo Time, learning to popularise without dumbing down too much. At various times he was toppled by a giant tortoise, attacked by a scorpion and jet-sprayed by a urinating lion. On another famous occasion a lethal cobra escaped on air, while once a vampire bat, emboldened by drinking blood, flew off and landed on camera two. “When we managed to run the show more smoothly, the audience was very disappointed,” he told The Sunday Times.

Children loved Zoo Time and his only rival in their affections was another Morris, Johnny, from Animal Magic on the BBC, of whose anthropomorphisms Desmond Morris disapproved. He also published some early children’s reference books, including Curious Creatures (1961), Apes and Monkeys (1964) and The Big Cats (1965).

Morris’s work at the zoo proved to be the starting point for one of his more intriguing adventures. One day he gave a pencil to Congo, a chimpanzee, who promptly drew a line, then another and another. The theory that within such animals existed a brain capable of the basic elements of artistic composition was not a new one, but Congo’s artworks became collector’s items, with Pablo Picasso claiming one and Sir Julian Huxley another.

Growing disillusioned at what he felt was the cramped and cruel way in which the animals were kept, Morris left the zoo in 1967 to become director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where his first task was seeing the ICA into its new and enlarged premises in The Mall. However, the financial success of The Naked Ape led to a hasty change of plan and he and Ramona instead disappeared to a villa in Malta with a pool and an orange grove, where their son Jason was born.

“I had made a fortune and told my mother I was going to spend it all, and she was horrified,” he told The Sunday Times. Yet spend it he did, buying a manor house with 27 rooms that was later used as the US embassy, two Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds and a yacht. “I had a really luxurious life, the dolce vita,” he said. “I would do the same again.” He also bought a house in northern Cyprus, but after the Turkish invasion of 1974 was unable to return.

After five years of painting and writing, during which he published The Human Zoo (1969), a sequel to The Naked Ape that examined the behaviour of city dwellers, the money ran out and he returned cheerfully to academic life, selling the Rolls-Royces and cycling to Wolfson College, Oxford, where he became a research fellow. “I was happy to do it, because I have always loved my work,” he said, although he could still afford never to sit on a committee.

The discipline worked and he continued to produce scientific papers and a string of bestsellers, ranging from The Soccer Tribe (1981), an analysis of the world of professional football, to Bodywatching (1985), an attempt to understand body language. They were followed by Catwatching (1986), Dogwatching (also 1986), Horsewatching (1988), Babywatching (1991) and even Christmas Watching (1992), exploring the roots of modern celebrations and customs.

Success enabled Morris to continue with his lesser-known artistic career, producing in the region of 10,000 canvases. Today an early Morris can fetch several thousand pounds — in 2018 one painting was reported to have been sold privately for £850,000 — although he claimed to have given most of them away. Many depict curvaceous, algae-like shapes that he referred to as “bio-morphs”, fantasy creatures inspired by the forms he saw as a small boy when peering into a microscope.

He was also an occasional collector, with the pictures on his walls including works by Congo the chimpanzee, a sketch by Miró dedicated to Morris, and a Gainsborough that he found in a Birmingham junk shop and that was authenticated only after a bitter dispute between experts. He did not much care for it, but kept it as a reminder that the art establishment belonged to the growing ranks of those whose authority he distrusted.

Behind his ample red-brick home, complete with indoor swimming pool, snooker room and artist’s studio (where the 19th-century lexicographer James Murray spent 30 years compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary), just north of Oxford city centre, was a vast coach house stuffed with artefacts from his travels, each with a story. It was neatly divided into two halves: science and art. “It’s like two hemispheres of my brain,” he said. At one time he was briefly vice-chairman of Oxford United Football Club.

After Ramona’s death in November 2018, Morris moved to Ireland where he established the DIVA (Dun Laoghaire Institute of Visual Arts) near Dublin, which houses his paintings, and where he could be closer to Jason, who had introduced his father to racing and became director of racing for Horse Racing Ireland in Co Kildare.

Morris said that he had always been a hands-on father when Jason was young. “I’m not squeamish,” he explained, reminding readers: “I spent several years as ‘mother’ to a chimp who used to pee over me every day.”

Morris had a receding hairline by the age of 25 and for much of his life kept the same “silly hair-do”, with his remaining locks combed over his pate. “The trick to not ageing is to look old when you are young,” he said. Conversation, always conducted in a booming, professorial voice, was never dull as he flitted from subject to subject, his arms gesticulating like a conductor in front of a symphony orchestra. One of his closest friends was the broadcaster Sarah Kennedy, who would call him Dr Deirdre. Together they made dozens of television programmes for series such as Animal Country and The Animal Roadshow.

In many respects Morris never lost the “schoolboy humour” element of his personality. Illustrated Dog Watching (1996) and Cat World, a Feline Encyclopedia (also 1996) might have sounded like safe Christmas presents for a maiden aunt, but they were full of bizarre facts such as that female cats scream during mating because the male has spikes on the end of his penis, or that a dog’s ejaculation lasts 40 minutes. He produced two sets of memoirs, Animal Days (1979) and Watching (2006). There was only one novel, Inrock (1983), a fantasy about a boy who disappears into a mysterious subterranean world.

When he was 50 Morris had examined his family tree and calculated that his likely age of death was 61. “People thought that was a very callous thing to do,” he told The Sunday Telegraph when he was approaching 70. “But for 11 years I thought I had only got those 11 years to go and so I got on with things. Then 61 came and went and I’m in extra time now … But I would like to be remembered as someone who kept his childlike curiosity throughout his entire life. I describe myself as a senile child. That about sums me up.”

Desmond Morris, zoologist, television presenter, author and artist, was born on January 24, 1928. He died on April 19, 2026, aged 98