Marcus Morris

Who was Marcus Morris?

The Reverend John Marcus Harston Morris OBE was an English Anglican priest who founded the Eagle comic in 1950 and was deputy chairman of the National Magazine Company.

The son of a clergyman, Morris grew up in Southport, Lancashire. He attended Dean Close School in Cheltenham, before reading Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford University on an ecclesiastical scholarship, then theology at Wycliffe Hall. He was ordained deacon in Liverpool in 1939, and priest in 1940. Having been briefly engaged to model Rita Foyle, he married actress Jessica Dunning in 1941, and they had four children, while Morris pursued "an energetic and exotic love life on the side."

After a chaplaincy in the RAF and postings in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk and Weeley, Essex, he became vicar of St James's, Birkdale, in 1945, where he published a magazine, The Anvil, which contained illustrations and design by Frank Hampson, articles by C. S. Lewis, Harold MacMillan, Dorothy L. Sayers and Chad Varah, and short stories for children by Geoffrey Trease, and circulated far beyond his parish, although it did not sell well and put Morris in considerable debt.