as ‘one of the best-known figures in South London’.2
Behind the austere frontage of conformity, though, there gleamed a sense of fun. Edward VII was on the throne when Geoffrey was born and William Morton shared his sovereign’s enjoyment of card games and long, smoke-filled evenings. Like the monarch, he did not allow his wife’s strict sense of rectitude to interfere with his own enjoyable routines of meeting friends and visiting music halls.
Later in his own life Geoffrey Morton would give an exhaustive account of his professional career. He said very little about his boyhood and adolescence – as if it had no bearing on who he was or what he became. He left nothing on record concerning his brother, Arnold, four years his senior and a ‘black sheep’ who disappeared early from the family story. Much more is recorded about his younger sister, Marion, an ambitious, spirited girl who went on to become a teacher and an international standard netball player.
He started at his first proper school aged eight in January 1916. Every morning he set off from Camberwell Road on the two-mile journey to St Olave’s Grammar School, an impressive red-brick building, adorned with stone bas-reliefs of philosophers and poets, which sat on the south bank of the Thames next to Tower Bridge. ‘Stogs’, as it was known to generations of pupils, was founded in 1571 to provide free education to boys from modest homes. The curriculum in 1916 included scripture, Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, English grammar and literature, history, geography, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, chemistry, physics and botany. Great store was set on the values of the rugby field and the cricket pitch. Olavians filled the ranks of the professions. They were lawyers and bankers, accountants and teachers and doctors. They also served the empire as soldiers, sailors and administrators.
The list of distinguished Old Boys was long. It seemed unlikely that Geoffrey Morton would ever be among them. ‘He has been somewhat disappointing,’ recorded his form master, Mr Midgley, when Geoffrey had been at the school barely six months. ‘His work has shown ability but he is not consistently keen.’3
The school’s ethos was Victorian and Edwardian – forward looking, but intensely patriotic and nostalgic for an imagined chivalric past. Its solid brick walls could not shield it from the very modern war being fought across the Channel. Stogs men were floundering in the khaki mud of Picardy, and dying at the same rate as everyone else. In Geoffrey’s first year, the school magazine was full of death notices and unsparing accounts of the fighting. ‘In the Royal Army Medical Corps we see the most terrible side of war,’ wrote an Old Boy, Leslie Hocking.4 ‘We see strong men pass us on their way up the trenches and a few hours later it is our duty to fetch some back as terribly disfigured and mangled corpses.’ Hocking was killed before his account appeared.
The conflict was on the doorstep. Britons could no longer rely on the surrounding seas to insulate them from violence when the country went to war. In the summer of 1915 Zeppelin airships started to drop bombs on London. In 1917, a raid demolished homes in Albany Road, a few hundred yards away from the Mortons’ house, killing ten and injuring twenty-four.
Occasionally, Geoffrey responded to his teachers’ urgings to try harder. The rallies were brief. Now and again he shone at French and German. His best subject was English grammar. In everything else he was towards the bottom of the class. He was particularly weak at scripture. William Morton’s conventional piety had failed to rub off on his son and Geoffrey’s indifference to God would persist all his life.
He left St Olave’s in December 1922, three months after his fifteenth birthday. His penultimate report carried a wounding parting shot from the headmaster, William Rushbrooke. ‘Failure in effort is culpable,’ he pronounced. ‘He can’t smile a path to success.’5 Geoffrey’s smile was one of his most noticeable characteristics. In the school photographs he always wears a shy grin that makes him seem vulnerable and very young. This immaturity was also commented on by the teachers. ‘He is often childish and silly in his behaviour,’ his last class master, L.W. Myers, observed in the same report.
Geoffrey’s subsequent amnesia about his schooldays can be explained as a simple unwillingness to recall a period of prolonged failure. Qualifications came to mean a lot to him. In his police career he accumulated many yet he left St Olave’s with none. In a recording made at the end of his life he confessed to being ‘embarrassed’ by this.6
Stogs boys were expected to stay until they were at least sixteen, when they sat for the School Certificate, which was an essential requirement for a halfway decent job. He never explained the early departure, but it is unlikely that money was the problem. The school fees were modest and the family’s circumstances were comfortable enough to fund Marion’s education through school and university. The likeliest reason was that there seemed little point, to parents and teachers, perhaps to Geoffrey himself, in staying on.
Without his ‘school cert’ he could expect only a dead-end job. He found one at the meat and poultry market at Smithfield in the City of London, where, each day, from the early hours, porters in bloodstained overalls humped carcasses from cold stores to butchers’ vans. He worked as a clerk for a provisions merchants, no more than a ‘general dogsbody’ he would say later.7
At some point he quit Smithfield and started work as a low-level manager with his father’s firm, United Dairies. It was scarcely more rewarding than clerking. He soon decided that his ‘future lay elsewhere’ but where exactly he had no idea.
In the early summer of 1926, chance pointed him in the right direction. Beyond the dairy walls, a great national crisis was brewing. Britain was in the throes of a social upheaval that seemed to some the prelude to a possible revolution. In May, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress called a general strike in an attempt to block proposals to cut miners’ pay and increase their hours. Nearly two million workers responded. The government set up volunteer units to maintain essential services. Tens of thousands of conservative-minded males stepped forward to do their bit to keep the country running, including Geoffrey Morton.
When the strike was announced he joined one of the expanded special police units that sprang up to assist the forces of law and order. They were untrained, unarmed save for a whistle to summon help and wore civilian clothes with only an armband to denote their authority. On the second day of the strike he turned up at the nearest police station and awaited instructions. The main drama of the day was an attempt by strikers to blockade the London County Council tramcar depot at Camberwell Green and paralyse local transport. One tram had managed to break through and travel half a mile to the Elephant and Castle, a busy road junction. It had been halted by pickets and Morton and a ‘burly constable’ were sent to the scene of the trouble.
When they arrived, he wrote, they found ‘a large crowd of men – several thousand of them – centred around a stationary tramcar to which they had clearly conceived a marked antipathy. All professional transport workers were on strike, so that the presence of the tram meant that it must be manned by volunteers – or blacklegs as the strikers would have called them.’8
Morton ‘saw smoke and flames rise from one end of the vehicle, to be greeted by an ironic cheer from its attackers’. Preoccupied by the spectacle of the burning tram, the strikers had not noticed the pair arrive. Despite the number present, Morton’s hefty companion ‘wasted no time. He did not trouble to draw his baton, but with a verve and determination which should assuredly have earned him his cap for England at Rugger, started to elbow his way through the mob towards the tram, with the strikers giving way right and left beneath the impetus of his progress.’
Morton
