Desmond Morris
English zoologist, ethologist and artist (1928–2026)
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Through World War I
Early life and education
Desmond John Morris was born on 24 January 1928 in Purton, Wiltshire, to Marjorie (née Hunt) and children's fiction author Harry Morris. In 1933, the Morrises moved to Swindon where Desmond developed an interest in natural history and writing. He was educated at Dauntsey's School, a boarding school in Wiltshire.
In 1946, Morris joined the British Army for two years of national service, becoming a lecturer in fine arts at the Chiseldon Army College in Wiltshire. After being demobilised in 1948, he held his first one-man show of his own paintings at the Swindon Arts Centre, and studied zoology at the University of Birmingham. In 1950 he held a surrealist art exhibition with Joan Miró at the London Gallery. He held many other exhibitions in later years. Also in 1950, Morris wrote and directed two surrealist films, Time Flower and The Butterfly and the Pin. In 1951 he began a doctorate at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, in animal behaviour. In 1954, he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree for his work on the reproductive behaviour of the ten-spined stickleback.
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Career
Morris stayed at Oxford, researching the reproductive behaviour of birds. In 1956 he moved to London as Head of the Granada Television and Film Unit for the Zoological Society of London, and studied the picture-making abilities of apes. The work included creating programmes for film and television on animal behaviour and other zoology topics. He hosted Granada TV's weekly Zoo Time programme until 1959, before returning shortly after in the 1960s, scripting and hosting 500 programmes, and 100 episodes of the show Life in the Animal World for BBC2.
In 1957, he organised an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, showing paintings and drawings composed by common chimpanzees. In 1958, he co-organised an exhibition, The Lost Image, which compared pictures by infants, human adults, and apes, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. In 1959, he left Zoo Time to become the Zoological Society's Curator of Mammals. He returned to the programme in the 1960s. In 1964, he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Animal Behaviour. In 1967, he spent a year as executive director of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Morris's books include The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal, published in 1967. The book sold well enough for Morris to move to Malta in 1968 to write a sequel and other books. In 1973 he returned to Oxford to work for the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. From 1973 to 1981, Morris was a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. In 1979 he undertook a television series for Thames Television, The Human Race, followed in 1982 by Man Watching in Japan, The Animals Road Show in 1986 and then several other series. Morris wrote and presented the BBC documentary The Human Animal and its accompanying book in 1994. National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1672/16) with Morris, in 2015, for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library.
In 2022, in association with the Natural History Museum of Porto he published Watching which he described as not exactly an autobiography but 'a book about the joys of watching the world'.
Morris was a Fellow honoris causa of the Linnean Society of London.
Parallel to his academic and media career, Morris continued to create paintings in a Surrealist style. His art career spanned 70 years of his long life, though for decades his paintings were not widely known. However, gradually they featured in exhibitions and were bought by public galleries, including the Tate in London. In 2017, his paintings were the subject of a BBC Four documentary The Secret Surrealist. Morris continued to paint Surrealist artworks quite prolifically into his nineties.
Personal life and death
Morris's father suffered lung damage in World War I, and died when Morris was 14. Morris's mother did not allow him to go to the funeral and he later said; "The grieving probably came later when I started to think about those bastards in Whitehall who had sent him off to die. It was the beginning of a lifelong hatred of the establishment. The church, the government and the military were all on my hate list and have remained there ever since." His great grandfather William Morris, an enthusiastic Victorian naturalist and founder of the Swindon local newspaper, greatly influenced him during his time living in Swindon.
In July 1952, Morris married Ramona Baulch; they had one son, Jason. In 1978, Morris was elected vice-chairman of Oxford United football club. While a director of the club, he designed its ox-head badge based on a Minoan-style bull's head, which remains in use to this day.
Morris lived in the same house in North Oxford as the 19th-century lexicographer James Murray who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary. He exhibited at the Taurus Gallery in North Parade, Oxford, close to where he lived. He was the patron of the Friends of Swindon Museum and Art Gallery and gave a talk to launch the charity in 1993.
After the death of his wife in 2018 he lived with his son and family in Ireland.
Desmond Morris died in Naas, County Kildare, Ireland, on 19 April 2026, at the age of 98.
Criticism
Some of Morris's theories have been criticised as untestable. For instance, geneticist Adam Rutherford, writing about Morris's suggestion in The Naked Ape that women wear lipstick to make their lips look like aroused labia, says Morris commits "the scientific sin of the 'just-so' story – speculation that sounds appealing but cannot be tested or is devoid of evidence". Rutherford describes The Naked Ape as "scientifically questionable".
Morris was also criticised for suggesting that gender roles have an evolutionary rather than a purely cultural background.