Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Morrison, Walter
MORRISON, WALTER (1836–1921), man of business and philanthropist, born in London 21 May 1836, was the fifth son of James Morrison, of the firm of Morrison, Dillon, & Co., by his wife, Mary, daughter of John Todd, of the same firm. Walter Morrison was heir to a share, which was largely increased during his own lifetime, of a great fortune made in business during the Napoleonic Wars. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, where, like two of his brothers, he became a redoubtable oar, and he also obtained a first class in literae humaniores (1857). He thus gave early proofs of a mental and physical vigour which was maintained throughout a long life, together with a devotion to his old university which bore abundant fruit in his latter days and is his principal claim to a place in the national record.
Morrison went down from Oxford in 1858, made a ‘grand tour’, which included Egypt, Palestine, and the United States, and entered the House of Commons in 1861 as liberal member for Plymouth. He held that seat till the liberal debacle of 1874, stood unsuccessfully for the City of London in 1880, parted from Mr. Gladstone over his Irish programme, and twice subsequently (1886–1892 and 1895–1900) represented, as a liberal unionist, the Skipton division of Yorkshire, in which his home was situated. He finally retired from candidature in 1900 after a broken career in parliament extending over nearly forty years. It was a career, however, which was neither conspicuous nor, in all probability, congenial. A man of strong convictions and great independence, but neither an orator nor an ambitious politician, Morrison was never at any period an enthusiastic party man. In his early liberal days his interests were largely centred in the co-operative movement for improving working-class dwellings. In the years following his break with Mr. Gladstone all his energies and resources were thrown into the fight for the Union with Ireland and against the tyranny of the boycott and the ‘plan of campaign’.
Morrison's intermittent absorption in politics did not keep him from a careful stewardship both of his private fortune and of the various business interests from which it arose. In particular he joined in 1874 the board of the Central Argentine Railway, in which his family possessed a large stake, became its chairman in 1887, and soon afterwards paid a protracted visit to South America which resulted in an elaborate report and the eventual absorption of the Buenos Ayres and Rosario line. He was also director of a number of local concerns and travelled constantly between London and Yorkshire in discharge of these duties. They were undertaken rather from a keen sense of responsibility than from any desire to increase his wealth, which grew partly by inheritance from a childless brother and sister who died before him, and partly through the simplicity of his personal tastes. He had none of the attributes of a miser and a great part of his fortune was consistently and judiciously given away during his lifetime.
Considering all his miscellaneous interests, an astonishing part of Morrison's time was spent at Malham Tarn, the wild moorland estate in Craven which had been acquired for him when he came of age, from the Listers of Gisburn. Here he could indulge his love of walking, of folklore, of a very miscellaneous range of literature, and of local leadership in many forms. He never married, and his notion of company was rather that of an audience than of a circle of friends. He was always something of an aloof and self-centred figure, greatly respected by his neighbours but never popular in the ordinary sense of the word, quite incapable of adapting himself to his society but delighted to welcome to Malham a succession of guests, among whom, at one time or another, appeared such ‘eminent Victorians’ as Henry Fawcett, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Sir William Harcourt, and especially Charles Kingsley. It was at Malham Cove that Kingsley had the idea of The Water Babies, and Walter Morrison was his ‘Squire’.
From Malham, too, radiated the princely benefactions for which history will best remember Morrison, though his dislike of publicity rendered their real extent almost incalculable. He played a considerable part in the development of the northern universities—a single anonymous gift of £10,000 to the new school of agriculture at Leeds was revealed almost by accident after his death. For Giggleswick School, where he was chairman of the governors for many years, he built and furnished down to the smallest detail, in celebration of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, that remarkable ‘chapel with a dome’ which was the expression both of his lifelong interest in Oriental architecture and of his personal predilections in English history. To go further afield, it is known that he was the mainstay of Lord Roberts's campaign for national service, that for some years he made an annual contribution of £10,000 to King Edward's Hospital Fund, and that innumerable relief funds owed much to his support during both the South African and the European Wars. He was one of the founders of the Palestine Exploration Fund and regarded himself in that connexion as the ‘discoverer’ of Kitchener. By a single gift of £15,000 he made possible the chief Hittite excavations (those of Carchemish) undertaken by the British Museum, while the Society (now dissolved) of Biblical Archaeology owed almost its whole career to his munificence.
Towards the end of his life Oxford became the special object of Morrison's benefactions. Fired perhaps by his experience at Giggleswick, he offered to rebuild the new chapel at Balliol on the lines of the old, which he greatly preferred; and, on the rejection of this somewhat startling proposal, he at once gave £30,000 to the university for the three purposes of a readership in Egyptology, a professorial pension fund, and the study of agriculture. Finally, in 1920, he endowed the Bodleian Library with a single payment of £50,000, and thus took rank among the three chief benefactors in the history of that famous foundation. The honorary degree of D.C.L., which was conferred upon him in the following year, was the only public recognition which he received, or indeed would have valued. He died at Sidmouth 18 December 1921, and was buried at Kirkby Malham.
[Geoffrey Dawson, ‘Walter Morrison’ in the National Review, February 1922.]