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The write stuff

Better known as the biographer of Agatha Christie and Edwina Mountbatten, there is a lot more to Janet Morgan

MULTI-FACETED Janet Morgan PHOTO: K.V.SRINIVASAN

"I wonder how those British women in whalebone skirts undertook long voyages to come to India. Many of them fell in love with this country of light and colours," says Janet Morgan, Lady Balfour of Burleigh. When friends suggest, "Let's go to India and teach them new ways of doing things," she says, "Let's go, learn new things and try them out in Britain."

Best known as the biographer of Agatha Christie and Edwina Mountbatten, and for editing the Richard Crossman Diaries (on which the BBC TV serial "Yes Minister" was based), Morgan has been consultant, director, trustee, and member of various boards and committees. In the British Cabinet Office she worked on the application of new technologies.

Art and science

How did she make these transitions between art and science? "Captain Cook was my ancestor. He wrote a book. My nuclear engineer father taught me that art and science were not separate worlds. ."

That is how she became a director in the first satellite television company in Britain. When the company was bought by Rupert Murdoch, her own shares realised "enough to pay an outrageous plumber's bill."

Morgan's own writing began in childhood. An irksome memory is that her entry on the "Habits of the Honey Bee" failed to win the top prize because the judges thought her parents had helped her to write it. "I had the same style then as now, old fashioned narrative about things, places and people." That interest took her into an abstruse area when a chat with Lord Shackleton, son of the polar explorer, triggered the idea of a D.Phil thesis on the House of Lords.

No pushover

How did Richard Crossman choose an unknown woman to edit his papers? "Known as a bully, Tricky Dick, and Double Crossman, he could find no distinguished professor to assist him. He thought that someone younger could be ordered around. Little did he know!" She was not surprised by the worldwide success of "Yes Minister". Every culture is delighted by the triumph of the advisor over the person with political power.

Morgan thinks that her two biographies trained her for "The Secrets of Rue St.Roch", a tale of espionage in World War I, where she came to grips with three languages, and a Gothic script in German.

Whodunit

The Agatha Christie book she terms juvenilia. "Although last year, when I re-read it to script a TV programme I found passages I'm proud of. I wrote it in the house of my generous host, of Christie's daughter, who had very mixed feelings about her mother."

Morgan turned detective and unravelled the mystery of Christie's disappearance. Refer to the indigestible parts in "Edwina" and Morgan will say, "You want to throw the first 100 pages into the fire."

She thought that some chapters suffered from excessive editing thereby losing out on the reflective elements. About the Edwina-Jawaharlal relationship, she says that it is what "all of us hope to have, and some of us are lucky to have with our spouses.

Beginning like Valentine's Day messages, their 12 years' correspondence grew to share everyday anxieties, ambitions, hopes, fears."

Morgan is fascinated by how "Edwina emerged from being a social butterfly into a hard working, determined, observant, practical person, concerned about the world."

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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