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Just the write stuff

She may be best known as the biographer of Agatha Christie and Edwina Mountbatten. But there's 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 (based on the BBC TV serial "Yes Minister"), Morgan has been consultant, director, trustee, and member of boards and committees in organisations ranging from American Express and Matsushita to Scottish Life Assurance Company, Cable and Wireless, Nuclear Trust and the Scottish Book Trust. In the British Cabinet Office she worked on the application of new technologies.

How did she make these transitions between art and science? "Captain Cook was my ancestor. He came home and wrote a book. My nuclear engineer father taught me that art and science were not separate worlds. People asked me to do things. I've always done them."

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."

Years later, Morgan was to tell Murdoch of this early connection when the press baron held a grand dinner to placate the British writers who had been outraged when he turned a prestigious publishing firm into his own HarperCollins. "The authors couldn't resist the invitation, out of curiosity or possibly hunger. I've never seen people eat and drink so much. They cleaned up every scrap. Then they were somewhat mollified."

Early start

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. "The doorkeepers guided me in avoiding the lords who were gaga and identifying the sensible ones. The thesis was written — though not published — in record time, costs 50 pounds because only two copies are sold per year!"

How did Richard Crossman choose an unknown woman over eminent academics 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!" His dictated account on the tape recorder was messy, but riveting. A new edition of Samuel Pepys' Diaries published at that time suggested the format. 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 is self-critical. She 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.

The 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." But it was a complex task. "I wrote it in the house of my generous host, 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, losing out on the reflective elements. Somewhat wistful about the Edwina-Jawaharlal relationship, she says 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."

Morgan has faced many challenges; the biggest was to be the only woman on the boards of many big multinational companies. "I thought I should be super-informed, even about things that hadn't yet happened in those fields. I swotted up all about sports and battles to be one with the `boys'. It took me 15 years to learn that all I had to do was to keep quiet and ask them questions."

GOWRI RAMNARAYAN

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