Michael Morton-Evans reports on his 60 years in media
Mosman’s Michael Morton-Evans, 83, trained as a concert pianist but at the age of 19 decided he wasn’t good enough to earn a living and got a job as a cadet with The Evening Standard, now called The London Standard, on London’s world-famous Fleet Street.
His first day on the job took him to the criminal court. Michael was excited, thinking he’d be seated in the press box, but crime reporter Nelson Sullivan had other ideas.
“’You’re not coming in,’ he said to me, and fished a sign out of his pocket,” Michael tells NL. “He said, ‘Go and hang this in the nearest phone box.’ So I did. It said, ‘Out of order.’
“So, the press poured out, rushed to the phone box, saw the sign and rushed off. Finally, Sully, as we called him, ambled out, straight into the phone box and dictated his story,” Michael laughs. “That was my first experience of journalism.”
One of Michael’s many highlights while working for The Evening Standard was when he spent days in a boat off the coast of Falmouth, southwest England, waiting for American journalist Bob Manry to arrive after sailing across the Atlantic in a 14-foot yacht named Tinkerbell in 1965.
“The press descended on Falmouth,” says Michael. “We all wanted to be the first to talk to Bob, but we didn’t know which way he’d arrive. We hired boats and every day, we’d go out in different directions and come back at nighttime having failed to find him. But I found him first!”
One ‘not so brilliant’ highlight of his Fleet Street years was when he sat next to former Prime Minister Lord Clement Attlee in 1967.
“By this time, (he) was an old man. I wrote about how nice it was to see (him) and how well he was looking but two days later, he died! I came in for considerable ribbing,” Michael laughs.
Michael rubbed shoulders with many people through his work, including model Christine Keeler, whose affair with married UK secretary of state John Profumo contributed to the downfall of the Conservative government of the day – known as the Profumo scandal.
It was Michael’s work at BBC Television that introduced him to Australia.
“I thought it’d be nice to come back one day,” Michael says. “Little did I think that I’d be back a year later.”
He spent a year at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and ‘absolutely hated it’ before coming back to Australia to spend Christmas with a friend – but he never left.
“I landed on 16 December 1969, and that was it,” says Michael, who worked at The Daily Mirror initially before joining the ABC, where he spent five years on the City Extra morning program.
Having worked in newspapers, television and radio, Michael likes radio best.
“(Radio) combines immediacy with the ability to express oneself in a way that is very limiting in print – and I’ve got the perfect face for radio!” he laughs.
Michael began volunteering with 2MBS Fine Music in 2009 and has been presenting the Fine Music Drive program for 15 years. He’s also conducted 387 interviews over seven years for his In Conversation program.
He’s just written The Experiment that has Lasted Half a Century to mark the 2MBS’s 50th anniversary, which he says is ‘an extraordinary story.’
When he’s not in the studio, Michael loves walking along the Esplanade at Balmoral in Mosman, where he has lived for 45 years.
“People fly hundreds of miles to see sights that I’ve got on my doorstep,” he says. “How lucky can you be?”