{{Short description|English historian and journalist (1910–1953)}} {{Use dmy dates|date=January 2017}} '''Iris Vivienne Morley''' (10 May 1910 – 27 July 1953) was an English historian, writer and journalist. Morley was born at Carshalton, Surrey, the daughter of Colonel Lyddon Charteris Morley CBE and Gladys Vivienne Charteris Braddell.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20090829005013/http://geocities.com/myjacobfamily/nassau.html NASSAU ANCESTORS]</ref> She married Ronald Gordon Coates of the Devonshire Regiment on 10 January 1929. The couple divorced in 1934 and she married Alaric Jacob on 2 August 1934.
With Jacob, she was in America for a period where he was based as a foreign correspondent, and they stayed there until the beginning of World War II. During the war, she wrote her trilogy of historical novels - ''Cry Treason'' (1940), ''We Stood For Freedom'' (1941) and ''The Mighty Years'' (1943) - with James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, and William III, as central characters. Jacob was away for two years at this time reporting from war zones.<ref>Alaric Jacob ''A Traveller's War'' Collins 1944</ref>
She accompanied her husband to Moscow in January 1944<ref>Alaric Jacob ''A Window in Moscow'' Collins 1946</ref> and wrote her work ''Soviet Ballet'' published in 1945. Morley was a journalist for ''The Observer'' and ''The Yorkshire Post''. She became a Communist and her ideas strongly influenced her husband. She appears in Jacob's book ''Scenes from a Bourgeois Life'' published in 1949 as Miranda Ireton.<ref>Alaric Jacob ''Scenes from a Bourgeois Life'' Secker & Warburg 1949</ref> That same year, she and her husband were included on Orwell's list of people he considered unsuitable to be authors for the Information Research Department. This list was prepared in March 1949 by George Orwell for his friend Celia Kirwan at the IRD, a propaganda unit set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government.<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jun/21/books.artsandhumanities The Guardian John Ezard ''Blair's babe Did love turn Orwell into a government stooge?'' Saturday 21 June 2003]</ref>
In August 1948, Jacob had joined the BBC monitoring service at Caversham, but in February 1951 he was "suddenly refused establishment rights, which meant he would receive no pension."<ref>Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor: "Blacklist: The Inside Story of Political Vetting", Hogarth Press 1988</ref> By this, time Jacob and his wife were separated but his establishment and pension rights were only restored shortly after Iris Morley died in 1953.<ref>Timothy Garton Ash: "Orwell's List", ''The New York Review of Books'', Nr. 14, 25 September 2003</ref>
Jacob and Morley had a daughter. After her death he married the actress Kathleen Byron.
==Publications== * ''The Proud Paladin'' New York: William Morrow & Co, 1936 * ''Cry Treason'' London: Peter Davies, 1940 * ''We Stood for Freedom'' New York: William Morrow and Co, 1942 * ''The Mighty Years'' London: Peter Davies, 1943 * ''Soviet Ballet'' London: Collins, 1945 * ''Nothing but Propaganda'' London: Peter Davies, 1946 * ''Not Without Fantasy'' London: Peter Davies, 1947 * ''The Rose and the Star'' In collaboration with Phyllis Manchester 1949 *''The Rack'' London: Peter Davies, 1952 *''A Thousand Lives'' London: Andre Deutsch
==References== {{Reflist}} *[http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/101037784/ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Brian Pearce, ‘Morley, Iris Vivienne (1910–1953)’, rev., first published September 2004]
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Morley, Iris}} Category:1910 births Category:1953 deaths Category:British expatriates in the Soviet Union Category:Historians from London Category:Journalists from London Category:People educated at the Royal High School, Bath Category:People from Carshalton Category:Writers from the London Borough of Sutton Category:20th-century English women journalists Category:20th-century English journalists