Ian Morrison (journalist)

Ian Ernest McLeavy Morrison (1913 – 12 August 1950) was an Australian journalist and war correspondent for The Times. He was one of the first journalists to be killed in the Korean War. The Academy Award-nominated film Love is a Many-Splendored Thing is based on Morrison's love affair with author Han Suyin in Hong Kong.

He was born 1913 in Peking, as the oldest son to Australian adventurer and journalist George Ernest Morrison (1862–1920) and Jennie Wark Robin (1889–1923). His father had been living in Peking on and off since 1897, when he had been stationed there as The Times' first Peking correspondent. In 1919, the family moved to United Kingdom, where the father died in 1920. Ian Morrison and his two younger brothers, Alastair Gwynne (1915–2009) and Colin (1917–1990), were all educated at Winchester College before continuing to Cambridge University.

In 1935, Morrison was appointed English lecturer at Hokkaido Imperial University in Sapporo, Japan, where he remained until 1938, when he became secretary to the British Ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie.

In 1941, Morrison married the Austrian/Czechoslovakian Maria Neubauer in Hong Kong. They had met earlier in Shanghai. They had two children, Nicholas and Petra. In 1946, his brother Colin married Maria's sister, Steffi.

During the Second World War, Morrison covered the Pacific Front, being promoted from freelance contributor to full-time staff correspondent of The Times. His first assignment was to cover the Battle of Singapore. During a November 1942 air raid during the Battle of Buna-Gona, he was mildly injured, and in December 1943 he fractured his vertebrae and suffered head trauma as a result of a plane crash. He then telegraphed The Times:

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