Papers of Dr. Kenneth R.S. Morris

Letters, diaries, reports, memoranda and photographs relating to service in the Gold Coast (1929-1952), Uganda (1955-1958, and c.1961-1963) and Liberia (1959-1960), mainly concerning research into sleeping sickness and the tsetse fly, with related printed material, 1932-1960.

Kenneth Robert Stacey Morris was born on the 23 February 1901 in Cornwall, England. He was educated at Blundell's School in Tiverton, Newton College in Newton Abbott, and later in his life studied at the Royal College of Science and the Imperial College of Science and Technology. After teaching for a short period at Bedales School (1924-1926) he returned to his own studies and obtained a BSc. in Biology in 1928. Later in that year he joined the Colonial Service and was appointed Assistant Entomologist at the Medical Research Institute in the Gold Coast, Africa. He spent much of his time studying the life-cycle and habitat of the tsetse fly, a subject which occupied the majority of his working life in Africa.

In 1931 Morris went back to England, and in 1932 started work at the Parasite Laboratory of the Institute of Entomology at Farnham Royal, Buckinghamshire. He remained there for 4 years during which time he obtained a PhD for a thesis on the Bionomics of a Tsetse.

Morris returned to the Gold Coast in 1937 when he was appointed to the post of Medical Entomologist; he remained in the Gold Coast for 15 years whilst he continued his researches into sleeping sickness and the tsetse fly. During this period he obtained a DSc. for a thesis on the Control of Trypanosomiasis (1946). He also formed the Gold Coast Department of Tsetse Control (1949) and was Director of this Department until 1952, at which point he retired from the Colonial Service.

On his retirement from the Colonial Service Morris formed an ecological research station for Nature Conservancy at Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria, England; he was Director of this research station until 1955. Morris' next appointment was back in Africa where he worked for the East African Trypanosomiasis Research Organisation (EATRO) in Uganda and other East African countries including the Sudan and Kenya (1955-1958). Between 1956 and 1960 he also carried out research in Liberia for the American Foundation for Tropical Medicine. In 1961 he became a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Department of Pathology at Makerere College Medical School. Morris retired to New Zealand where he became a broadcaster, journalist and lecturer. He died in April 1980.

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Collection level description created by Marion Lowman, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House.

The library holds a card index of all manuscript collections in its reading room and a handlist is also available for this collection.

Listed as no.1260 in Manuscript Collections in Rhodes House Library Oxford, Accessions 1978-1994 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 1996).

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Donated to the Oxford Development Records Project.