Alan Moorehead

Alan McCrae Moorehead, (22 July 1910 – 29 September 1983) was an Australian war correspondent and author of popular histories, most notably two books on the nineteenth-century exploration of the Nile, The White Nile and The Blue Nile (1962).

Biography Moorehead was born in Melbourne, Australia. He was educated at Scotch College, with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne. He travelled to England in 1937 and became a renowned foreign correspondent for the London Daily Express. Writer, world traveller, biographer, essayist, journalist, Moorehead was one of the most successful writers in English of his day. He married Lucy Milner, who at the Daily Express in 1937 "presided over a women's page free of the patronising sentimentality which marked much writing for women at the time".

During World War II he won an international reputation for his coverage of campaigns in the Middle East and Asia, the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe.

He was twice mentioned in despatches and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. According to the critic Clive James, "Moorehead was there for the battles and the conferences through North Africa, Italy and Normandy all the way to the end. The hefty but unputdownable African Trilogy, still in print today, is perhaps the best example of Moorehead's characteristic virtue as a war correspondent: he could widen the local story to include its global implications." And James further affirmed, "His copy was world-famous at the time and has stayed good; he was a far better reporter on combat than his friend Ernest Hemingway." Moorehead's 1946 biography of Montgomery also remains well considered – "Moorehead was well able to see – as Wilmot calamitously didn't – that Eisenhower was Montgomery's superior in character and judgment."

In 1956, his book Gallipoli about the Allies' disastrous First World War campaign at Gallipoli, received almost unprecedented critical acclaim (though it was later criticised by the British Gallipoli historian Robert Rhodes James as "deeply flawed and grievously over-praised"). In England, the book won the Sunday Times thousand-pound award and gold medal was the first recipient of the Duff Cooper Memorial Award. The presentation of the latter was made by Sir Winston Churchill on 28 November 1956.

While on a trip to Australia in 1965, Moorehead began to collaborate with producer Robert Raymond. Raymond said in 1966 that he "first got the idea for the documentary when Alan Moorehead was out here last year on a visit. He was working on the establishment of the Australian Wildlife Foundation, and while I was talking to him one day I suddenly said, 'Why don't we do a program?'" This became a two part documentary, 'We, the Destroyers,' broadcast on the commercial channel station TCN-9 in August, 1966. It was an investigation of the damage being done to Australia's flora and fauna. This was a time of higher ecological awareness in Australia, which was accompanied by the launch of the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1965.

In 1966, Moorehead and his wife, younger son and daughter (Caroline Moorehead) made what became for him the first of an annual series of visits to Australia. There he had completed a television script for his manuscript "Darwin and the Beagle", but tragedy struck before the book was published. That December, suffering from headaches, he went into London's Westminster Hospital for an angiogram which precipitated a major stroke. The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840 (Hamish Hamilton, 1966); revised, illustrated edition, 1987. Darwin and the Beagle (Hamish Hamilton, 1969). A Late Education: Episodes in a Life (Hamish Hamilton, 1970); autobiography, and his friendship with Alexander Clifford during the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

Contributions to The New Yorker Incomplete – to be updated Title Department Volume/Part Date Page(s) Subject(s) Illustrious Sir: If You Value Your Life ... A Reporter in Sicily 25/50 4 February 1950 36–47 The Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano. The Angel in May Profiles 26/8 24 February 1951 34-65 Angelo Poliziano.