Having risen to the top of the seemingly disparate worlds of rock photography and technical diving, Keith Morris demonstrated a rare ability to immerse himself in utterly different disciplines. Morris, who went missing from a dive on a submarine wreck in the English Channel on 17 June, was among the most influential divers in Britain.
Born in Wandsworth in 1938, his father was a promising footballer whose professional ambitions were thwarted by the Second World War. Determined to make the most of his own athletic prowess, Morris pushed himself hard at school sports (he was athletics captain of Farnham Grammar School in Surrey) and, aged 17, was ranked second in Britain's youth section for the 1,500 metres race.
After a spell of travelling, he returned to study photography at Guildford Arts School. A glamorous apprenticeship ensued in which he worked for several fashionable photographers, notably David Bailey. He continued his induction into the Sixties underground by working for the irreverent magazine, Oz, but it was his photographs of rock musicians that really made his name.
Morris photographed the key musical figures of the age, including Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Costello (who he taught to dive) and even Fred Astaire. He was known in the music industry as the only professional to have photographed the cult singer/songwriter Nick Drake before his premature death in 1974. But by the mid-eighties Morris had gravitated away from rock photography and was devoting more time to his other passion - adventurous diving.
He had started scuba diving back in the Sixties, using borrowed equipment. Initially self-taught, he trained formally with BSAC and quickly found himself at the forefront of the sport. Super-fit and determined to push the sport's boundaries, he specialised in diving in extreme tidal systems where planning, experience and physical strength were crucial. He attained the BSAC's highest qualification - national instructor - and won the Wilkinson Sword for his outstanding performance in the exam. He hung the trophy in his photographic studio and visiting musicians would ask what it was. 'When I told them, they didn't seem to be all that impressed,' he said years later.
He developed an obsession with the Corryvreckan, a legendary whirpool off Jura in the Hebrides. Over the course of more than 30 dives, he studied the pinnacle, which works with racing tides to create the whirlpool. 'It's the most amazing place,' he told DIVE magazine last year. 'There is this eerie growling sound created by water flowing through caves in the pinnacle. It makes for a spooky dive, especially with local stories about the Cailleach Uragaig, a Celtic 'hag of the deep' who lives at the bottom of the whirlpool.' Morris assumed a near-religious devotion to the pinnacle and its wildlife, forbidding his diving charges from removing lobsters from the area.
BSAC national instructor Robin Eccles remembers being selected to accompany Morris on a fast drift along the Swinge in Alderney. 'It was a manic drift and our liveaboard, the Maureen, tracked us at eight knots. The experience opened my eyes to the possibilities that diving could offer. Keith was one of the great diving extroverts - he was passionate about everything he did.'
In the early Nineties, he was drawn to America by the advent of mixed gas diving. Britain today has a thriving community of technical divers, many of whom were taught by Morris. One of his peers was technical diver Richard Bull, who as bassist with the Kursaal Flyers had been photographed by Morris.
'I saw a lot of Keith in the mid 1970s,' Bull told DIVE. 'Incredibly, he didn't know I was a diver and I didn't know he was until we bumped into each other at a BSAC first class theory exam ten years later in 1985! (well, the other bloke propping up the bar in the Marquee Club couldn't be a diver, could he?). Let there be no mistake about it - Keith was a pioneer of technical diving in this country. He was one of the very first to make the journey to Key West to train with Billy Deans - at about the same time that Rob Palmer and I were living on Tom Mount's floor in Miami and soaking up Tom's philosophies.
'I last dived with Keith a couple of years ago in Tunisia when we were making a film about Malta Convoy shipwrecks with Mike Pitts. I remember looking at him hovering at 70m next to the massive guns of HMS Manchester. I saw a man at peace and totally comfortable with his surroundings. I saw a man who was meant to be there.'
In common with some of his favourite musicians, Morris was prone to bouts of depression. It stemmed from the death of his 15-year-old son, Lee, in 1991. Following his father, Lee had qualified as a diver and was training at an inland site when he got into difficulties and drowned. Morris seldom talked of the loss, but decided to continue diving despite the periods of depression he suffered for years afterwards.
He worked as an instructor trainer for Technical Divers International (TDI) and led several expeditions in which he located historic shipwrecks. In 2002, one of his teams located and dived the wreck of HMS Limbourne, a British Hunt-class destroyer sunk during the disastrous Operation Tunnel in the Second World War. 'When I finally saw the remains of the wreck, it was so obviously the Limbourne that we didn't need to find anything else to make the identification - but we found the bell anyway,' he said at the time. 'The year before, we found the Charybdis, which went down during the same engagement in Operation Tunnel. It was a typical Navy cock-up - the Charybdis was going after a decoy and got picked off by an S-boat.'
Often gruff but usually amiable, Morris threw himself into his interests so utterly that success was inevitable. 'I've always been freelance and I've never had a job,' he said. 'I've always thought that you should do something that you enjoy doing, then work out a way to make a living doing it.' He successfully completed the London Marathon earlier this year and was thought to be in excellent physical condition when he embarked on his final dive. At the time of writing his body had not been found and the precise circumstances around his death remain a mystery. He leaves two daughters.
