The life and death of the man who made the link between exercise and health

Until yesterday, I had never heard of Professor Jerry Morris. Yet a fascinating obituary in The Times made me wish I had. Maybe it is because I am now on the back nine of life, as over 50s golfers call it, that I read obituaries more than I used to. It is also - another back nine point perhaps - because often I will have known one or more of the people covered. Most weeks there seems to be a former MP who was around when I first covered Parliament. But it is also because with the standard of writing and reporting across most of the media falling, obituaries in the broadsheets often contain some of the best old-fashioned journalism, and the best stories. Professor Morris was Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a leading epidemiologist. The obit records that he 'effectively proved the connection between health and physical exercise by studying the comparative incidence of heart attacks between London's bus drivers and bus conductors.' I don't know why that tickled me so much, but tickle me it did. He was not the first to assume a link between exercise and health, but the first to provide data, first published in The Lancet in 1953. And its base was years of study of bus drivers, who spent most of their working day seated behind the wheel, and conductors who made hundreds of journeys up and down the stairs of double-decker buses every day. No prizes for guessing which group had the longer-lasting hearts. He did similar research among postal workers, finding that postmen who delivered on foot or by bike were less likely to have a heart attack than sedentary clerks or telephonists. And then he set to work on a study of 18,000 desk bound civil servants, and found that the fittest were those who undertook regular vigorous exercise. It all seems very obvious now. But it was trail-blazing stuff and he was considered something of an eccentric, not least because he was one of the first people to take up jogging. This was also the pre-computer age so this vast research was all recorded by pen and paper, but led eventually to the accepted wisdom that exercise is good for you. It appears to have been tough though. He clearly found it difficult to get acceptance for his work. Some of the papers ridiculed him. It was when the Americans took up his research that he started to make a bit of progress. He later sat on a number of public health policy committees but again found resistance to measures he recommended to tackle problems caused by smoking, pollution, health inequalities. I loved the exchange recorded when Professor Morris was studying juvenile rheumatism and rheumatic heart disease, which affected poor children, and a superior who worked in Harley Street and at Eton, said he never saw a single case at the school. 'An acute clinical observation,' remarked the professor. He enjoyed a low pulse rate and well into his nineties he swam, cycled or walked every day. He did most of his running round Hampstead Heath, so I must have seen him over the years. And in the last eight weeks of his life he went to 14 plays, four operas and two concerts. He was '99 and a half.' A life well lived.