Anglo-Welsh journalist and historian Jan Morris was BOTD in 1926. Born James Morris in Clevedon, Somerset to a Welsh and English mother, she was raised and educated in Oxford. She studied at Oxford University, joining the British Army towards the end of World War Two. After the war, Morris wrote for The Times of London and was the only journalist to join Edmund Hillary’s 1953 expedition to Mount Everest, reporting the news of the successful ascent. Morris produced the first evidence of the 1956 Israeli-French invasion of Egypt, and reported on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. A popular history and travel writer, her three-volume history of the British Empire, Pax Britannica, received widespread praise. Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949 and had five children together. She began transitioning to female in the 1960s under the care of American sexologist Harry Benjamin, travelling to Morocco in 1972 to undergo gender reassignment surgery with pioneering French surgeon Georges Burou. She described her gender transition in her 1974 memoir Conundrum which became a bestseller, becoming one of the first public figures in Britain to identify as transsexual. Morris later revealed that British doctors had been unwilling to perform her reassignment surgery unless she and Tuckiness divorced, which they were unwilling to do. They remained together, eventually divorcing and re-entering into a civil partnership in 2008. Morris died in 2020 aged 94.