Series - Robert James Morris

William Knibb Morris (1833-1912), was born at Loughton, Essex UK, son of Thomas Morris (1800-1874) and Sarah (Allard 1803-1876). He and his father sailed in the Boomerang from Liverpool to Melbourne in 1855 and arrived in Hobart by the SS City of Hobart on 24 May 1855. His brother James had emigrated earlier in 1853 with his wife Elizabeth (Bryant) and baby Thomas and worked for J.B. Mather, who sponsored Thomas and William Morris as bounty emigrants and lent money for the fare (W. Morris mentions in a letter that he had not paid Mather for the tickets). Thomas Morris got a job with R.A. Mather and William started work for H.J. Marsh & Brother's ironmongers, serving in the shop and keeping the books. They lived at first in James Morris' home with his wife, father-in-law Bryant, and the babies, William James born in December 1853 and daughter Mary Elizabeth born 13 July 1855, the first child Thomas having died in Hobart in February 1854, and friend Isaac Cash. William wrote to his mother, however, that James was charging too much for their lodging. In 1861 his mother, Sarah Morris, came to join her husband. In 1859, after a year or two in a store at Falmouth as agent of the East Coast Steam Navigation Co of which J.B. Mather was manager, James Morris went to work for J.A. Graham in his store at Swansea and in 1869 purchased the store from Graham. After eighteen months in Hobart William K. Morris ran a store at Fingal. In 1860 he was managing a store in Sydney for Mr Beamis but this was closed when the owner Mr Beamis was dying in August 1860. He then went to Gayndah in Queensland to work in a store run by Beamis' son until May 1861. In October 1861 he was back in Sydney looking for work and in November went to Orange and then Forbes, on the N.S.W. goldfields, working for a storekeeper named Curran and in 1862 he worked in South Gundagai in Gasse & Co's store. About 1864 he opened a general store at Fingal. In 1869 he married Sarah Rebecca Rothwell and they had seven children between 1870 and 1882. In 1877 he sold his Fingal store and brought his family to Hobart, where he worked for the merchant Leo Susman and later for the Hobart Mutual Benefit Society.
Morris was interested in scientific discoveries including photography, especially methods of copying photographs on paper and there are many references to scientific matters in his letters to his brother Tom, who was also interested in photography and Tom's future wife, Jane Garman was a photographer. In August 1855 Morris wrote to his brother about another method, "besides the collodion" of "photographic pictures on paper described in Mr Woods of Cheapside's little book which is a very simple and good method, and when taken they can be waxed which renders them almost equal to those taken on waxed paper". He sent his brother "a small picture taken by the above process, a positive which I transferred to a piece of paper treated with the chloride sodium in the usual way". A Hobart photographer, Walter Dickenson, might have taken him as an assistant but Morris was afraid of the risk of leaving the commercial - life for the artistic. Morris does not seem to have done much photography himself when he was working as a storekeeper in Queensland, N.S.W. and Fingal, although he bought photo-slides to send to his brother. Indeed he may not have owned a camera at that time as he borrowed Clifford's camera to photograph his parents' house at Mangana and had his children's portraits done by professional photographers. His interests turned more to the development of the electric telegraph and the telephone, electric lighting and the microscope and there are many references to developments in Tasmania and on the mainland. In 1888 he became an active member of the newly formed Photographic Society in Hobart, especially in working various kinds of lantern projectors, and in 1891 he referred to his "little camera"