Condolences

“Thank you for leading me to the wonderland of marine biology, and your inspiration did change my life. I am very proud to be your first student, and you set an excellent role model for the Morton’s clan to follow. You will stay in our hearts forever. Vale Brian!”  

“Farewell Brian, our beloved ‘See Fu’. Thanks for being a lifelong teacher and friend. You taught me that anything can be achieved if you believe it's important enough and you showed us how it's done by your life's work. As I navigate through myriad of challenges in my life, you never judged my decisions and you're always there with good advice, full support and enlightening humour. You are gone yet always here.”  

Remembrance articles of Professor Brian Morton by Dr Winnie Tang:
《悼香港海洋生態保育之父》，信報財經

“In memory of father of marine ecological conservation in HK”, EJ Insight

   — Dr Khaki CHAN 

 

On Brian
 

Brian had a dry sense of humour, which I learnt about when he was at SWIMS, the marine institute he established with “Morton’s Way”. I just regret I didn’t seize all the opportunities to learn about the ocean from him. Instead we ran into each other at the bar in the Senior Common Room, over a beer and the sunset. Then whenever he was back at HKU, we would have a big, warm hug.

A few years ago I visited him in Little Hampton. Such peace! We were emailing a lot too, when he would tell some of the funniest stories including that of a pen. Again, I would have loved to know more about life under the water and his life in particular – only this time it would be from his books and drawings, mapped to his passionate voice.

Brian, thank you for your love of Hong Kong and HKU.

 

It is a depressing and difficult task to write about Brian.  Depressing for all the obvious reasons.  Difficult because he accomplished so much that any sort of precis is bound to miss a lot.  Difficult, too, because he was a complex man, not easily summed up in a few paragraphs – or even pages.  This reminiscence is inevitably highly selective.

First the straightforward stuff.  Brian was – unarguably – the most important marine biologist to have worked in Hong Kong and at Hong Kong University; I add that phrase because he was proud of the association and, after all, he did spend his entire career with the institution after joining in 1969.  It is solely because of Brian’s energy and drive that the Swire Group of Companies was willing to partner with HKU to establish the Swire Institute of Marine Sciences in 1989.  It has been a great success.  SWIMS is now going through its second renovation and expansion, and supports a vibrant, international group of graduate students and research scientists.  Of course, Brian trained many of his own graduate students before and after establishment of SWIMS, some of whom went on to hold influential positions in government departments charged with looking after Hong Kong’s environment, or in education; others have contributed to society in a variety of ways. Brian was a passionate teacher of undergraduates, and was effective in that role because he genuinely loved what he was doing and wanted to convey that ardor to the next generation of scientists and citizens.  Brian also made used of his many international connections and his location in Hong Kong to run a series of international workshops – some focusing on marine ecology, others on malacology (= the study of molluscs) – where scientists lived and worked together for a couple of weeks contributing work that increased our knowledge of local biodiversity.  The best of these were held at Wu Kwai Sha in the years before it became part of Ma On Shan New Town and gained its own MTR station. They featured extensive field work, intricate procedures carried out in makeshift temporary laboratories established for the workshops.  The long days were followed by much late night discussion and carousing fueled by San Miguel beer thereby forging many long-term collaborations and friendships.   Marvelous times, indeed.

 

And then there was Brian’s own scientific output.  There was certainly a great deal of it, reflecting the inordinate amount of energy that he always seemed able to conjure up (despite the aforementioned carousing and, for many years, his prodigious consumption of Winston cigarettes).  What was perhaps Brian’s most important single contribution appeared relatively early, and was published by HKU Press in 1983.  Soon after arriving in Hong Kong, Brian realized that there was no accessible literature on local inshore marine life.  To remedy this, he coauthored (with New Zealander John Morton – no relation) a book entitled The Seashore Ecology of Hong Kong.  It was a handbook that any interested student or layperson could use to find her way around the coasts of Hong Kong, while learning about their natural history and fauna.  It was illustrated by many line drawings of the animals and their habitats (which Brian provided himself), and almost 40 years later is still the go-to reference for our shores.   In the interim, some of the names of the creatures featured in the book have changed – taxonomist are wont to adjust and tinker with Latin binomials, and higher rankings such as genera and families tend to shift a bit - but none of this was Brian’s fault, and the book is still remarkably useful.  One thing it does reveal is the extent to which communities on particular shores have changed over the years.  For instance, the description of Hoi Sing Wan (Starfish Bay) incudes sketches of many creatures that cannot be found there today – most notably, the starfish. If he had accomplished nothing else (although there was much more to come), The Seashore Ecology of Hong Kong secured Brian’s place as the founding father of marine biology in the territory. 

 

During his years here, he devastation people wrought upon the Hong Kong environment were not lost on Brian, and he was a fierce critic of those – including government – who attempted to conceal or disregard them.  During the 1980s, denial of pollution and environmental degradation was certainly the default mode of the local authorities, and Brian would frequently call them out for it.  During one memorable occasion local on TV, Brian railed about the untreated “… pig shit …” flowing into Tolo Harbour - to the evident alarm (it might have been glee) of the show’s presenter.  His concern for local conservation led Brian to the local chapter of WWF, which was just getting started in the early 1980s.  He became chairman of their education committee charged with increasing awareness of the environment in local schools. That was a big ask at the time: children had little exposure to or interest in nature (even most of those studying biology at HKU were doing so only because they had failed to be admitted to medical school), and the local environment was not mentioned in school science curricula.  I believe Brian took on this important task because he realized that effective protection of nature and the environment had to begin with awareness and education.  That seems obvious now, but it was not so then, and Brian deserves credit for perceiving and building upon the connection.  Later he was instrumental in the establishment of WWF’s Hoi Ha Wan Marine Life Centre.  As WWF (HK) approaches its 40^th anniversary, and has grown from an organization that had only a single staff member to one with a complement of over 120, it is important to acknowledge that Brian played an important role in its development.  A small part of Brian’s role in the WWF story involved the annual Big Bird Race in which teams would rush around Hong Kong and the New Territories for 24 hours trying to spot as many species of birds as they could in order to raise sponsorship money.  For a few years, Brian and I were part of a team called the Birdbrains (Brian was Captain) and, one year (I think it was around 1985), he came up with the notion that we should compose a team song about our bird-spotting experiences and perform it for all the other race participants at the after-party. A fragment of the lyrics is included in the title of this reminiscence.  (Hint: think of Mr Sinatra singing ‘My Way’-“… then again, too few to mention”.)

 

Going back to his research, Brian often described himself as a marine biologist, sometimes as an ecologist, and occasionally as a malacologist. None of these entirely hit the mark.  He was something of a generalist, but was, at heart, a zoologist and his interest in marine biology and ecology was primarily driven by trying to understand what the animals were doing in their habitat – in other words, how they fed, moved, and made a living.   His core scientific work concerned the functional morphology of bivalves (oysters, clams, and the like); his basic approach was to take them to bits to see how they worked.  Mostly this involved opening the shell and examining the soft parts using a range of techniques.  But Brian’s great skill was to translate the rather amorphous internal anatomy of bivalves into intricate 3-D drawings of how the parts worked together and contributed to a functioning animal.  He used the drawing process as a way of seeing or understanding the creature.  I doubt there was anyone else working with bivalves who had Brian’s depth of understanding and grasp of the biology of these animals.  It is a pity that he never trained a graduate student in functional morphology or left a successor; perhaps he felt there were too many pressing topics deserving of study in the seas around Hong Kong.   

 

I have already referred to Brian’s energy, but I need to say a little more about him as a person. He could be immensely kind and generous, and was always fiercely loyal to his graduate students, but was occasionally capable of extreme belligerence – sometimes, although certainly by no means always, directed at those he regarded (up until then) as friends.  Often this bellicosity passed without any lingering animosity, but that wasn’t always the case and Brian could be his own worst enemy.  He would seldom take a moderate position in an argument if he could adopt a more extreme view.  Plus he was not at all ‘woke’, and wouldn’t have recognized the need even if it had been pointed out to him.  (Woe betide anyone who might try!)  And because he had worked hard to get to where he was, Brian took a rather dim view of people who (he felt) were undeserving of their rank or station.  He wasn’t always right about that: Brian did not remain a fan of those who hired him to join HKU or smoothed his path to becoming a professor, but they certainly did the right thing in recruiting him and facilitating his advancement.  Hong Kong, the university and its students, as well as marine science are richer for it. 

 

Brian was a larger-than-life character who could be a little brash at times.  He seemed totally bulletproof, and those who knew him tended to underestimate his insecurities.  But he could be very sensitive to things he imagined undermined his position, or underplayed the importance of SWIMS and his own role in maintaining it.  Because Brian achieved so much, and with apparent ease, it was easy to take his robustness for granted.  Friends and colleagues occasionally failed to take sufficient account of insecurities that – in certain situations – could give rise to a ferocious response.  It is probably fair to say that, sometimes, we let him down.  We shouldn’t have missed it: after all, Brian was a Barry Manilow fan – how hard core could he really be?

 

All things must pass.  But given his legacy, Brian will not be forgotten.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
 

 

In remembrance of Brian Morton 
 
It is impossible to sum up in words the profound influence that Brian Morton had on everyone that he met. And it is even more difficult to sum up his impact on WWF Hong Kong’s development in the last 40 years. 
 
Brian sat on WWF’s executive council for 22 years and transferred his passion for marine conservation to everyone he met. Brian was a mentor to more people than I can count. His expertise in marine and freshwater ecology and malacology played an integral role in developing WWF’s wetlands and oceans conservation work. He helped WWF grow from a small volunteer organization into the city’s largest green NGO and laid the groundwork for environmental education programmes that are still running today. 
 
In the early days, Brian was helping to raise money for the purchase of gei wai at Mai Po – to protect the flocks of migrating birds that visit each year in spring and autumn – through the Bird Bird Race. In 1987 he established a University of Hong Kong team namely “Birdbrains”. Brian participated in every Big Bird Race event until 2003. In this period, Brian and the Birdbrains raised almost HK$1.4 million for WWF Mai Po conservation and education programmes.  
 
Brian’s pioneering work also include in the passing of the Marine Parks Ordinance in 1995 and the declaration of Hoi Ha Wan and other sites as marine parks in 1996. Again, he played an essential role in the founding of WWF Hoi Ha Marine Life Centre. He was an advocator for, and collaborator on, the setting up of WWF Hoi Ha Marine Life Centre. Nowadays, the centre is the important gateway for many students and general public to learn and experience the beauty of Hong Kong marine environment. Brian was firstly invited by Sir David Akers-Jones to set up WWF education committee to lead the development of environmental education since 80s. His vision for educating the new generation of Hong Kong youth was passed on to all the WWF educators that worked with him.  
 
Words may fail to sum up the lasting influence that Brian has had on all of us at the panda family, but I am proud to see his legacy in our work every day. Our education programmes go from strength to strength, and our education centres at Mai Po, Island House, and Hoi Ha Wan still bear the recognizable stamp of his input.
 
Thank you, Brian. You will be deeply missed by the panda family!
 
Nicole Wong
Acting CEO, WWF Hong Kong
 
25 June 2021