Some questions have arisen on various forums with regard to my relationship with karate.  To set the record straight, I'll be making a series of posts that will shed light on the events that have shaped my life as a martial artist, including how karate factors into the equation--and how it doesn't.

The seed of my martial art journey was planted when I was eight in Malaysia during the Bandit Campaign of the early 1950s, where my father was stationed preparing Gurkha troops for jungle warfare.  My father also organized sports days and events for the military stationed in Ipoh.  As part of the ‘other entertainment’ he recruited members of the Ipoh Chin Woo athletic association  to put on kung fu demonstrations, and so I  got to see kung fu at these events as well as at the local cinema, street vendors, local temples, recreational grounds, and kampongs where I played or visited my Malay, Chinese and Indian friends.  I can still clearly recall these images, which were to become a part of my personal imagery of how I believed the life of warriors to be. I also internalized images of my father’s physical prowess and the Fairburn-type training, milling, bayonet fighting, fencing and boxing training that he conducted in his gymnasium. I saw men running assault courses and the boxing tournaments that my father organized; I saw Gurkha troops training with the kukri  and engaging in bando-style boxing at special festivals, including the decapitating of a water buffalo with one stroke of a large kukri.  And I occasionally saw the bodies of Communist  bandits on the back of a Gurkha  truck parked near the school I attended.

As I’ve written in the autobiography on my website, I was a somewhat wild  kid, always in fights.  I was daring almost to the point of being suicidal.  My mother’s solution was to try to beat it out of me with cricket stumps, steel stair rods, or anything else that was hard that came to hand.  My father, a member of the Army Physical Training Corps Tough Tactic Teams, took a different approach.  He enforced a military style discipline and engaged me in the ways of the military gymnasium. He  encouraged me in sport to be fiercely competitive even when the odds were stacked against me—and he usually stacked the odds against me himself!  I can recall on sports days in Malaya (as Malaysia was then known), irrespective of how much older  and bigger some of the other kids were, he would handicap me in the sprints, throwing the cricket ball and other events.  He still expected to me win because I was Steve Morris’ son.  

My father treated me as if I were a much older boy; when I had tonsillitis as an eight-year-old child in Ipoh, I recall being  placed  in a Land Rover with a Gurkha driver armed with a Sten gun  at the height of the bandit campaign and making the long journey to Kuala Lumper Military Hospital to have my tonsils out. When I arrived at the hospital I refused to go on to the family ward and was finally put on the male ward instead, where I was taken under the wing of the soldiers who were hospitalized there.  Whatever the challenge, I was expected to rise to it.

Like any other kid, I had fights.  Unlike any other kid, I had lots of them, especially after moving from the rural setting of the Welsh farmhouse  where I was born to the bombed out slums of Nechells, Birmingham at the end of the WWII.  The frequency of these fights increased when I was placed in a military  boarding school in Germany from age 11 to 15.  Then, when my father was posted to Tripoli in 1958, I was persuaded by my parents to become a boy soldier.  As the numbers of boys around me increased, so did the frequency of my fights.  Whilst I’d always been a good scrapper, I  never stopped wanting to be a better one.  My motivation came not only because I loved to fight  and win—especially against older and bigger boys—but also because I ran a money lending racket at Harrogate, and getting my money back plus interest wasn’t always easy, if you know what I mean.   

As chance would have it, in 1959 shortly after becoming a boy soldier I saw an advertisement in Titbits  magazine for Leong Fu’s ‘Karato’ correspondence course (coincidentally, he was from Ipoh, the same place  I had spent some of my childhood).  I ordered it, and it was this course that sparked the next nine years of my resourcing all kinds of martial art material. I  collected  books and magazines on boxing, wrestling, ju jutsu, judo, fencing, karate, and military manuals on close-quarter combat and war  .During the nine years I spent in the Army I also  collected  Super 8 films on boxing (and even one of Muay Thai) as well as books on Buddhism and yoga.  I even became a member of the Buddhist society in Russell Square.  Key amongst my collection were four books I’d nicked from  my father: Jack Dempsey’s Championship Fighting and the three fencing books by Roger Croisner, Aldo  Nadi,  and CL de Beamount.

In hindsight, it was these four books that laid the foundations of much of my thinking about martial arts. However, as a teenager the more I read about  Japan, the samurai Zen Buddhism, and karate, the more I became convinced that the Japanese martial arts and karate in particular would take me to the next level as a fighter.  However, I had never seen karate in action except for a brief glimpse of it on a Cliff Mitchellmore  programme called ‘Tonight’ around  1960. My personal interpretation of karate was largely  based on the kung fu I’d seen as a child.

Then, in 1965/6 when on leave from Benghazi, I visited Vernon Bell’s karate dojo in London. What I had imagined karate to be—indeed, what I’d been teaching myself and testing in fights—was something completely different from what was going on in Vernon Bell’s dojo. I’d placed a completely different interpretation on the dynamics as well as application of  karate’s moves.  At the time, I just couldn’t believe that  what Bell’s students were practicing was  karate, particularly with regard to how they fought.  Their kumite bore no resemblance to any fight I’d ever had, or seen   And when some brown belt  broke a  baked half-inch board  after setting up as if he were going to attempt to knock down the fucking  Empire State Building (I was breaking bricks and slabs of concrete and taking the tops of bottles around this time),  I openly laughed  out loud.  The visit was a complete waste of time and I kept telling myself this couldn’t be karate.

But, as I was to later find out, it  was. So for those who state that it took me 30 years to find out that karate wasn’t what it was cracked up to be—actually,I’d already started to figure that one out  in 1965\6, long before karate had become popularized in the West.