Christopher J.A. Morry

The Last of the West Country Merchants is the second foray into the field of historical writing by the author who, having been educated and trained in the environmental sciences, and having worked in that field for over forty years, has produced scores of scientific and technical papers, book chapters and research and science policy monographs.

You Can Take the Boy Out Of the Bay is the third and final book in what the author thinks of as the "Morry Trilogy". It consists of about one hundred comic anecdotes concerning the early life in Newfoundland, the US and Canada of his father, Thomas Graham Morry.

Christopher John Augustine Morry was conceived in Newfoundland before Confederation but born a month later, thus a true and proud Newfoundlander and Canadian. He was the second son among the four children of Thomas Graham Morry, of Ferryland and Evelyn Mary Wheeler, of St. John’s, a union of “bayman and townie” that has left him with a life-long love and loyalty to the two main social divisions of Newfoundland society. His third name, Augustine, given at his Confirmation, was adopted in print only at the time of his first historical publication to distinguish him from a cousin named Christopher John Morry who publishes in the domain of communications as a support for human development in the third world.

His first historical narrative, “When the Great Red Dawn is Shining” (2014), concerned the experiences of his grandfather, Howard Leopold Morry, as an ordinary foot soldier in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment during the horrors of warfare in Gallipoli, on the Somme and in Ypres during WWI. This second book contains the essence of his 25 years of research on his own family, the Morrys of Devon and Newfoundland, as a model of the group of small to medium-scale merchants from the “West Country” who came at the very end of colonial exploitation of the Newfoundland cod fishery and chose to remain in their adopted home.