Alexander Hargreaves ‘Sandy’ Morton was proposed by A. K. S. Lambton for membership of the Gibb Trustees at the meeting in Durham in 1985, and his first attendance was the following year in Cambridge, with Malcolm Lyons as Chairman. By that date, Sandy had recently become Lecturer in Persian at SOAS, where the demanding Professor Lambton would have had time to refresh her opinion of his talents and abilities – an opinion originally formed, no doubt, when first supervising Sandy's PhD thesis on nineteenthcentury Persian travel diaries and an opinion that survived her considerable disapproval of his failure to complete it.

The reasons for this ‘failure’ are not difficult to imagine, when life takes you on its course, but at the same time it is not entirely untypical of Sandy's later style; he had many interests and projects and worked on them at his own speed, with meticulous attention to detail but the lack of any obvious sense of urgency. He led a reflective, thoughtful life – if he was energetic, it was mentally rather than physically so. I count it, indeed, as one of the achievements of my own rather more hectic activities that I managed to wring two fine articles out of him for volumes I was editing, which I refused to finalise until I had received his contribution. In both cases, they are remarkable textual analyses of Persian historical works concerning the first Safavid ruler, Shah Isma‘il. Fortunately, the absence of a doctorate had no impact on his career, especially as he did not appear motivated by everyday ambitions or the urge for self-promotion. The recognition that he achieved and the respect in which he has been held came from his scholarship and his collegiality.

Sandy was born on 11 April 1942 in Multan, Pakistan, son of Kenneth Morton, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and Mary Hargreaves, whose father served in the Indian Archaeological Survey under Sir John Marshall, who worked on early excavations at the famous sites of Mohenjodaro and Taxila and ended his career as Director General of the Survey.