Founder of the Shannon Trust reading project for prisoners
In the summer of 1992, when Christopher Morgan sat down to write to a prisoner who was serving life for murder, he could have had no inkling of where the correspondence would take him. Morgan, who has died aged 84, had joined a pen-pal scheme operated by the Prison Reform Trust, with the intention of "giving prisoners a window to the outside world". He was allocated the lifer Tom Shannon. It was an unlikely pairing: Morgan was a gentleman farmer and Old Etonian; and Shannon a rough-and-ready, semi- literate orphan, who had survived behind bars by standing up for himself.
They were to correspond for several years and Morgan was struck by Shannon's graphic and moving description of the penal system. In 1995, he published a selection of the letters in Invisible Crying Tree. The book sold well and Morgan decided to put the royalties to good use. As he said at the time: "I did not want to make money from the book and Tom Shannon could not."
Through his correspondence with Shannon, Morgan was aware of the appalling illiteracy rates in prison, with almost half the population unable to read. The idea came to him – in the bath, he said – that the half who could read could teach the half who could not. From that simple formula, the Shannon Trust was born. In 1997, Morgan bought copies of Toe by Toe, a highly structured reading plan developed by Keda and Harry Cowling, and took his idea to the head of the prison service, Richard Tilt. Although sceptical at first, Tilt allowed Morgan to carry out a pilot study at Wandsworth prison, a south London jail not known for progressive thinking, saying: "If it works there, it can work anywhere."
In the beginning, the scheme floundered. Morgan put up notices which, of course, the potential learners could not read. Then he discovered non-readers were reluctant to come forward. Morgan was near to giving up when a prison officer, Neil Lodge, became seized by the scheme's potential and set about finding mentors and learners. Within a year, 50 men had learned to read and the programme was on its way. Now, Toe by Toe is in place in almost every prison in Britain. Last year, 9,000 prisoners learned to read by the method and, all told, 50,000 prisoners have been helped by the trust since it was founded.
Morgan was born in Bromley, Kent, to General Sir William Morgan and his wife Amy. His father was awarded the DSO in the first world war and by 1945 was supreme allied commander for the Mediterranean, accepting the first surrender of German forces in the war, after their defeat in Italy. After Eton, Morgan joined the army in the last months before VE day. Then, he took a commission in the Royal Horse Artillery. Over the next 20 years his army career took in periods in Washington, as ADC to his father, in London with the King's Troop, and in France. He left the army in 1965 and joined the cigarette manufacturers Gallaher, rising to be sales and marketing director.
Morgan's main recreational passion was riding and he became a successful three-day eventer. He continued to compete into his 50s, before switching to polo, which he played into his 70s. In 1999 he contracted Wegener's disease, a blood-vessel disorder, but continued to be heavily involved in the Shannon Trust.
In 1955 he married Ann Douglas, who was one of the bedrocks of his life. She died in 2008. He is survived by their four children, Stephanie, Andrew, David and Rupert.
David Ramsbotham writes: Christopher Morgan was renowned as a thoroughly nice as well as able person, who took an immense interest in people as people. Outside his army career and his work with Gallaher, he was a successful farmer, author of several books on such subjects as the stories behind operas and the restored palaces of St Petersburg, and a worker in wood. He organised weekends at his farm in Sussex during which people could bring items of furniture and repair them under instruction, in an oast-house that he had converted into a carpentry shop.
When Christopher set out to try to persuade the prison service to adopt the Toe by Toe programme, extraordinarily, instead of welcoming what he was offering, the senior management of the prison service seemed to put obstacles in his way. It was a proud moment for Christopher when he received the Longford prize for his work, from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in a packed Church House, Westminster, in 2004.
• Christopher Morgan, farmer, author and founder of the Shannon Trust, born 6 March 1927; died 14 April 2011