For his 110th birthday, Reverend Bill Morgan will have not one, but three parties this week to mark the occasion. First was a Sunday barbecue with his family, which made him happy.
The 103 years between Morgan and his great-grandson Flynn Sullivan, 7, disappeared as they shared a joke at Morgan’s aged care home in Melbourne’s south-east.
Happy 110th birthday: Flynn Sullivan, 7, gives great-buppa Reverend Bill Morgan a hug at a family barbecue.Credit: Penny Stephens
“You’re one of the best people in the world,” Flynn told his “great-buppa”.
“Well, you don’t know me, then,” shot back Morgan.
Great grand-daughter Arte Morgan-Marsh, 4, handed Morgan a hand-drawn birthday card, with a hug.
Morgan’s daughter, Lib Elliott, said he had “been a wonderful dad”.
Morgan, whose birthday is on Thursday, had “lived his life, he hasn’t just existed”, Elliott said.
At the age of 100, he went to the MCG to watch his beloved Western Bulldogs win the 2016 AFL premiership.
Morgan reckons he’s had just one cigarette and a single sip of beer in his life. “They never appealed to me,” he said.
His parents, Scottish immigrants, were strong disciplinarians, as were his teachers.
“We knew right from wrong,” he said, a trait he believes is missing for some children today.
Morgan grew up in working-class Footscray, but his father John owned an engineering business.
In the Great Depression, his mother, Jean, would feed men who slept in Footscray Park.
After graduating from Scotch College in Hawthorn, Morgan played rugby for Victoria alongside future heroic World War II prisoner of war surgeon Edward “Weary” Dunlop.
Morgan told The 100 Project, a website that records centenarians’ life stories, how he watched Dunlop run 50 yards and shrug off tackles to score a rare try for Victoria against New South Wales at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Reverend Bill Morgan at Cumberland View aged care home with his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Credit: Penny Stephens
Dunlop, he said, was a man whose “actions spoke ever so much more than his words”.
Morgan said on Sunday he felt called to the Presbyterian ministry as a teenager when a visiting, religious British naval commodore gave a school talk about how Jesus died for them.
“It gave me something to live for,” Morgan says. “I hadn’t, until then, known what I was going to do in my life.”
After graduating in theology, his posts as a minister included Clare in South Australia, Trafalgar in Gippsland, Launceston in Tasmania and a 22-year stint in the Melbourne suburb of Ormond. In 1971, he was moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Victoria.
Bill Morgan (left) as a teenager at Scotch College in 1935.
Today, at Cumberland View aged care home in Wheelers Hill, Morgan still takes monthly services and counsels people.
In 1957, Morgan’s first wife, Joan, died, and he was a single parent to three small children. He said he got through it “with difficulty, only by my faith” and remarried to Jessie in 1964. Jessie died in 2011.
Bill Morgan pictured circa 1956 with, left to right, son John, wife Joan, and daughters Lib and Heather.
Asked his advice for people in tough times, Morgan said: “Whatever you do, don’t give up.
“If you’ve got faith in God, trust Him. If you haven’t got faith, find it. Keep on keeping on.”
He quotes the hymn What A Friend We Have in Jesus: Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged; take it to the Lord in prayer!
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