RARE \"The Indian Express\" Frank Moraes Hand Signed 3X5 Card For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "The Indian Express" Frank Moraes Hand Signed 3X5 Card. 

– 2 May 1974) was editor of many prominent newspapers in post-Independence India,

including The Times of India and The Indian Express. Born

in Bombay (now Mumbai) of Goan descent

on 12 November 1907, Moraes was the son of Anthony Xavier Moraes, a

Goan civil engineer. There has been considerable migration of Goans to Bombay

for many decades. He spent his childhood in the city of Poona (Pune)

in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, and studied at Catholic schools in both cities.

The historian Teresa Albuquerque was

his sister. From

1923, he was at St Xavier's College where

he studied history under Henry Heras and also economics. He earned his B.A.

at Bombay University majoring

in history and economics. He went to Oxford for his M.A. in history" He

was active in Oxford University student

politics, and edited the student newspaper Bharat. He also studied

law at Lincoln's Inn in

London, and was called to the Bar. In all,

he spent seven years in England from 1927 to 1934. In 1937 he married Beryl

Anna Bonosa. The couple had a son named Dom, who went on to become the famous

poet Dom Moraes. Beryl suffered from mental illness in the 1940s

and was confined to hospitals and mental asylums. Returning to India in

1934, he practiced as a Barrister for a few months, and in 1936 joined The Times of India as

a journalist, was promoted to junior assistant editor in 1938, and worked in

Burma and China as the war correspondent for The Times between

1942–1945. Between 1946–1949, Moraes was based in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as editor of The Times Ceylon and The

Morning Standard. He worked as the India correspondent

of several British newspapers, and in 1950 became The Times of India's first

"Indian editor", amidst a changing post-colonial situation. On

returning from Ceylon in 1949, Frank Moraes was named editor of The

National Standard, a Goenka-owned Indian newspaper that later morphed into

The Indian Express. According

to another journalist of Goan origin, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro,

"[A]t that time I was on the news copy desk as well as being the music

critic, and remember him as an individual who kept himself aloof, quite unlike

other editors I have worked with. Six days a week he wrote the main editorial

and a column he signed as 'Atticus'". Moraes left within months to be the

editor at the Times of India. Ribeiro recalls that in January 1953,

while at Calcutta on the job of Sunday editor at their

soon-to-be-started edition in that city in eastern India, Moraes visited the

edition. He recalls, "Well after midnight I was down in the pressroom

okaying pages as they were being "made up" on the 'stone'---those

were the days of metal type and printers' ink—and in rolled Frank Moraes at the

head of his cohort, and he had just a one-line mantra for me: "Let's get

the paper out! Let's get the paper out!" Having said that, he kept out of

our way. Others in the group, however, were more obtrusive, and soon we had to

hustle them back upstairs.". In 1957, The Indian Express (formerly

the Morning Standard) named him as the editor-in-chief of this

Goenka-run newspaper. Becoming one of India's best known journalists

his columns appeared regularly on Sundays and Mondays in the Indian

Express, while another column signed as "Ariel" made its mark in

the Sunday Standard. He did some radio broadcasts. In 1961 he was

appointed Sheriff in Bombay.