Sculptor born outside Minera, near Wrexham, in North Wales. His father, captain of the local lead mine, died in 1880 and, as soon as he was old enough, Morcom was sent to work for a local firm of stonemasons. He eventually secured a job in Liverpool with Norbury, Paterson & Co. During his time with them, in the early 1890s, he enrolled at the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art. Morcom was also taken on as an assistant in the sculptural practice of Charles John Allen, then head of the School’s sculpture department, assisting him on the reliefs for Pare’s Bank in Leicester (1900–01). By 1904 Morcom had been appointed assistant modelling master at the school. In the following year he was elected a member of the Liverpool Academy and was awarded a ‘National Medal for Success in Art’ by the Board of Education, South Kensington. In the 1909 Eisteddfod he won first prize in the sculpture section. In May 1910 he was appointed modelling master at Leicester School of Art. At Leicester he also worked as an architectural sculptor and in 1914 bought up Pearson and Shipley, a firm of stonemasons and monumental sculptors, based in the Newarke area of Leicester. Morcom called his new firm The Plasmatic Company. In addition to his work for the firm, he operated independently as a sculptor and continued at the School of Art. Morcom married in 1915 and his final home was at Kirby Muxloe, in a house designed for him by Ralph Bedingfield and decorated with carved stonework executed by The Plasmatic Company. Morcom’s surviving public sculptures include, in Leicester, the stone Liberty Statue (1919), originally on Liberty Buildings, Eastern Boulevard, resited at Walnut Street in 2008 following the building’s demolition; and a cast metal Wyvern over the main entrance of the Fire Station, Lancaster Road. He and his firm also carried out the carving on the temporary war memorial in Town Hall Square, Leicester (unveiled 1917), and on permanent war memorials throughout Leicestershire, including at Ravenstone (1920), Quorn (1921), Queniborough (1921) and Kirby Muxloe (c.1924). They also supplied the memorial crosses for Gumley (1920) and Aylestone parish church (1921), and tablets for churches in Ellistown (1919), Weston-by-Welland (1920) and Fleckney (1920). In May 1920, he won a limited competition to produce the war memorial outside St Augustine’s Church, Edgbaston, Birmingham (unveiled July 1921). Morcom exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Royal Cambrian Academy, the Royal Academy and, as a member of the Leicester Society of Artists, regularly at the New Walk Art Gallery, Leicester. Many of his smaller works and models are now in the collection of the Wrexham Maelor Museum Service, Wrexham, Clwyd. A Statuette of Andromeda in bronzed plaster is in Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh (introduction by A. Yarrington), Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp. xi, xx, 97–98, 137–38, 153, 178, 180–81, 260–61, 311, 321–22, 330, 339, 340, 341; Leicester Mercury, 4 December 1981, p.18; Mapping Sculpture; The Studio: [i] vol. xxxiv, no. 146, May 1905, p.351, [ii] vol. xxxvi, no. 152, November 1905, pp.169, 166, 169, [iii] vol. xxxix, no. 163, October 1906, pp. 68, 67, 68, [iv] vol. xlii, no. 177, December 1907, pp. 231, 228; The Western Front Association: ‘Tolkien’s “bitter winnowing” and the War Memorial at St. Augustine’s Church, Edgbaston’.
Terry Cavanagh, 2000; revised, November 2025