Probably the son of Mowbray Morris (1819-1874), manager of The Times, London, Mowbray Morris was in Adelaide as a young man in 1871 as Aide-de-Campe to the Governor, Sir James Fergusson. During this time, he claimed, he contributed the poem 'A Voice from the Bush' to the Geoffry Crabthorn literary column of The Register. The poem, published anonymously, won much acclaim and was believed for some time to be by Adam Lindsay Gordon.
Mowbray Morris was later art editor of the Allahabad Pioneer, and then editor of Macmillan's Magazine, in this latter capacity introducing to public scrutiny some of the early work of Rudyard Kipling (1889). In the 1880s and 1890s he published various literary works, and the popular work Hunting,by His Grace the Duke of Beaufort, K. G. and Mowbray Morris (1885).