Admiral Moore

Post date: Mar 17, 2017 3:59:38 PM

The following has kindly been provided by Rachel Hassall, archivist at Sherborne School

Admiral Sir Henry Ruthven Moore GCB, CVO, DSO (1886-1978).

Born 29 August 1886 at Plumstead, Kent, son of Colonel Henry Moore of the King’s Own Regiment, later JP, Minehead, Somerset.

Attended Sherborne Preparatory School, 1895-1899.

Attended Sherborne School (School House), September 1899-December 1901:

Previous illnesses: chicken pox and measles.

Intended career: Army.

Form on leaving: Vb.

Destination: Royal Navy.

Extract from Patrick Francis, Vivat Shirburnia: Sherborne School and the Great War, 1914-1918 (2014), pp.222-223:

“One OS Sailor who was definitely present at Jutland in May 1916 was Henry Ruthven Moore (a 1899-1901), and his naval career was even more illustrious than that of Ellerton. In an interview that he gave to the BBC in 1966 when he was eighty, he recalled the chance circumstance that had led him into a career in the Royal Navy rather than the Army: ‘I was in the Army Class at Sherborne and I was supposed to be going into the Army, like all my people before me, including my father and uncles who had commanded the same regiment way back… and it wasn’t until the brother of a pal of mine came back from the Boxer trouble and chasing pirates around… that I decided that the Navy sounded a very much better life than I thought I was going to have (in the Army). And so I wrote to my father, who was in the War Office, and said what did he think about it, and he didn’t argue…’ As a result of his two years at Sherborne, Moore ‘was as old as I could have been’ when he became a cadet at HMS Britannia, Dartmouth, in 1901 and he claimed that there were ‘only two of us who had been a public schools’. He also had a reminiscence about the time ‘when King Edward VII came down to lay the foundation stone of the College’ and finding himself directly opposite the King when the cadets were being presented. The shore-based naval College opened in 1905. Moore went to sea in 1903, as a midshipman, specialising in navigation, and his early naval service included time in the Far East. During the Great War he navigated various light cruisers and at the Battle of Jutland he was in HMS Castor, which was damaged in the fighting but Moore was not amongst the casualties.” [Footnote: Moore’s ‘pal’ was Eric Douglas (day boy 1899-1904) who served as an Army Chaplain in France in the First World War, and the brother in question was Stopford Douglas (day boy 1897-1898) who has an interesting and varied naval career].

Passed 16^th into HMS Britannia, 1902.

1908, married at the Church of St Peter & St Paul, Newport Pagnell to Katherine Henley Joan Gillespie, daughter of the late Mr Hugh James Gillespie, formerly of The Gables, Windsor.

WW1, Lieutenant, Grand Fleet (DSO, despatches). Took part in the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

On Staff of Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich, 1919-1921.

Naval Assistant Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, 1921-1924.

Assistant Secretary to the Naval Delegation, Washington 1921-1922 and Geneva 1927.

Captain 1926.

Chief of Staff for the Home Fleet, 1936.

Rear-Admiral, 1938.

Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, 1938.

WW2, Commander of Third Cruiser Squadron, 1939.

Assistant Chief of Naval Staff, 1940.

Commanded Home Fleet, 1940.

Vice-Admiral, 1941.

Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff, 1941.

Commander of the 2nd Battle Squadron, June 1943.

Admiral, 1944.

Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, 1944.

Commander-in-Chief, The Nore, 1948.

First and Principal ADC to King George VI, 1948-1951.

Retired 1951.

High Sheriff of Kent, 1959-1960.

Died at Wateringbury, Kent on 12 March 1978.

In 1979, the family of Admiral Sir Henry Ruthven Moore presented to Sherborne School the banner which hung in Westminster Abbey over his stall. It now hangs over the choir in Sherborne School Chapel.

For more on Admiral Moore see Henry Moore wins DSO. and Admiral Sir Henry Ruthven Moore and MGS