Basil Oliver Moon BA

• Matriculated: 1902

• Born: 31 August 1884

• Died: 24 May 1915

• Regiment: London Regiment (Post Office Rifles)

• Grave/Memorial: Post Office Rifles Cemetery, Festubert: 1.B.9

Family background

b. 31 August 1884 at 46, Elm Park Gardens, Chelsea, London, as the younger son of Ernest Robert Moon, LLB [later KCB KC] (1854–1930) and Lady Emma Henrietta Penelope Moon (née Lamb) (c.1860–1947) (m. 1881), 46, Elm Park Gardens, Chelsea, London; also of Balholmie, Meikleour, Cargill, Perthshire (built by Sir Ernest and owned by the family from 1900); also 48, Cadogan Square, Chelsea, London SW. At the time of the 1891 Census the family were living at 46, Elm Park Gardens (six servants) and at the time of the 1901 Census they were still at the same address (five servants). In 1911, Sir Ernest bought Braziers Park, Ipsden, Wallingford, Berkshire, a late seventeenth-century mansion, from V. Fleming, who had acquired it in 1906: it passed out of the family in 1950.

 

Parents and antecedents

The Moon family was settled at Newsham, Woodplumpton, north of Preston, Lancashire, before the end of the sixteenth century and many of the family are buried there. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Moons established themselves in Liverpool as successful merchants. They invested in railway shares at an advantageously early date and as a result, Moon’s grandfather, Richard Moon (1814–99), who had moved from Liverpool to Worcester in 1847, became increasingly involved with the London & North-Western Railway Company. Founded in 1846, the Company had, by 1885, become the largest joint-stock company in the world. In 1851 Richard Moon became one of the Company’s Directors and was its stern, disciplinarian and extremely hard-working Chairman from June 1861 until his retirement in February 1891.

As a manager intent on cutting costs wherever possible and avoiding expenditure which generated no return, Richard Moon gained a reputation as something of an autocrat. But equally, when the economics made sense, he was prepared to spend lavishly – as can be seen in the development of Crewe, where the Company’s works, alongside a small railway junction, were turned into a large town between 1843 and 1887. It was his idea, in 1869, to build an 800 mm-gauge railway up Mount Snowdon (finally constructed 1885–86), and during his time with the Company, its rail network grew from 1,030 to 1,830 miles of track. Although his relationship with Parliament, and in particular the Board of Trade, was uneasy at the best of times, under his chairmanship the Company’s value almost tripled and its dividends almost doubled in value. He was made a Baronet in 1887.

Moon’s maternal grandmother, Eleanor (1820–1891) Brocklebank, was a member of a successful Cumberland family of ship-owners, one of whose members was a major benefactor of Magdalen.

Moon’s father, Ernest Robert, studied at Cambridge, then trained as a barrister and was called to the Bar in 1878 (Inner Temple, later Bencher and Master of the Bench). He joined the Northern Circuit, then the Parliamentary Bar, “and his appearance in the Common Law Courts was generally limited to cases in which railway companies were concerned. For some years before he left the Bar he held general retainers in Parliament for most of the British railway companies.” When the famous cricketer Sir Edward Chandos Leigh (1832–1915) retired as Counsel to the Speaker of the House of Commons after 24 years (1883–1907), the then Speaker, Ernest Moon’s old Cambridge friend James William Lowther MP (1855–1949; Speaker 1905–21, later the 1^st Viscount Ullswater), offered him the post, for which he was eminently qualified since he was intimately familiar with the Parliamentary Bar and had been made a King’s Counsel in March 1902. Ernest then remained in post for 21 years, during a period when the procedural rules governing the Commons were being tightened up, when radical fiscal measures were being introduced, and when there were intense political struggles over Home Rule for Ireland and the constitutional implications of the Parliament Act (1911). He would have advised not only the Speaker on parliamentary matters, but also members seeking advice, the Chairmen of Committees on Private Bill legislation (far more important then than now), the representatives of Government departments, the parliamentary agents, and others who were concerned with Private Bill business. He “was extremely popular with members of every party in the House, for he was not only able and willing to assist them upon points of Parliamentary practice, but he was also accessible at all times and possessed a charming courtesy and geniality”. He also served on various Board of Trade committees dealing with railway legislation and acted as independent chairman in labour disputes all over the country. During World War One he chaired the Munitions Tribunal for the South-Western Midland District and presided over the Enemy Trading Committee, which decided about 1,500 cases during the last three years of the war. He was made a CB in 1915 and a KCB in 1919. Throughout his life he was an active member of the Royal Institution (founded in 1799 for the promotion of scientific education and research) and eventually became one of its Vice-Presidents. On his death, he left £225,654 gross.

Moon’s mother was one of the two daughters of John de Villiers Lamb (1833–1900), a prominent member of a distinguished and wealthy Australian family with commercial, pastoral and industrial interests. According to G.P. Walsh’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, by the mid-1860s John de Villiers Lamb owned vast pastoral estates in the Liverpool Plains district, the Port Curtis district, the Burnett district, and the Albert and Warrego districts of New South Wales, and was regarded as an authority on all aspects of sheep-farming. But he also had business interests in insurance, mortgages, mining, pearling, and the production of oil, minerals and natural gas. In the 1890s he was a London director of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. He was also known as a many-sided sportsman who was also interested in local politics. Two of his five sons served in the Second Boer War and one of them was killed in action. A striking portrait of Moon’s mother, painted on the occasion of her marriage by Sir William Blake Richard (1842–1921), now hangs in the Tate Gallery, London.

 

Siblings and their families

Moon was the brother of Arthur [later KC MC] (1882–1961), (m. [1912] Marjorie Isabel Skinner [1885–1966]), one son, two daughters.

Arthur, too, attended Eton, where he was a member of the Eton College Volunteers (1899–1901) and from 1901 to 1905 he was an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, where he was awarded a 4^th in Classics Moderations (1903), and a 3^rd in History Finals (1905). He was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1907 and in 1910 stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate for St Pancras North. From October 1914 to 31 March 1915, he served as an Able Seaman in the Anti-Aircraft Corps of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, having applied for a Territorial Commission on 26 March 1915. Like his younger brother Basil, he was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Post Offices Rifles (15 April 1915) and promoted Lieutenant in November 1915 and Captain on 30 October 1917. He was demobilized on 2 March 1919, having been gazetted as winning the MC on 1 January 1919. Until 13 May 1920 he was a member of the Territorial Forces Reserve. After the war his address was 3, Cheyne Place, Chelsea, and he became a prominent barrister, took silk in 1928, and was made a Bencher of the Inner Temple in 1936. He was made a member of the General Claims Tribunal in 1939 and became its Chairman in 1945. He also served as Counsel to the Speaker of the House of Commons.

 

Education and professional life

He attended the Revd W.H. Churchill’s School at Stonehouse, North Foreland, near Broadstairs, Kent (1884–1970) from 1895 to 1898 (cf. W.G.S. Cadogan, G.A. Loyd, A.H.E. Ashley), Eton College from 1898 to 1902, and he matriculated at Magdalen as a Commoner on 20 October 1902, having taken Responsions in Hilary Term 1902. In the Hilary and Trinity Terms of 1903 he took the First Public Examination, including an option in Classics, and he was awarded a 4^th in Modern History in Trinity Term 1905. He took his BA on 21 October 1905. After graduation, according to a letter from his father to President Warren dated 12 June 1915, he tried “to fit himself for a business career”. He stayed for some months with Monseigneur Pasquier, the head of the Theological College in Angers, France, in order to learn the language; and he then trained as a Chartered Accountant with the firm of Messrs Kemp, qualified in 1909, and then lived for a time with a German family near Hanover. He spent what his father described as “a couple of years in Russia among Russians, with whom he became quite at home”, first in a town in the Ural Mountains, where he worked for the town corporation, and then in St Petersburg. He also visited many other parts of Russia for business purposes. His father then continued:

The career would have been in the direction of English developments in Russia which have been of late encouraged by the Russian authorities with whom he had become popular. His industry, tact and business ability would have earned him success but after all the end of his career is far nobler than a career of mere success.

And President Warren wrote of him posthumously:

Bright, good-looking, amiable and blameless, fond of sport, especially of beagling, he was a very useful and much-liked member of the College, and was very helpful, after he went down, to the College Mission, which has lost so many friends by this devastating war.

When he made his will, he gave his address as 48, Cadogan Square, London.

 

 

War service

On 3 August 1914, Moon, who was 5 foot 11inches tall and described his profession as “Gentleman”, applied for a Commission. He received a Commission as Second Lieutenant from the Commanding Officer of the 8^th (City of London) Battalion, The London Regiment (Post Office Rifles) on the following day, when the Battalion was on its way to its annual training camp. By mid-August 1914 the Battalion was training at Bisley, in Surrey, and in September 1914 the Battalion had found a more permanent base at Crowborough, in East Sussex, where training began in earnest and where the Battalion lost a good number of its technically adept members to such units as the Royal Engineers and the Telegraph Section of the Army Post Office. On 6 November 1914 the Battalion was transferred from the 2^nd London Brigade, part of the 1^st (London) Division, to the 2^nd (London) Division, that was stationed at Abbot’s Langley, near Watford, Hertfordshire, where training intensified. On 17 March 1915, the Battalion, including Moon, embarked for France; it disembarked at Le Havre on the following day as part of the 4^th London Brigade, the 2^nd (London) Division. After a day’s rest, the Battalion was taken by train to the vicinity of Béthune, then marched to Auchel, about seven miles west-south-west of Béthune, on 21 March, and arrived at the trenches near Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée, about four miles to the east of Béthune and just north of Cambrin, on 25 March (where it took over from the 1/15^th [County of London] Battalion, The London Regiment [Prince of Wales’s Own Civil Service Rifles], and where it suffered its first casualties when two officers were killed in action in their dug-out by a shell). It then rested near Noeux-les-Mines, about five miles to the south-west, for a period of 12 days during which Moon was promoted Temporary Lieutenant (24 April). There is then a gap in the original records, but we know that on 11 May, when the Battalion became part of the 140^th Brigade, in the 47^th (London) Division, Moon’s Battalion took up its position in the trenches north of the high ground around Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée, in preparation for the Battle of Festubert, a village less than a mile to the north, which began on 15 May and lasted until 27 May. Here, from 16 to 19 May, the Battalion was involved in heavy and costly fighting on the battle’s right flank; on 17 May it was required to extend its line further southwards by building a line of fortified trenches while it was under heavy bombardment. On 20 May, the Battalion moved back to Gorre, a mile or so west of Festubert on the Béthune road, but two days later it was moved back into the line at Festubert to take over some recently captured first-line German trenches.

At about 02.30 hours on 24 May 1915, using grenades and fixed bayonets, Moon’s Battalion attacked two strong-points in the German front-line trenches from which grenades could be thrown and machine-guns and mortars could be fired. Moon’s platoon was following the bombers and while he was trying to lead it round behind a long trench that was held partly by the attacking British and partly by the defending Germans, he was killed in action, aged 30. He had, it seems, borrowed a rifle, jumped out of the trench and was running along the side of it firing at the Germans, when he was severely wounded by a German grenade; he died at sunset.

 

 

On 28 May, his Battalion Adjutant reported to his family that he had been hit in the head by a sniper and died painlessly. But when, a week after Moon’s death, Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Wilfred James Whitehead (c.1873–1934), the Battalion’s Commanding Officer, published an account of the attack in The Times, he painted a more harrowing picture:

During the attack, I am sorry to say, I lost two out of my three subalterns. […] as soon as Roy [Berriman Hatfield, 1895–1915] (who was bomb [grenade] officer) was [mortally] wounded, Basil [Moon] went up to the front and by his coolness and courage helped materially towards the success of the affair, and at last, when all our bombers [grenade throwers] had been killed and there was just the chance that the Germans might bomb us back again before we could block the trench, he picked up a rifle and ran along their parapet, picking off the German bombers until an exploding bomb [grenade] blew the lower half of his face off. Even then he had sufficient strength left and sufficient thoughtfulness to write me a note and send it by messenger saying that he was sorry he was “out of action”. Poor old chap, he was full of pluck right to the end.

As a result of reading Whitehead’s account, Second Lieutenant [later Sir] Edward Clare Blight (1887–1976), an Oxford graduate who was a major force in the running of Toynbee Hall and knighted for his services to social work, wrote the following letter to Moon’s parents, which provides a fuller picture of Moon’s ability as an officer and sheds a little more light on the circumstances of his death:

When I joined the First [Eighth] Battalion at Annequin on May 6th, I was attached as a supernumerary to [Moon’s] platoon, and I naturally saw a great deal of him during the eventful fortnight that followed. I soon learnt to admire him very much. He seemed to me an ideal officer, especially in action. He knew his work thoroughly, and was always thinking of the credit and comfort of his men, anxious that they should do well, and watchful for their safety. His own example was splendid; he never asked a man to take any risk that he hadn’t first taken himself, and was not only brave “with an air”, and his coolness and gallantry under fire made the men always absolutely confident in him. One used to overhear them, “Mr Moon isn’t afraid of anything”, and I knew they were proud of him as well as being fond of him. I last saw him on the night of Saturday, May 22nd, when No’s 2 and 3 Companies went up at 10 p.m. to relieve the Canadians from a section of German trench that had just been captured. It was a confusing bit of work and we were seriously shelled when doing it, but he was hard-working, cool and bright all the time. I was carrying a box of ammunition with him over a bad bit, and his cheery comment was, “What a picnic this is!”. When [23 May] he got his men into position on what was our right flank – the most dangerous position of our line – we were attacked by bombs, and I was hit, but the last I saw and heard before I left the mêlée was Basil, right in the thick of it, calling out, “Stick to it, men.” I heard from one of our men on the Hospital Boat that the Company had made a charge the next morning [24 May] and captured the trench opposite but I did not know till today that Basil had been killed.

After the Battle, the Post Office Rifles had been reduced to 300 out of 900 officers and men. Moon was first buried, together with two other officers and a lot of other men, at a farm called Smelly Farm, near Festubert Village. He is now buried in Post Office Rifles Cemetery, Festubert, Grave 1.B.9, with the inscription: “Brave, Honourable and Beloved”; he is also commemorated on plaques both inside and outside the village hall in the hamlet of Wolfhill, about seven miles north of Perth, Scotland. He was mentioned in dispatches for his part in the action of 24 May 1915 (London Gazette, no. 29,422 [31 December 1915], p. 58). Moon left £50,779 1s. 1d.

 

 

 

Bibliography

For the books and archives referred to here in short form, refer to the Slow Dusk Bibliography and Archival Sources.

 

Printed sources:

[Anon.], ‘Death of Sir R[ichard] Moon’ [obituary], The Times, no. 35,990 (18 November 1899), p. 14.

[Thomas Herbert Warren], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, 33, no. 22 (4 June 1915), p. 352.

[Major Wilfred J. Whitehead], Letters from the Front: Fighting at Close Quarters [29 May 1915], The Times, no. 40,875 (8 June 1915), p. 7.

Lord Robson, ‘Basil Moon’ [letter to the Editor], The Times, no. 40,876 (9 June 1915), p. 9.

[Anon.], ‘The Late Second-Lieutenant B.O. Moon: A Brave Soldier’, The Blairgowrie Advertiser, no. 3,131 (19 June 1915), p. 8.

[Anon. (One of the Company Commanders)], A History of The Post Office Rifles (8^th Battalion City of London Regiment) 1914 to 1918 (no publisher, 1919), reprinted by the Naval & Military Press (Uckfield, East Sussex: 2014), pp. 5–12.

[Anon.], ‘Speaker’s Counsel: Sir Ernest Moon’s Retirement’, The Times, no. 44,884 (4 May 1928), p. 9.

Rt Hon. James William Lowther, Viscount Ullswater, A Speaker’s Commentaries, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold, 1925).

[Anon.], ‘Sir Ernest Moon, K.C.’ [obituary], The Times, no. 45,528 (2 June 1930), p. 9.

[Anon.], ‘Mr. Arthur Moon’ [obituary], The Times, no. 55,047 (5 April 1961), p. 15.

G.P. Walsh, ‘Lamb, John de Villiers (1833–1900)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 5 (1974), pp. 55–6.

Messenger (1982), pp. 13–26.

Leinster-Mackay, The Rise of the English Prep-School (London: Falmer Press 1984), pp. 172, 297.

Michael Reed, ‘Moon, Sir Richard, first baronet (1814–1899)’, DNB, vol. 38 (2004), pp. 897–8.

Peter Michael Brain, The Railway Moon – A Man and his Railway: Sir Richard Moon and the L&NWR (Kingston St Mary, Devon: PMB Publishing, 2010).

Duncan Barrett, Men of Letters: The Post Office Heroes who fought in the Great War (Basingstoke: AA Publishing, 2014), esp. ch. 3 (‘Festubert’), pp.61–86, 334.

 

Archival sources:

MCA: Ms. 876 (III), vol. 2.

MCA: PR 32/C/3/870 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letter relating to B.O. Moon [1915]).

OUA: UR 2/1/48.

WO95/2731.

WO374/48477.

WO374/48478.