The early days of a Civil Servant who became Governor

By Sir Henry Monck-Mason Moore,
last British Governor of Colonial Ceylon
Excerpted from HAJ Hulugalle’s British Governors of Ceylon

I was born on March 16th, 1887, the youngest of a family of seven, I hardly knew my only brother, Herbert, the eldest of the family as I was a very small boy when he came down from Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar, and then went to Canada to take up a legal practice there. After many vicissitudes he had become ‘Crown Prosecutor’ in Victoria, Vancouver by 1914, with an American wife and two small boys, who came to stay with my parents when he himself went to France on joining, the Canadian Seaforth Highlanders. We met again in London 1918-19, when we were both on leave from the Army waiting for demobilization. He returned to Canada with his family. He and his wife are now dead, but his two sons and a daughter, all married, are doing well in Canada and in the USA.

Of my sisters, the eldest, Kathleen, is now living in retirement at Oxford, after being the Headmistress of Queen Anne’s School, Caversham, for many years. She was one of the original founders of Sherborne Girls’ School. My next sister, Mabel, after a visit to India, where she contracted smallpox, became crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. She stayed with me for about six months in the bungalow on the ramparts of the Fort at Jaffna, when I was Office Assistant to Mr. Freeman, but had to return to England, when I was appointed itinerating police magistrate in the Western Province, and had no permanent quarters in which she could live in comfort.

Sir Henry Monck-Mason Moore and Lady Moore

She died some years ago. My third sister, Evelyn, was always delicate but became very active in the International YWCA, of which my mother with the Hon’ble Emily Kinnaird was a foundation member. She visited America and Canada and lived for a time in Geneva. During the last war she was in charge of the YWCA. Club in Tottenham Court Road which was badly bombed in the blitz. She was awarded the OBE for her services. She died last year.

My next sister Sylvia (Dr S. M. Payne) met her husband Dr. John Payne, FRCS. when she was finishing her own medical studies at the Royal Free Hospital, London. On their marriage they went to Torquay, where he had a good practice. In 1914 he joined the RAMC and went with the cavalry division to France. My sister took charge of the military hospital at Torquay and was, I believe, the first woman to be given the honorary rank of captain and was awarded the CBE. for her services.

After the war she practised as a consultant psychoanalyst in Harley Street, and continued to do so after her husband’s death. Though over 80 and rather deaf she is still active and lives in London. Of her three sons, one was President of Pop and Captain of the boats at Eton and President of the CUBC at Trinity, Cambridge, and rowed in the English Olympic crew at the Los Angeles, and became a lawyer; and another son became a doctor, and after doing research work for the World Health Organization in Geneva, is now doing research work at Yale University, America.My youngest sister married a solicitor, Mr. Thomas Atkey, and is now a widow living with her daughter, who is married to Raglan Squire, an architect, the son of Sir John Squire, the poet and critic.

My reason for this account of our family fortunes is to provide a background to the surroundings in which I was myself brought up. I was four years younger than my youngest sister, Ruth, and from an early age never questioned the fact that we all had to rely on our own exertions if we were to extend our interests beyond the somewhat narrow field of activity into which we had been born.

My father and my mother were both remarkable personalities in different ways. As a young man at Wadham College, Oxford, he had stroked the College Boat and won a University scholarship in Hebrew. After he had been ordained he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Low Church Evangelical Movement, which in the middle period of the nineteenth century had a considerable and influential following. For many years he drew large congregations to his church in Portman Square to listen to his sermons which combined scholarship with an emotional and spiritual appeal.

My mother, whom he had met on a reading party in France in his undergraduate days, was a Miss Monck-Mason. She came of an old Irish family, which like most old Irish families had fallen on evil days, but she had a host of Irish relations – Sir Hercules Robinson (a former Governor of Ceylon), later Lord Rosmead, was a second cousin, I believe, as was also Archbishop Crozier, the Irish Primate. She was not an intellectual, but had the sweetest possible nature combined with much horse-sense from which we could all draw comfort when we felt rebellious at our father’s somewhat puritanical regime.By the time that I was born we had moved to Wimbledon, where my father was incumbent of Emmanuel Church run by a board of trustees. I don’t know why he had left Portman Square, but I suspect it was due to some doctrinal controversy as he was intolerant of Episcopal control, and based his attitude on the 39 Articles and the Gorham judgment of the House of Lords.

With so large a family and modest private means the best our parents could do for us was to give us the best education they could afford to make our own way in the world. This they undoubtedly did. In my case I went to “Rokeby”, a very good preparatory school, as a day-boy, where Guy and Cedric Boustead, whom I was to meet again in Ceylon, were my contemporaries. From there I sat for a scholarship at Charterhouse, which I failed to get, so instead I sat for a scholarship at King’s College School, which had just moved from the Strand in London to Wimbledon.

Sir Graeme Tyrrell (later Chief Secretary of Ceylon) is an old K.C.S. boy but in London before my time. In due course I became Head of the School and won a Rustat Scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, and also the Skinner scholarship for which only K.C.S. boys were eligible. During all this time I was a day-boy and my father was most anxious for me to take orders. So much so that, though I wanted to follow him at Oxford, he would not agree, as he distrusted the Oxford Movement and the Higher Criticism which Oxford had the reputation of fostering.Jesus was at the time more devoted to sports than study. We were head of the river for three years in both the Lents and Mays, and also head of the Hockey League. My best friend. Shields, stroked the Varsity Boat and I was captain of the Hockey Team, so perhaps it was not surprising that I failed to get a first in the Classical Tripos and had to be content with a 2(1).

By this time I felt I had not the necessary vocation to go into the Church, which my father accepted with disappointment but with good grace. Instead I went to Wrens to cram for the Indian Civil Service, where I worked really hard. I missed India by 25 marks out of 5,000, but obtained an Eastern Cadetship in Ceylon instead. I have never regretted my good fortune in going to Ceylon instead of India in the light of subsequent events.