The Spectator’s Notes: My grandfather’s dire omen on the eve of war

This week’s issue is dated 2 August. On that date 100 years ago, my great-grandfather, Norman Moore (always known as ‘NM’), went to Sunday Mass. ‘Father Ryan,’ he noted in his diary, ‘seemed hardly to have thought of the war… I told [him] I felt uncertain whether August would be a good time for a mission to Protestants but I gave him the £5 I had promised.’ Later, he and his wife Milicent went to tea with their Sussex neighbours, Lord and Lady Ashton, who ‘seemed very little informed of the gravity of the situation’. Back at home, a telegram arrived from NM’s friend, Ethel Portal: ‘Germany occupied Luxembourg Reported repulse of Germans by French near Nancy unofficial.’ NM drove to pick up his younger son Gillachrist (‘Gilla’) from Robertsbridge station. On the platform, he heard a young man saying that England would not be drawn into the war, since she had no treaty with France. NM there wrote a telegram in Irish (a language of which he was a scholar) to thank Ethel for hers. The clerk came on to the platform and said: ‘“Is this telegram in code or cypher for we have orders not to send such?” No I said it is in Gaelic. I will read it to you & so I did and he was satisfied.’ The train arrived ten minutes late, a thing almost unheard of.

Gilla was on the train, and the family, including ‘all the men of the house of Moore’, gathered at Browns, an aunt’s house nearby. They included a cousin who had just sailed back across the Channel. He had caught a crammed train from Paris to the coast and ‘thought the French seemed depressed about the war and heard talk of the probability of defeat’. Then the Moores went back to NM’s house, Hancox, calling en route on Lord and Lady Ashton, who ‘grew more serious’ at the news of war.