MOOR, Henry (1809-1877), of 5 Clarendon Terrace, Brighton, Suss. and Otterham House, Teddington, Mdx.

On his death Moor was remembered as the ‘first veritable Tory’ to break ‘through the Liberal traditions of Brighton’, yet he had frequently taken an independent line, both on the hustings and during his brief spell in the Commons.1Morning Post, 17 May 1877. No mention was made of his decade-long political career in Australia, where he had established a reputation for liberal-conservatism - albeit ‘not far removed from a less than benevolent despotism’ - and as a devout Anglican, but found himself villified by anti-squatter and anti-government campaigners as a ‘double faced and unprincipled schemer’.2F. Strahan, ‘Moor, Henry’, Australian Dictionary of National Biography (2006), ii. 251-2. Unless otherwise indicated, the following paragraphs are based on Strahan.

After attending Greenwich School Moor had trained as a solicitor, and from 1832 to 1841 worked in partnership with John Simpson at Furnival’s Inn, London. In February 1842 he arrived in Port Phillip (Melbourne), where he established a practice at Stone Cottages, Little Flinders Street East, dealing mainly in unpaid debts, commercial arbitrations, conveyancing and mortgages.3F. Corder, ‘A letter book of an early Melbourne solicitor: Mr Henry Moor, 1842-3’, Victorian Historical Magazine, xxix (1959), 61-69, at 62 and 64. His application for the position of town clerk to the settlement’s first municipal council in December 1842 was unsuccessful, but the following November he was elected a councillor for Bourke Ward. He served as mayor from November 1844 to November 1845, earning respect for sorting out the council’s finances and declining any personal emolument, and on stepping down it was noted that ‘there is not another person in the town so competent to discharge the duties’.4Port Phillip Gazette, 27 Oct. 1845, quoted in Corder, ‘A letter book’, 69. He served again from November 1846 to November 1847, when he also chaired the provisional committee for anti-transportation, and in February 1848 was appointed first registrar of the Anglican diocese of Melbourne.

A close associate of superintendant Charles LaTrobe, in July 1849 Moor was elected to represent Port Phillip’s Geelong district in the New South Wales Legislative Council, where he unsuccessfully attempted to bring in bills increasing the powers of the Anglican Church and was accused of assisting wealthy occupiers of crown lands (squatters) in the run-up to separation. Following the creation of the state of Victoria, he stood for Portland in the first elections to its legislative council in October 1851, but was defeated. He departed for England early the following year, returned to Australia in December 1853, and in March 1854 left permanently.

Moor, who had made ‘a large fortune’ in Australia from his business and pastoral holdings, settled in Brighton’s fashionable Kemp Town and took up philanthropic and charitable endeavours, notably as president of the Brighton Institute, which had reading rooms in Church Street.5Strahan, 252; Daily News, 13 July; Morning Post, 16 July 1860. On 26 Jan. 1859 he chaired a London dinner to celebrate the 71^st anniversary of the settlement of Australia, where he was described as a late member of the ‘legislative councils of New South Wales and Victoria’.6Morning Chron., 27 Jan. 1859. He was on the continent when a vacancy occurred at Brighton in July 1860, for which he came forward as a ‘moderate’ Conservative, citing his support for an extension of the franchise to all those who were educated. After a hard-fought contest against two rival Liberals he was defeated in second place.7Morning Post, 16, 17 July 1860. The presence of three rival Liberals provided another opening at the by-election of 1864, when he stood as a ‘free, independent and unshackled’ supporter of ‘measures not men’, who was favourable to economic reductions, a reform of church rates that would ‘relieve those who conscientiously dissent’, and non-intervention in foreign wars. Finding his commitment to the established Church questioned by some local Tories, after he had insisted that Anglicanism was ‘not the only way to enter the kingdom of heaven’, he suspended his candidature, only to resume the field with mutual assurances of support. In what was billed as an ‘extraordinary result’, he was returned with a comfortable lead ‘for one of the most liberal boroughs in the kingdom’.8Standard, 4, 9, 15 Feb.; The Times, 7 Feb. 1864.

Moor generally opposed the Palmerston ministry in the lobbies, but had no qualms about charting his own course, telling the House that he did not ‘belong to any party; he was an independent Member’, 29 May 1865. He voted with his radical colleague for public buildings to be rated, 5 Apr., but against the opposition’s criticism of the schools inspectors’ reports, 12 Apr., 12 May 1864. He divided against the county franchise, 13 Apr., and borough franchise bills, 11 May 1864. In his maiden speech, 18 Apr. 1864, he endorsed calls for greater police supervision of released convicts, ‘whilst transportation was kept in its present suspended state of animation’. He agonised over the abolition of university tests, 1 June 1864, explaining that although he backed the admission of Dissenters and Catholics to Oxford and Cambridge, he could not support their obtaining electoral rights in university governance on graduation. He divided against repeal of the malt duty, 7 Mar. 1865, but was in the Liberal minority for inquiry into the Irish Church, 28 Mar., and their majorities on the Catholic oaths bill, 30 May, 12 June 1865. On 18 May 1865 he unsuccessfully moved an amendment to the partnership bill, noting that its object ‘was to encourage loans of money to traders’, but that its clauses about repayment in cases of bankruptcy made it doubtful that providers ‘would lend money on such conditions’. On 29 May 1865 he raised the issue of a pension for his friend Latrobe in respect of his service as Port Phillip’s superintendant, and in his last known intervention moved unsuccessfully for one to be bestowed, 22 June 1865.

At the 1865 general election Moor offered again for Brighton, where a reunited Liberal party attacked his ‘liberal-conservatism’ and pushed him into third place.9Morning Post, 12 July 1865. He suffered the same fate three years later, standing as an ‘Independent Conservative’, and is not known to have sought election elsewhere. Moor, who had published a descriptive account of a tour through Imperial Russia in 1863, died at his home in Teddington in 1877, leaving estate valued under £35,000 to his second wife.10H. Moor, A Visit to Russia in the Autumn of 1862 (1863); Morning Post, 17 May 1877. A surviving letterbook from his first year in Australia is held by the University of Melbourne Law Archives (Law Institute of Victoria Collection, Acc. No. 60/8) and a street bears his name in Fitzroy, Melbourne.