Irish Blood, Irish Heart: Frank McNally on a Mancunian hibernophile, Sir Norman Moore

Irish Times

09-05-2025

Manchester-born and Cambridge-educated, the baronet, pathologist, and historian Sir Norman Moore (1847 – 1922) was in some ways a pillar of the English establishment.
But the defining events of his life included an encounter at Crewe railway station, one night while waiting for a connection, with two travelling harvest workers from County Mayo. Moore was able to greet them in their native language, after which they all drank coffee together, discussing Irish history at length.
Eighteen years later, one of the men wrote to him, having seen his address in a newspaper, and this time seeking his expertise on a chronic illness. The English medical man helped cure the patient, eventually, and they became regular correspondents thereafter.
This is one just example of a deep entanglement with Ireland and its culture, including the language, that Moore inherited from his unconventional parents.
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He was the only child of the political economist Robert Ross Rowan Moore and his Limerick Quaker wife, Rebecca (née Fisher), already estranged by the time of Norman's birth. Raised mostly by his mother and her liberal non-conformist friends in Manchester, Moore Jnr left school early to work in a cotton mill.
But he later studied at St Catherine's College, Cambridge, and won an eight-year residential scholarship there, to help set up a school of science, before he was 'rusticated' (a polite word for expelled) because of involvement in a scuffle.
Staying with a friend near Ballymena, he discussed Virgil and Homer with a local ploughman.
After that, he enrolled in St Bartholomew's, London, to study anatomy, and was involved with that hospital for the rest of his life, writing its history in a two-volume set, published in 1918.
Alongside his medical career, meanwhile, he had become a scholar of Irish, a language he learned in childhood. One measure of his engagement with it is that, to help him understand the 11th century Leabhar na Huidri (Book of the Dun Cow), he read an Irish grammar book by a German professor, and was so impressed with that as to contact the author and ask permission to translate it into English. His version of the book was later considered by at least one expert to be an improvement on the original.
Moore was also a frequent visitor to his ancestral homeland, a country he approached with the zeal of a pilgrim. On first seeing the Rock of Cashel, for example, he eulogised:
'My mother's ancestor Ceallachán was king of
Caisil
and when I crossed the plain and saw the grand old rock […] I rejoiced to feel that it was no strange or foreign grandeur which surrounded its old towers but a kindly family love.'
Walking Ireland's back roads, he sometimes slept rough. He was in west Donegal the night that, unbeknownst to him, his father died. Many years later, he recalled:
'I slept on a wild mountain ... called Lough Salt. I was ignorant of his illness. I had lost my way and was very tired so I lay down in a hollow and covered myself with pieces of turf to keep off the wind which swept furiously across the mountain. Fierce driving rain followed but at last I fell asleep and when I awoke it was a clear, starlight morning. I walked on thinking of the protecting care of God. My father had been dying that night and I had walked on, as far as strong worldly protectors go, alone in the world. But God has always been my helper and to Him I will always turn for help.'
Moore was struck by, among other things, the level of classical learning in 19th century Ireland, even among the poor. Staying with a friend near Ballymena, he discussed Virgil and Homer with a local ploughman and reflected critically on the writings of a previous scholar a century earlier:
'Dr Charles Smith, whose survey of Kerry, [was] published in 1774, noted that 'classical reading extends itself,
even to a fault
, among the lower and poorer kind in this county.' The `fault', in his estimation, was that it took their attention away from more useful knowledge.'
Even when in England, Moore could commune with the old country, something he did on his 30th birthday. 'As I could not be in Ireland on that day I chose Glastonbury', he wrote, because 'many Irishmen spent religious lives there'.
Kneeling at what he thought was the former location of a high altar, he made a vow 'that I would always prefer duty and learning to money.'
Of his sense of identity, Moore said this: 'I am myself, but I am more. I have received a sort of trust from my dead ancestors.' After winning the affections of his future wife, Amy Leigh Smith, he wrote: 'In giving your heart to me, my dear one, you gave it to Ireland. You are all the world of people to me and Ireland is all the world of land.'
This extraordinary man seems to have been largely ignored in the country he loved and has since been forgotten. But he will get some overdue recognition next week, when Dr Elizabeth Boyle of Maynooth University gives a talk on his life and work at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The event is on Thursday, May 15th, at 5.30pm. More details are at celt.dias.ie