Patrick Comerford
During my two recent days in hospital in Oxford – the John Radcliffe Hospital and the Churchill Hospital – over the past two weeks or so, I have ended each day attending Evensong in the Chapel of the Resurrection in Pusey House.
Last Friday evening, I noticed two sets of two-light windows near the chapel that commemorate two architects, father and son, with intimate links with Pusey House and with strong Irish identities.
Temple Lushington Moore (1856-1920), the architect of Pusey House, was born in Tullamore, Co Offaly. His only son, Richard Temple Moore (1891-1918), was killed when the RMS Leinster was torpedoed and sunk off Dublin a mere month before the end of World War I.
Pusey House on St Giles’, Oxford, is firmly rooted in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, and is celebrating its 140th anniversary throughout the academic year 2024-2025. It was founded in 1884 in memory of Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and, for 40 years, a leading figure in the Oxford Movement.
The first principal of Pusey House was Charles Gore (1853-1932) in 1884-1893. Gore edited Lux Mundi in 1889, delivered the Bampton Lectures in 1891, and founded the Community of the Resurrection at Pusey House in 1892. Later, he became Bishop of Worcester and the first Bishop of Birmingham, before returning to Oxford as Bishop of Oxford.
At first, Pusey House occupied two townhouses on the present site on St Giles’ from 1884 to 1912. In 1903, a Leeds solicitor, John Cudworth, left a bequest of £70,000 to Pusey House, which then had a growing ministry to the university. When Darwell Stone (1859-1941) was Principal (1909-1934), the Irish-born architect Temple Moore was commissioned in October 1911 to design new college and chapel buildings.
Temple Moore has been described as ‘England’s leading ecclesiastical architect from the mid-Edwardian years’. The architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner said that he was ‘always sensitive in his designs and often interesting.’
His designs reflect his Anglo-Catholic practice and values. His work can be seen across England, particularly in the North. He is known for a series of fine Gothic Revival churches built about 1890 and 1917 and he also restored many churches and designed church fittings.
He designed about 40 new churches, including the Anglican cathedral in Nairobi, restored older churches, and made alterations and additions to others, and designed fittings and furniture for many church interiors. He also designed and altered country houses, schools, vicarages, parish halls, a court house, and memorial and churchyard crosses.
Temple Lushington Moore (1856-1920) was born in Tullamore, Co Offaly, on 7 June 1856, the son of an army officer, Major-General George Frederick Moore (1817-1884), and Charlotte Reilly (1827-1922), the youngest daughter of John Lushington Reilly, of Scarvagh House, Co Down, and Louisa Hancock Temple of Watertown, Co Westmeath. Charlotte Reilly was also related to Power Le Poer Trench (1770-1839), the last Church of Ireland Archbishop of Tuam, and to Archbishop William Alexander of Armagh.
So the names Temple and Lushington come from his mother’s side of the family, with ancestral roots in Co Down, Co Westmeath and Co Galway.
Moore grew up in Scotland, moved to London in 1875, and was articled to the architect George Gilbert Scott jr (1839-1897), known as ‘the Middle Scott’. Although Moore set up his own practice in 1878, he continued to work closely with Scott, helping to complete his works when Scott’s health deteriorated.
From the early 1880s he travelled widely studying buildings on the continent, chiefly in Germany, France and Belgium. He was particularly impressed by the great mediaeval brick churches of north Germany, echoes of which can be found in some of his own impressively austere designs.
Moore married Emma Storrs Wilton (1856-1938), the eldest daughter of the Revd Richard Wilton of Londesborough, in 1884.
Moore is known for his Gothic Revival churches built in 1890-1917. He also restored many churches and designed church fittings. The National Heritage List for England designates at least 34 of Moore’s new churches as listed buildings. Two of these, Saint Wilfrid’s Church, Harrogate, and All Saints, Stroud, are listed at Grade I, and at least 16 of the others are at Grade II*. His other works include the restoration of the Treasurer’s House and Saint William’s College, York.
Stuart Kinsella of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, has also identified at least two cathedral and two churches in Ireland, one of each in Co Armagh and Co Galway, where Moore designed repairs and improvements: Dumore, Church, Co Galway (1887), Acton Church, Poyntzpass, Co Armagh (1890-1891), the Bishop’s Chapel in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh (1890-1891), and Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Tuam (1894).
Moore was elected a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (FRIBA) in 1905, and his pupils included Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), son of George Gilbert Scott jr.
Moore designed a large Gothic building around a quadrangle for Pusey House. The centrepiece is the two vaulted chapels separated by a stone pulpitum, based on those found in ‘mediaeval Franciscan priories.’
Moore’s only son, Richard Temple Moore (1891-1918), was articled to his father, worked with him on his designs for Pusey House, and was expected to continue the practice. The Chapel and part of the Library were complete by 1914, and most of the remaining portions of the building were finished in 1918.
But Richard Moore was killed in the closing days of World War I. He had enlisted as a private in the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry and was a military passenger on the RMS Leinster when it was sunk by torpedoes in the Irish Sea on the morning of 10 October 1918. The Kingstown-Holyhead mailboat, was 16 miles out of Dublin that morning heading for Holyhead when it was torpedoed and sunk by German U-boat 123.
The RMS Leinster was carrying 771 passengers and crew. They included a crew of 76, 22 postal sorters from Dublin working in the ship’s onboard postal sorting room, and 180 civilian passengers, men, women, and children. The greatest number of passengers on board, however, were service personnel. Many of them like Richard Moore were going on leave.
Richard Moore was just 27 and was buried in Grangegorman Military Cemetery, Dublin. Officially, 501 people died in the sinking, making it both the greatest ever loss of life in the Irish Sea and the highest ever casualty rate on an Irish owned ship. The dead are remembered at the RMS Leinster Memorial in Dun Laoghaire, and for many years by the Leinster Memorial Church at the Seamen’s Institute (1919-1923) on the corner of Eden Quay and Marlborough Street, Dublin, designed by WM Mitchell & Sons.
One of the inscriptions on the paired windows in Pusey House reads: ‘To the Glory of God and in loving memory of Richard Temple Moore, Royal Wilts Yeomanry, Drowned on SS Leinster Oct 10 1918 aged 27 years. Only son of Temple Moore, Architect, and his partner on this building.’
Temple Moore had lived his later life in Hampstead, in Downshire Hill and then at 46 Well Walk, where he died on 30 June 1920. He was buried in the churchyard at Saint John’s Church, Hampstead, which he had altered in 1912. His son-in-law Leslie Thomas Moore continued his practice and completed some of his commissions.
The second set of wording on the paired windows in Pusey House reads: ‘ADMG and in memory of Temple Moore, Architect of this building. Died June 30 1920 aged 64.’
Temple Moore’s south range of the quadrangle at Pusey House remained unexecuted at the time of his death, and was only finished in 1925 to sympathetic designs by John Duke Coleridge (1879-1934).
The smaller Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament was reordered between 1935 and 1939 by Sir Ninian Comper (1864-1960). Comper and Moore were both invested in medievalism and, more broadly, in the richness of architectural revivalism. Comper’s work in the chapel includes a gilded baldacchino surmounted by the Risen Christ and attendant angels, and the stained glass in the east window.
The two two-ight windows in Pusey House commemorating Temple Moore and his son Richard are by Henry Victor Milner (1866-1944), who painted windows and church furnishings for many of Moore’s churches.
Milner worked for Burlison and Grylls for some time, and his work with Moore in his churches from 1887 on seems to have been commissioned independently.
The architectural historian Harry Goodhart-Rendel once described Pusey House as the best specimen of Gothic design in the city of Oxford. Pusey House continues its work as the centre of Anglo-Catholicism in Oxford but, far from being an architectural showpiece, Pusey House Chapel remains a place of living worship, where the offices are chanted and the Mass is celebrated every day.
