Moore, (William) Arthur (1880–1962), traveller and international journalist, was born 21 December 1880 at Glenavy, Co. Antrim, younger son and fourth among five children of the Rev. William Moore (d. 4 August 1920), curate of Glenavy, and Marianne Moore (née Frizelle; d. Feb. 1917) of Co. Sligo. His father was later rector of St Patrick's, Newry (1892–1920). Moore was educated at Campbell College, Belfast, obtaining an open classical scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, in 1900. In 1904 he was elected as president of the Oxford Union.
In late 1904 Moore was employed as secretary to the Balkan Committee established to publicise the plight of Macedonian Christians. He travelled extensively in the Balkans, and in 1908 he reported on the Young Turk revolution for a number of British newspapers. While in Macedonia he became, in his own words, ‘the first west European to penetrate central Albania’. In late 1908 Moore was employed by a consortium of newspapers to report on the civil war in Persia. Arriving in Tabriz on 19 January 1909, he found himself trapped in a 100-day siege. In March he joined the constitutionalist cause, and on 19 April led the final sortie on royalist forces, which helped to alleviate pressure on the town until Russian relief forces arrived.
Later in 1909 he was employed as the official correspondent of The Times in Teheran. Over the next three years he became involved in Persian politics, and travelled widely in Persia, undertaking in 1912 a horse-back ride from Teheran to the Persian Gulf. Travelling home in the midst of the first Balkan war, he sent several articles to The Times, which earned him the appointment from April 1913 as ‘our own correspondent in St Petersburg’. It proved an unhappy few months, as a result of persistent clashes with the long-term resident correspondent, Robert Wilton. In 1915 he married Wilton's secretary, Maud Eileen Maillet (d. 3 August 1957), daughter of George Maillet. As a journalist she wrote under the pseudonym ‘Eve Adam’.
After his return from Russia, Moore travelled in May 1914 on his own initiative to Durazzo, Albania, to report on events following its declaration of independence. He departed in early August after the outbreak of war, and arrived in Paris. On one excursion to find the war front, he encountered retreating British soldiers near Amiens. The publication of his report in The Times (30 Aug. 1914), and its revelation of the hitherto officially disguised conduct of the war, caused a furore, but the ‘Amiens despatch’, as it became known, remains one of the few authentic journalist voices of the first world war.
Moore enlisted in early 1915 and spent much of the conflict working in Salonica. His wife was based in Italy, and their only child, Antony Ross Moore, was born near Naples on 30 May 1918. At the close of the war, Arthur Moore received back the Romanian royal family in Bucharest on behalf of the British government. Among other foreign decorations, he was awarded a military MBE.
Between April 1919 and late 1921 he returned to Teheran as Middle Eastern correspondent for The Times, becoming friendly with Reza Khan, who in 1925 acceded as shah. In 1922 cuts in the paper's celebrated foreign department witnessed the end of Moore's association with Printing House Square. Between 1922 and 1923 he edited the New Age, which he used to castigate Bonar Law's government. In early 1924 he was appointed as assistant editor to the leading British newspaper in India, the Statesman in Calcutta. Between 1927 and 1933 he also served as Bengal European constituency member in the Indian legislative assembly, before being appointed in late 1932 as managing editor of the Statesman.
He was close friends with Indian leaders such as Gandhi, and was familiar with the contemporary viceroys, but he suffered a severe personality clash with Linlithgow, viceroy from 1936 to 1943. Moore publicly pilloried Chamberlain in 1938 following Munich, and with the onset of the second world war he adopted ideas that increasingly alienated the British authorities. His demands for home rule for the viceroy, the federation of India, and a hastening of dominion status, served only to attract official hostility. In August 1942 Linlithgow secured Moore's dismissal from the Statesman.
He stayed in India for another decade. In 1944 he joined Supreme Allied Command South East Asia (SACSEA) as a public relations adviser to Mountbatten. In 1948 he founded an intellectual journal entitled Thought (1948–55). He spoke openly against the partition of India, and in 1950 reported the Korean war for the Dalmia newspaper group. He returned to England in 1952, and devised a new system of tuning keyboard instruments to give truer intonation than ‘equal temperament’, while retaining freedom of changing keys. This was publicly demonstrated at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 19 December 1960.
Moore's writings included his unpublished memoirs; a novel, The miracle (1908), under the pseudonym ‘Antrim Oriel’; ‘Scenes from the siege of Tabriz’, Contemporary Review, dxxiv (1909); The Orient Express (1914); This our war (1941); and ‘Tuning a keyboard: a new solution’, Musical Times, xcix (1958). He died at his Chelsea home on 23 July 1962. His son Tony Moore (d. 3 November 2000) worked in the diplomatic service, was awarded the CMG (1967), and married (1963) Mary Galbraith, later principal of St Hilda's College (1981–90). One of Arthur Moore's nephews, George Buchanan (qv), was a noted Irish author and poet.