Vice admiral William Usborne Moore (March 8, 1849 – March 15, 1918) also known as W. Usborne Moore was a British naval commander, psychical researcher and spiritualist."Maria Gertrude"
Usborne Family Tree.

Career

Moore worked as a naval surveyor, serving in Fiji and the SW Pacific in and between 1876 and 1885; in China with between 1885 and 1889; in Australia with between 1889 and 1893; and in home waters with between 1895 and 1900. In 1877, he married Maria Gertrude in Sydney,

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. In the South China Sea, Moore and Percy Bassett-Smith, the surgeon of HMS ''Rambler'', spent a week on a scientific survey of the Tizard and Macclesfield Banks. This work was carried out at the request of Captain Wharton, Hydrographer of the Navy, who was a member of the Coral Reef Committee of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

. They ran sections to determine the shapes of the reefs, and dredged to establish the type of coral growing, and the depths at which live coral could be found. Later that year, while surveying the Zhoushan Archipelago and Hangzhou Bay in 1888, Moore took time to investigate the

tidal bore Tidal is the adjectival form of tide. Tidal may also refer to: * ''Tidal'' (album), a 1996 album by Fiona Apple * Tidal (king), a king involved in the Battle of the Vale of Siddim * TidalCycles, a live coding environment for music * Tidal (serv ...

of the Qiantang River, the largest in the world. He provided the first detailed description of the bore by a western observer. On a subsequent visit, he was able to obtain photographs of the bore. Moore continued to pursue the scientific opportunities presented by surveying voyages on his next command, HMS ''Penguin''. Bassett-Smith was again appointed surgeon, and the engineer was J.J. Walker an established entomologist. Between 1890 and 1893 they collected widely, providing the material for a series of published papers.

Spiritualism

Moore retired in 1904 with the rank of Rear-Admiral. He developed an interest in spiritualism and had a long history of defending fraudulent

mediums Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or spir ...

as genuine. He endorsed the direct voice medium

Etta Wriedt Etta Wriedt (1859-1942) was an American direct voice medium. Wriedt was born in Detroit and was well known in the field of spiritualism, she employed a trumpet in the darkness of the séance room which she claimed spirits would use to make noises ...

. He defended the Bangs Sisters and even stated that the psychical investigator

Hereward Carrington Hereward Carrington (17 October 1880 – 26 December 1958) was a well-known British-born American investigator of psychic phenomena and author. His subjects included several of the most high-profile cases of apparent psychic ability of his times, ...

had never visited their house or exposed their tricks. After Carrington gave incontrovertible evidence that he had visited their house and caught them in fraud, Moore had to retract his charges. In 1906, Moore attended a séance with the British materialization medium Frederick G. Foster Craddock. A small electric torch used to produce 'spirit' lights was discovered in a drawer during a séance by Moore. Despite admitting the fraud of the incident, Moore still endorsed the mediumship of Craddock, stating that his trance control "Graem" was a malicious spirit. Moore also endorsed the American materialization medium Joseph Jonson from

Toledo, Ohio Toledo ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Lucas County, Ohio, United States. A major Midwestern United States port city, Toledo is the fourth-most populous city in the state of Ohio, after Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, and according ...

. He claimed to have observed materialized spirits emerge from the cabinet during a séance in his book ''Glimpses of the Next State'' (1911). Jonson was later exposed as a fraud by

James Hewat McKenzie James Hewat McKenzie (1869–1929) was a British parapsychologist, and the founder of the British College of Psychic Science. McKenzie was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 11 November 1869 and died on 29 August 1929, in London.Buckland, Raymond ( ...

who discovered that Jonson's daughter had dressed up as a spirit. In 1907, Hereward Carrington attended séances with Jonson at

Lily Dale, New York Lily Dale is a hamlet, connected with the Spiritualist movement, located in the Town of Pomfret on the east side of Cassadaga Lake, next to the Village of Cassadaga. Located in southwestern New York State, it is one hour southwest of Buffalo ...

and concluded "on several occasions, the fraud was very apparent, and that I was enabled to follow the process of materialisation and dematerialisation with ease. Everything was the most obvious and simple trickery, and seen to be such." The spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle described Moore as "among the greatest of psychic researchers". However, Moore was heavily criticized by psychical researchers. Science historian

William Hodson Brock William Hodson Brock (born 1936) is a British chemist and science historian. Brock was born in Brighton. He studied chemistry at University College London and the history and philosophy of science at the University of Leicester to become a lectu ...

has described Moore as a "credulous spiritualist". Brock, William Hodson. (2008). ''William Crookes (1832-1919) and the Commercialization of Science''. Ashgate Publishing. p. 206.

Publications

''The Cosmos and the Creeds: Elementary Notes on the Alleged Finality of the Christian Faith''
(1903)
''Glimpses of the Next State''
(1911)
''The Voices''
(1913) *''Spirit Identity by the Direct Voice'' (1914)

Career

Spiritualism

Publications

References

Further reading