editorial staff of The Times, where his outstanding abilities were quickly recognized.
Early in 1899 Monypenny was offered unexpectedly the editorship of the Johannesburg Star, the foremost organ of the Uitlanders, who were suffering under the oppressive rule of President Kruger. The offer was accompanied by an assurance of unhampered editorial freedom. He accepted it, and made the journal a power in the political struggle that ensued. When this culminated in the South African War he obtained a commission in the Imperial Light Horse, fought in Natal, and, not without injury to his health, endured the siege of Ladysmith. Later, under Lord Milner's high commissionership, he became director of civil supplies and a member of the committee for regulating the return of refugees after the annexation of the Transvaal. When the Star was again published he resumed the editorship; but he resigned it in 1903 from a scrupulous sense of honour, finding himself unable to countenance the importation of indentured Chinese labour. He made his way from Lake Victoria Nyanza by an exhausting tramp past Wadelai and Dufile and down the White Nile to Khartoum, and thence to England, where he rejoined The Times staff. In 1908 he was appointed an original director of The Times Publishing Company.
Monypenny's great opportunity came when he was chosen by The Times to write the authoritative biography of Lord Beaconsfield, from the materials bequeathed to Lord Rowton. The choice was in all respects happy. He had taken a lifelong interest in the greater issues of politics, imperial and domestic, upon which he brought to bear a judgement of conspicuous sagacity, fortified by close observation, penetrating shrewdness, and a natural gift for separating the essential from the accidental. These qualities gave weight to a lucid style, charged with thought. The first volume of his Life of Benjamin Disraeli appeared in October 1910, and the second, delayed by failing health, in November 1912. Ten days later, on 23 November, Monypenny died in the New Forest. The biography was continued, and completed in four more volumes, by Mr. G. E. Buckle, the editor under whom Monypenny had served The Times. Mr. Buckle also wrote the inscription for the memorial tablet in the parish church of Farnham Royal, Buckinghamshire, where Monypenny is buried. Monypenny was never married.
[The Times, 25 November 1912; private records; personal knowledge.]
MOORE, EDWARD (1835–1916), principal of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Dante scholar, was born at Cardiff, where his father practised as a physician, 28 February 1835. He was the elder son of Dr. John Moore, by his second wife, Charlotte Puckle. He was educated at Bromsgrove, and at Pembroke College, Oxford. In 1858, after obtaining four first classes (classics and mathematics) in moderations and the final schools, he was elected to an open fellowship at Queen's College. He was ordained in 1861, and three years later was appointed by Queen's College to the principalship of St. Edmund Hall, which he held for nearly fifty years. Under Moore's headship the reputation of the hall as a home of ‘true religion and sound learning’ was greatly increased, the numbers were more than doubled, and it was represented in almost every honours list. The university commission of 1877 prepared a new scheme for St. Edmund Hall, to take effect on the retirement or death of the existing head. Moore made it his object to defeat this scheme, which would have ended the separate existence of the hall, and to retain the hall as nearly as possible on the old lines. In 1903, on Moore being nominated to a canonry at Canterbury, the provost of Queen's carried through the hebdomadal council a statute which would have resulted in the absorption of the hall by the college. Moore successfully opposed the statute in congregation, and, retaining the headship with the sanction of the prime minister, set himself to preserve the independence of the hall. After a prolonged struggle, during which, though he had taken up his residence at Canterbury, he lived for a part of each term at the hall, his efforts were crowned with success, and in 1913 he at last felt free to resign. At Canterbury he was from the first an active member of the chapter, his special province being the library.
To the world at large Moore was best known as a Dante scholar. In 1876 he founded the Oxford Dante Society, thereby giving a powerful impulse to the study of Dante in Oxford, and consequently far beyond the limits of Oxford. In 1886 he was appointed Barlow lecturer on Dante at University College, London, an appointment which he held in all for seventeen years; and in 1895 a Dante lectureship was specially created for him at the Taylorian Institution at Oxford. Two of his earliest works on Dante, The Time References in the ‘Divina Commedia’ (1887), and Dante and his Early Biographers (1890),
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