1. Patricks Best Mates
During Patricks long career in astronomy (he was a British Astronomical Association member for 78 years!) he had many friends. Of course, when someone is famous they tend to attract friends for all sorts of reasons, but genuinely devoted fans were always welcome in Patricks world and inside his house. However, Patrick expected his friends to always be totally, unswervingly, loyal, and his definition of loyalty meant that you agreed with him on all of the fundamental pillars that supported his view of the world. A friend could never write a bad review regarding one of his books, or even point out any minor errors. Such a review would see the friend rapidly relegated to his personal Serpent Kingdom! Patricks erroneous view that the major lunar craters were created by volcanic action could never be challenged by his closest friends and neither could his belief in the existence of Transient Lunar Phenomena or TLP. Since his teenage years Patrick had been influenced by Robert Barker and Percy Wilkins within the BAA Lunar Section and they certainly did not believe in a changeless world, or one whose surface was cratered solely by meteoritic impacts. So, impact theorists and TLP sceptics would rapidly be labelled as Serpents.
Outside the world of astronomy Patricks political views were distinctly right wing, although his hatred of blood sports ran counter to this. Therefore, if you had the view that the English were the best race on Earth (sometimes he was willing to extend this to the British!) and that immigration must be banned forthwith and that women should be banned from certain activities (such as being on TV and working as teachers or in publishing) you were almost certain to be eligible for his select group of friends. Confusingly, Patrick did have a few exceptions to these rules in cases where he really did like the person in question. For example, Bill Granger of Peterborough, who readers of RAF Blazer will recall had a wife Ethel with a 13-in. waist and who invariably had a cat on his shoulder named Treacle Pudding, was a communist! Yet he was allowed into Patricks inner circle of friends and even appeared on the second edition of The Sky at Night .
Clearly, when you have lived such a long life, with more than half a century in the public eye, you will have lots of friends, or at least, lots of acquaintances, but I have tried to concentrate here on the people who Patrick felt most at ease with and who he regarded as his very closest friends. This list of Patricks best mates is therefore very selective and many friends have been left out if they had no eccentricities or if there is little exciting to relate. I have deliberately omitted people like H. Percy Wilkins who I covered to exhaustion in RAF Blazer and I have specifically included people who readers asked me to write more about. In addition, within Patricks huge circle of friends there are some people who were such extraordinary and eccentric characters that they just had to be included. So, essentially, this chapter is the result of reader requests for more information about specific people, along with some of my own personal preferences.
I will start this list with Patricks best ever friend, his Mum.
Gertrude Lilian Moore (ne White) (18861981)
Fig. 1.1
Patricks mother Gertrude Lilian Moore ne White (18861981) during her 80s. From a photograph in Patricks collection, copied by the author with his permission
Fig. 1.2
Captain Charles Trachsel Moore (18851947). This painting was never publicly displayed in Patricks house, unlike the dozens of paintings and pictures of his mother
When Patrick attempted to write his first astronomy book, aged 8, he made it clear that he was Going to keep it simple, so that even Mother can understand it! Despite this apparent youthful insult to his mothers intelligence she remained, without question, his best friend in life until her death on January 7th 1981, at the advanced age of 94. Gertrude Moores death was a hammer blow to Patrick, and those who knew him well think that his character permanently changed in January 1981. His mother had shared his whole life and he was her only child. Patrick had never been that close to his military father (an accountant following injuries sustained in a gas attack in the trenches in World War I) and after he died, just before Christmas 1947, the bond between mother and son became even closer. Due to problems with Patricks heartbeat he was educated at the family home, rarely mixing with other children until the age of 15 or so. Therefore Patrick grew up as a very unusual child, whose mother, father, cousins and tutor were his sole friends until his teenage years.
A number of people have suggested that Patrick may have had a form of Aspergers syndrome, but I am reluctant to do what has become a modern obsession, namely putting everyone into a psychological box and ticking it. Patrick was unique and I feel the isolated only child upbringing by his mother must have played a major role. To go from this unusual childhood to then become an RAF Officer, a schoolteacher and then a TV astronomer and a national institution was a journey that only he experienced and only his mother witnessed first hand. What would his father have thought if he had lived beyond 1947? Ten years later Patrick was on BBC Television each month and by the early 1970s he was a household name, known to everyone in the UK and adored by millions. Only Gertrude Moore witnessed Patrick go from childhood to international fame and only she, surely, really understood her son. So, when she passed away it was a hammer blow to Patrick.
In 1929 Mrs Moore had sparked Patricks initial interest in astronomy by showing him a book she had owned for many years, namely The Story of the Solar System by G.F. Chambers (published in 1898). Patrick read it in a couple of days and his mother then passed the companion volume to him, namely The Story of the Stars . The young Patrick had other interests too, especially playing the xylophone, playing the piano and playing with the family cat, but it was astronomy that would dominate his interest from the age of about 10 onwards. It was not at all clear that Patrick would end up as an amateur scientist and prolific author though, as his mother told the Daily Express columnist Jean Rook in July 1978:
He was the untidiest, oddest little devil as a boy and he hasnt changed. Life with him is a bit strange, but not bad when you stop worrying about what could happen next.
In fact though, 5 years before that newspaper interview, and before she appeared alongside Patrick on This is Your Life and Parkinson , both in 1974, she appeared on her own in a 10 min. TV slot first broadcast on Thursday February 22nd 1973 on BBC 2 at 9.15 p.m. Sandwiched between part 2 of Weir of Hermiston and an episode of Horizon entitled How much do you smell? Mrs Moore related the true story of being Patricks Mum in the BBC series Times Remembered by Proud Mums. Her account of Patricks genuine heart rhythm problem totally preventing his schooling was a little different, as she stated that it was amazing to see him so full of energy on TV, because: as a child he was thoroughly lazyhe only put up with going to school for one year! The Daily Mirror reporter Mary Malone summarised the show in the next days newspaper on 1973 Feb 23: For something out of this world, look no further than star gazer Patrick Moore of telly fameespecially the way mum tells it. In that splendid new series Times Remembered by Proud Mums (BBC 2) he was yet another of the famous to be bared. That scraggy, windswept look is all his own apparently. Mum has spent years trying to tidy him up. But no matter how carefully she packs his bags, he still goes off with little more than a toothbrush. He just doesnt care what he looks like she said, shaking her head with happy regret. By the way, did it occur to any of you that wild man Pat resembles more than somewhat those delightful drawings his mother does of creatures in outer space?
