The journalist from Ulster who issued first true report about the Great War in an August 1914 despatch from Amiens in France

On July 24 he attended Campbell College as chief guest, and had to face Fred Crawford who had smuggled 20,000 rifles into Larne only three months previously. Nobody present at that occasion realised how close Britain was to going to war, and three weeks later Gleichen himself was riding down French lanes trying to stem the German advance.

Kitchener, then Secretary of State for War, had learned from previous campaigns, to be suspicious of reporters and, once the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had landed on the continent, he banned journalists from covering military matters. In the early weeks of August 1914 the official war correspondent appointed by Kitchener was Colonel Ernest Swinton known as ‘Eyewitness’, but who issued such anodyne and trivial reports that he quickly became re-christened ‘Eyewash’.

Arthur Moore (1880-1962) was born in Glenavy, where his father was curate, and raised in Newry when his father became rector of St Patrick’s on the hill. Educated at Campbell College in east Belfast then St John’s college Oxford, Moore had been engaged as an international correspondent with The Times in 1909, and covered turbulent political events in Persia (as it then was), and later in 1913 in St Petersburg where he was sent to assess the development of Russian military capabilities in face of the growing threat of European war.

He developed an instinct for a scoop and, in April 1914, had ventured to Albania to report on the political turmoil there but, following the none-too-distant assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he fled to join other Northcliffe reporters in Paris.

Never one to kowtow readily to authority, Moore ventured out on August 28 from the capital to the battlefront in search of the BEF and, at about 7 pm, came across British soldiers in a lamentable condition who said that they had been ordered to retreat from Amiens but had been given no precise instructions. He was astonished as this contradicted everything that had been printed in the press about the BEF.

That night he sat in his hotel rooms in Amiens and wrote a despatch for The Times. The following day he reached Dieppe and paid a ship’s captain to take the report to Printing House Square.

Moore’s Amiens Despatch, as it became known, was published in one of the few Sunday special editions produced by The Times during the War on August 30 1914. As it fundamentally contradicted everything previously published, revealing a humiliating retreat in the face of the German onslaught, and as it also contravened the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), The Times’ editorial department proved somewhat reluctant to publish it and deleted parts which they felt the press censor would blue-pencil. To the paper’s astonishment, the censor, FE Smith, who only the previous year had been in Belfast supporting the unionist cause, had not only restored much of what it had redacted but had also added his own paragraph using the despatch to encourage urgent necessary enlistment.

He wrote: I am sorry to have censored this most able and interesting message so freely, but the reasons are obvious. Forgive my clumsy suggestions but I beg you to use the parts of this article which I have passed to enforce the lesson – reinforcements and reinforcements at once.

The rest of the press, envious of the coup by The Times, was outraged and accused it of being alarmist and effectively treasonable; the public was distressed and horrified as it contradicted everything it had been led to believe.

The government, particularly Asquith, the prime minister, was apoplectic with rage. He regarded publication as ‘a very regrettable exception’ to the reticence expected of the press and added, with total irony, that the government believed that ‘the public is entitled to prompt and authentic information of what has happened at the front’.

The report, which is still in the archive of The Times, described previous reports as ‘eyewash’ and ‘children’s prattle’. Moore employed some journalistic licence by describing Mons, which cost about 1,500 casualties, ‘as the fiercest fight in history’, but essentially the report revealed the depressing military reality.

The Times defended itself against all accusations and accurately described Moore – whose name was never mentioned – as a journalist experienced in reporting warfare.

The Amiens Despatch was the first authentic report of the First World War and, as the authorities were keen to control such matters thereafter, perhaps in some ways the only authentic report.

Moore, then unaware of the scandal and outrage at home, later wrote that he was extremely proud that it resulted in the enlistment of 30,000 volunteers in Great Britain the following week.

Up to that time, Carson had been reluctant to encourage members of the Ulster Volunteer Force to enlist unless the British government promised that there would be no imposition of Home Rule. The dating of events makes it clear, however, that within days of reading the despatch Carson authorised the UVF Special Order for Enlistment, encouraging the membership to volunteer.

It can be argued that Arthur Moore’s despatch was responsible for the move to establish the 36th (Ulster) Division.

There is one strange footnote to these events.

On Sunday 6 September 1914, one week after the publication of the despatch, Arthur’s father’s sermon in Newry was based upon the notion of God being a refuge in times of war.

His congregation was referred directly to events on the continent: ‘The British Army, in particular, has fought a series of rearguard actions which will be memorable as long as history endures. With amazing speed the Germans are pushing forward to strike a blow at Paris’ and ‘The very foundations of the Empire are threatened; all the resources of the Empire must be collected and concentrated, both of men and material, for the defence of our nation’.

These sentences are lifted virtually verbatim from the report in The Times. Although he did not realise it, the sermon had been effectively written by his son.

Moore ultimately enlisted during the First World War and was re-engaged by The Times as its Middle Eastern Correspondent between 1919 and 1921. He became Assistant Editor (in 1924) and Managing Editor (in 1933) of the most prestigious British newspaper in India: The Statesman in Calcutta.

In the late 1930s he antagonised and alienated the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and the British government with efforts to hasten Indian independence and was dismissed in 1942.

He died in 1962 in England and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave although a headstone has been erected in recent years.

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Keith Haines is a former head of history at Campbell College. He will give a series of lectures, in which Arthur Moore will feature, entitled The Secret Diary of Campbell College, 129¼.

1. Among Ignoramuses, Knaves and Blacklegs (September 14).

2. We have looted Paradise instead of living in it (November 9).

3. You know you are getting old when your former pupils have become questions on Pointless (January 11 2024)

Details from Campbell College 028 9076 3076.