A summary of his caree, which spanned two world wars, is all I will attempt in this introduction.
Major Moore was actually born in Chicopee, Massachussetts, gaining US citizenship, and it was to there that he retired, though he maintained a home in Bermuda, and there where he died in 1970.
Raised in Bermuda, he attended the Saltus Grammar School.
With the outbreak of the Great War, he served in the Bermuda Rifle Corps, before taking a leave from that unit to travel to Canada were he successfully applied for a commission in the Royal Flying Corps. After completing his basic training in Canada, he was sent, oddly enough, to Texas, in the United States, where, even at that early date, the Royal Flying Corps was operating (winter) flying schools, for advanced training, before being posted to France.
Serving with a number of squadrons, he flew Sopwith Dolphin fighters on active sorties over the Western Front, gaining three-and-a-half victories and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Presumably, when the Royal Flying Corps was merged with the Royal Naval Air Service in 1918 to create the Royal Air Forceas an independent service, he went with it.
On the war's end he left the service, though,and returned to the island. Presumably he found civilian employment, though this writer has yet to establish what. He couldn't quite shake the taste for military life, however, and entered the part-time Bermuda Volunteer Engineers in the nineteen-twenties. He quickly was promoted to Major, Officer Commanding the BVE and was still in this capacity when the volunteer units were mobolized on the 3rd September, 1939, preparatory to the decleration of war on Nazi Germany.
While continuing in his role as OC, BVE, he took on another role of perhaps greater significance.
With the outbreak of the war, a pair of patriotic residents, Bertram Work, who was actually a US citizen,and Canadian bornDuncan McMartin, donated a Luscombe floatplane to with which to create their brainchild, a flying school to train local volunteers for the RAF. A second Luscombe was acquired and, ministered to by a quasi-governmental committee, the Bermuda Flying School was set up in 1940 at Darrell's Island (the pre-war Imperial Airways operated civil flying boat port that was largelly taken over by the RAF during the War), and, in addition to his duties with the engineers, Major Montgomery-Moore also became its commanding officer.
Before the RAF's oversupply of manpower led to its closure in 1942, the flying school would become part of the Commonwealth Air Training plan,and would send 80 Bermudian pilots to the Air Ministry,most of whom went to the RAF (though the Fleet Air Arm was also a beneficiary.)
With the closure of the flying school, Major Moore looked around for another use to which its management,and the islands manpower might be put.
He arranged with the Royal Canadian Air Force to supply them with aircrew recruits, already examined for physical and educational fitness and, before the war was over, more than two-hundred recruits, men and women, were accepted by the Canadian service.
The RCAF expressed their gratitude to Major Moore directly with a commendation for his efforts on their behalf.
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