Judge Robert Moore (LGS 1965)
Written by Robert’s wife
Farewell to His Honour Judge Moore
My husband Robert Moore, a very proud old boy of Loughborough Grammar (1956 to 1965), sadly passed away on March 23rd 2023 after a 2 year long fight with pancreatic cancer. The truth is that he would be furious if he knew that I hadn’t already let his old school know that they’d lost one of their biggest fans, so here we go.
Robert Jeffery Moore was born in Rugby to Doreen and Jeff Moore, on the 11th of February 1947. At Loughborough Grammar School he excelled academically, was a regular in the school plays, a county tennis player and a winger in the 1st XV. He learned French from a teacher called Tivi who by all accounts was some sort of shouty former SAS sergeant major turned French teacher who Robert insisted was brilliant. To be fair Robert’s French was always passable, but he did used to insist on yelling it at people so I’m not sure we all shared his enthusiasm for Tivi’s methods.
Robert was one of those people who loved school, making some life-long friends: Derek Shardlow, Dick Hall, and Bri Jones particularly who shared many adventures together. Robert would love whenever anyone new would enter the family fold, because he’d get to tell them the old stories from these days.
Manchester Uni was next to study Law. By 1971 he was called to the Bar in Sheffield.
Soon after all that he broke a tooth eating a lobster. An emergency trip to the dentist found a flustered dental nurse apologizing for having messed up his appointment time. The dental nurse, was me.
We married at Ecclesall Church on August 4th 1979. We honeymooned in Jamaica.
By December 1980 we had Alex. And by September 1983 we had Giles. We bought our first proper family home that same year. A house that provided decades of enjoyment, and was the source of many a landmark party.
Robert loved a party and would take planning them to a truly epic level. From murder mystery nights where he’d hire a vintage cars to pick up our friends to then bring them to the house, to turning our dining room into a train carriage, to hiring musicians to perform in the garden.
Robert was a man who loved the law. It defined him. His study was littered with artwork of trials, books of law defining cases. However despite all this, for a man who loved the law so much, making him follow any sort of rule was impossible. If he could find a way to get a cheaper ticket, jump a queue, or sneak into a ‘members only’ area at a sports ground, he’d do it.By 1994, Robert was made a Circuit Judge in Sheffield. He served on the bench for over 25 years, making him one of the longest serving Judges of all time in the UK. His flair for being a tough sentencer made him a regular thorn in the side of the court of appeal, but for some amusing reason gained him a massive cult following in Grimsby. “Judge Moore for Mayor of Grimsby” the Grimsby Telegraph wrote in 2018.
There’s so much I’ll miss about Robert. His shouty birthday wishes from the Beatles White Album, his tuneless rendition of Sha La La La Le at full volume when he knew you had a hangover. Performing the entire railway children as a one-man play, including upsetting himself at the end with the “daddy my daddy” bit. The massive legend shaped hole he leaves in our lives is tough. Pretty much every single great song from 1960 onwards makes me think of him.
