Ronald Joseph Moore – our Uncle Ron – who died aged 90 in 2020, was a carpenter by trade, spending his working life at Hellingly Hospital. He had been a good spin bowler who could have played for Sussex, an excellent canoeist who was asked to represent his country, a runner, a walker and a keen cyclist. A lifelong bachelor, he knew a lot of the older population of Hailsham, with whom he would often enjoy a joke or two – he had a wonderful sense of humour – and share tales of their wartime childhoods in the town. He loved music, taught himself to play the guitar and would spend happy evenings with his small circle of close friends, playing guitar and singing.
His love of stringed instruments and making things from wood came together in the hours he would spend in his beloved shed, crafting musical instruments. Lots of instruments. He used to say, with a sheepish laugh, “I don’t know what you’re going to do with them all when I’m gone!” but it was only after his death that my three sisters and I fully realised what he had meant.
His modest two-bedroom house was stuffed with instruments – mandolins, mandolas, ukeleles, balalaikas, guitars, Appalachian dulcimers (about 70 of them, it turned out) and a lute. They were everywhere, and mostly half-finished. He loved making the bodies of the instruments, frequently decorating the sound holes with intricate inlays, but rarely got around to stringing them – and we had no idea what on earth to do with them. We couldn’t sell them in their unfinished state, and it would have been a crime to have thrown them away
In the end, I posted a message on Facebook asking if anyone was interested in having one of the instruments, and we gave one or two to the people who responded. Then a chap called Mike Hughesman got in touch and told us how Jim Tipler and some of his musical friends might be interested. They had recently lost another of their friends to cancer and so were doing up old or damaged guitars and selling them, the profits going to a cancer charity in his memory. Since cancer had also taken Ron, we thought this would be ideal and so it was that Jim, Rob Cast and Dave Mantle took away a number of the instruments.
We also contacted with the Nonsuch Dulcimer group who came and relieved us of quite a few of the dulcimers which they sold to keen players. Finally, thanks to a contact made via a friend, Pete Brown, the music producer and son of Joe Brown, took some of the mandolins and a couple of balalaikas which he said he would get finished so they could be used in his recording studio.
Ron was a talented, but shy and modest man. He would have been amazed – and thrilled – to think that there are people all over the country who are playing and enjoying the instruments that he loved to make. It is a wonderful legacy.
Piece written by Judith Horth.