Captain John Moore – Janes Fighting Ships

Captain John Moore, who has died aged 88, was editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships and helped develop the covert landing techniques of the Special Boat Service.

Moore was respected internationally. Once, when he was arrested in Shanghai after photographing a Chinese warship, his reputation alone was sufficient to get him released from custody. At the height of the Cold War his forewords to Jane’s Fighting Ships were eagerly awaited commentaries on the state of the world and in particular its navies.

From his shed at Rickney, meticulously lined with files containing his correspondence, press cuttings and photographs, he kept a pair of binoculars handy so that he could indulge another passion, ornithology.

John Evelyn Moore was born on Armistice Day 1921 at St Illario near Genoa, where his father ran an import-export business. The family then emigrated to New Zealand, John picking up a lifelong love of rugby; he was eventually sent to school in England, completing his education at Sherborne. It was on the long sea journeys to and from the antipodes that he formed his love of the sea, and he joined the Navy in September 1939.

Having completed his training at sea in the battleship Rodney, Moore underwent a sub-lieutenant’s course in Portsmouth, then served in the survey ship Challenger from 1942 to 1944. He assisted in hydrographical surveys in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea in preparation for Operation Zipper, the British plan to recapture Malaya from the occupying Japanese; during this period he contracted malaria and was bitten by a rabid dog.

In 1944 he volunteered for “the trade”, and served in the submarines Rover, Vigorous, the captured U994 and Trenchant. He passed his “perisher” course in 1949 and went on to command the submarines Totem and Alaric, and then the 1st Submarine Squadron in Sydney and the 7th, based in Singapore. Moore used to recount how, on a visit to Tonga, a typically well-built son of Queen Salote become stuck in the hatchway of a submarine and had to be eased out before the submarine could dive.

During the Second World War Moore had experienced at first hand the difficulty of landing men from submarines and the submariner’s dislike of entering shallow water. He determined to do something about these problems when in Singapore during the Confrontation between Malaysia and Indonesia between 1962 and 1966, taking a special interest in the operations of the Special Boat Service.

By 1965 “Goldfish”, an underwater method of leaving and re-entering submarines, was under development by the Navy in the Far East. The technique was based on the experience during the Second World War of the midget submarines known as X-craft; but Moore took this further, inventing a homing device called “Trongle” which enabled swimmers to find their parent boat at night.

Next he converted a Mark 20 torpedo (“a useless device for its original task”) to become an underwater delivery vehicle which he called Archimedes, and he experimented with this with the then 2nd Lieutenant Paddy Ashdown, RM.

Moore also adapted a Polaroid camera to take reconnaissance photographs through submarine periscopes, and eventually perfected a technique whereby special forces could be parachuted to a waiting sub, collect their gear and proceed to their targets.

Thus far his commander-in-chief, Vice-Admiral Sir Frank Twiss, had backed Moore’s adventures – but he forbade Moore to undertake “aerial activities.” Moore, however, thought it important to endorse his own schemes and dropped by night to a waiting submarine. He was hauled from the water by a leading seaman who, with true submarine hospitality, greeted him with a tot of neat rum, followed quickly, as Moore revealed himself, by: “Christ, it’s the boss!”

Appointments in naval intelligence followed when Moore studied the navies of the Warsaw Pact nations.

Notwithstanding a lifetime in a disciplined service, Moore never lost his independence of mind. It is said that he refused promotion to rear-admiral for the certainty of long-term employment at Jane’s – on his retirement from the Navy in 1973 he became the first naval officer to be its editor.

An affable and sociable man, Moore was a great raconteur. He wrote several books, the best being Submarine Warfare: Today and Tomorrow (1986), which criticised the West’s preparedness for war. In 1992 he gave his papers to the Churchill Archives at Cambridge.

His funeral service, which he planned, ended with a chorus of Yellow Submarine.

John Moore, who died on July 8, was twice married: first, in 1945, to Joanna Pardot, from whom he was divorced in 1967; he married secondly, in 1970, Barbara Kerry, who died in 2008.

He is survived by two daughters and a son from his first marriage. Obituary