People Australia

Edward Moore (c.1780–1852), general merchant, was born around 1780 to brewer James Moore (?–1785) and his wife Anne Byrne.[1] His paternal grandparents were Edward Moore (?–1787), a wealthy porter brewer of Dublin, and Jane, the daughter of wealthy silk manufacturer Thomas Reynolds, who brought £3,000 to her marriage.[2] On James’s marriage, his father gave him £20,000, a house, and a brewery in the Blackpitts, an area of Dublin. James died nine years later and, according to an article by Henry FitzGerald Reynolds, Edward Moore’s second cousin twice removed, ‘such was the dissipation of him and his wife, that, when he died, all his cash was spent, his customers had quitted him and his brewery was ruined, all his effects scarcely reached to pay his wife’s settlement of £3,000.’[3] From an early age Edward was therefore cared for by his aunt Mary O’Connor, née Moore (?–1783), and her husband, Valentine O’Connor (1744–1814).[4] O’Connor was part of a wealthy Irish Catholic merchant family whose success stemmed from a trade in goods grown on the plantations of the West Indies and America and was strengthened by advantageous marriages. The O’Connors lived in Dublin, firstly at Bachelor’s Walk, then at 6 Dominick Street, and owned a country residence at Oakley Park, Blackrock. It is likely that Moore was brought up in these places.[5]

Valentine O’Connor and his brother Malachy (1753–1820) were general merchants in Dublin, and in 1803 Valentine took Moore into business with him. Their nephew Hugh O’Connor was also taken into the firm, and on the death of the two uncles the cousins continued business as O’Connor and Moore.[6] They successfully dealt in sugar, which they imported from the West Indian plantations in St. Lucia and Antigua, mahogany from Honduras and St. Domingo, rum from the Leeward Islands and Jamaica, and tobacco from Virginia, as well as wool, cotton, wine, and spirits.[7] In 1836 the cousins, as mortgagees of the High Point Estate in Antigua, received compensation of £2399 1s 4d for 171 enslaved people.[8] It is likely that Moore is also the Edward Moore mentioned as sequestrator of the Content Plantation in Jamaica, awarded a share of compensation of £2714 5s 8d, for 146 enslaved in 1835.

Several branches of Moore’s family were also connected to slavery. When his uncle Valentine O’Connor made his will in 1813, he was joint owner with his brother Malachy of the Mount William sugar plantation on St. Vincent, as well as of an unknown number of enslaved people.[9] This property was originally owned by the O’Connor brothers’ cousin, Bryan Blake, whom they had sent to Antigua in 1787 as their agent, but it was sold to the O’Connors on Blake’s death in 1801, to cover Blake’s debts to the two brothers.[10] Malachy O’Connor later married Blake’s widow, Lydia, who was the daughter of Alexander Brodie, owner of Windyhills Plantation in Antigua and its enslaved workers.[11] In 1816 Blake’s son, Martin, sued the O’Connor family over the sale, claiming that the property should have passed to him on his father’s death. Martin died in 1826, and the court case was carried on by his sister and heir, Cecilia, of Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin, who was granted the estate in 1833.[12] In 1837 she received £5,052 compensation for 188 enslaved people on the Mount William Estate.[13]

Several other branches of the family had links to slavery. Jane Reynolds’ nephew, Thomas Reynolds, owned the Fort Stewart Estate in Jamaica, which was passed down to his oldest son, Alexander.[14] Moore’s sister’s stepson, Edmund William Jerningham, married Matilda Waterton, who was a co-claimant for compensation for Plantation La Jalousie in British Guiana.[15] Malachy O’Connor made his feelings on slavery clear in a letter written to his brother-in-law, Reverend Alexander Brodie in 1816:

I forgot to mention one of my dislikes to a W(est) India property – that is – the neglected state of the religion & morals of the Eng(lish) W(est) Ind(ian) slaves – as to the state of Slavery itself – provided attention is given to their religion & morals I think it is a suitable one for a great part of the whites as well as for the Blacks.[16]

Moore had considerable interests in the colony of South Australia from at least 1839. The Hundred of Willunga, sections 258 and 286, on Kaurna Country, were surveyed for Moore by Philip Lamothe Snell Chauncy that year and subdivided into town allotments.[17] Along with his sister’s stepson Jerningham, he was involved in the formation of the town of Gawler, also on Kaurna Country. They were two of the original colonisers, Jerningham buying 252 acres and Moore 379 acres.[18] By 1850 Moore’s land in South Australia was listed as: ‘Acres in Adelaide – “4ll,” “412,” “413,” “742,” and “743. 20 allotments in Gawler Town. 379 acres Para Special Surrey, near Gawler Town. Township of Willunga, and land adjoining – 160 acres in Survey D.’[19] His interests in South Australia were managed by South Australian agent Henry Johnson until 1849, when the management was taken over by George Morphett.[20]

In 1836 Moore listed his address as 12 Cleveland Row, St. James, Westminster.[21] By 1839 he had moved into a house at 4 Seamour Place, Mayfair, and by the time of his death in 1851 he also listed Benmore in Galway County as one of his residences.[22] Moore remained unmarried, but there is some evidence that he had an intimate relationship with the author Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan.[23]  He died in 1851 at his residence in Mayfair.[24] His estate was valued at £160,000.[25]

Moore left his lands in South Australia to Sir Harry Webb and Edmund Jerningham of the London Joint Stock Bank as tenants in common, and all the rentals due to him from the freehold of Benmore in Ireland to his cousin Valentine O’Connor Blake. He left an annuity of £600 p.a. to Madame Edna Pradon Robillard of Paris and £1,000 to her daughter Marie. He left £10,000 in trust for the repair of religious buildings in Dublin. His residuary heirs were his cousins Valentine O’Connor Blake, Charles O’Connor, and Dennis O’Connor.[26] In Adelaide, Moore Street, which ran near his allotments, was named after him; Jerningham Street was named after Edmund.[27] Gawler also has streets named after the two men.[28] Moore’s relationships to wealthy merchant families with connections to slavery and his trade in goods grown by the labour of enslaved people resulted in immense wealth, which enabled him to acquire land belonging to First Nations people in South Australia and to play a significant part in the colonisation of the colony.

[1] ‘O’Ferrall of Balyna,’ Burke’s Landed Gentry (London: Harrison, 1871), 1011.

[2] St. Doulagh’s Cemetery, Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives, accessed 17 September 2025,

https://www.igp-web.com/IGPArchives/ire/dublin/cemeteries/st-doulaghs.html; Albert Eugene Casey, Volume 06: Historical and Genealogical Items Relating to North Cork and East Kerry (Birmingham, Alabama: Knocknagree Historical Fund, 1963), via Ancestry.

[3] Henry FitzGerald Reynolds, ‘Moore of Mount Brown, Co. Dublin,’ Notes and Queries 149, no. 25 (1925), 439–40; Henry Biddall Swanzy, The Families of French of Belturbet and Nixon of Fermanagh (Dublin: Alex. Thom, 1908).

[4] ‘O’Connor, Valentine’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, accessed 17 September 2025, https://www.dib.ie/biography/oconnor-valentine-a6619; ‘Died,’ Belfast Newsletter, 25 January 1814, 3.

[5] Connor, Valentine, merchant, Connaught, Ireland records, Public Record Office, Dublin, via FamilySearch; William Wilson, Wilson’s Dublin Directory for the Year 1798 (Dublin: William Wilson, 1798), 85; Oakley Park, Stillorgan Genealogy & History, accessed 1 October 2025, https://www.youwho.ie/valoconnor.html.

[6] Thomas Reynolds, The Life of Thomas Reynolds (London: Clowes and sons, 1839), 76.

[7] ‘O’Connor, Valentine’, Dictionary of Irish Biography; ‘Commercial,’ Freemans Journal (Dublin), 21 August  1809, 2; ‘Auctions,’ Saunders’s News-Letter (Dublin), 29 November 1803, 3; ‘Imports,’ Freemans Journal (Dublin), 20 September 1810, 2; No title, Freemans Journal (Dublin), 13 July 1809, 2; ‘Sugar,’ Freemans Journal (Dublin), 17 November 1807, 1; ‘Postscript,’ Volunteers Journal or Irish Herald (Cork), 18 February 1785, 3; ‘Exports,’ Freemans Journal (Dublin), 16 November 1810, 2.

[8] Antigua 359, Legacies of British Slavery, accessed 17 September 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/788.

[9] Vere Oliver, Caribbeana, v. 4 (1909), 255; ‘O’Connor, Valentine’, Dictionary of Irish Biography.

[10] Mount William St Vincent, British Legacies of Slavery, accessed 16 September 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/3466; Sweetman Family Papers, National Library of Ireland, accessed 17 September 2025, https://www.nli.ie/sites/default/files/2022-12/156_sweetmanpapers.pdf.

[11] ‘O’Connor, Valentine’, Dictionary of Irish Biography; Vere Oliver, Caribbeana, v.1 (London: Mitchell, Hughes and Clark, 1910), 99.

[12] Sweetman Family Papers, National Library of Ireland, accessed 17 September 2025, https://www.nli.ie/sites/default/files/2022-12/156_sweetmanpapers.pdf.

[13] ‘St Vincent 470 (Mount William)’, Legacies of British Slavery, accessed 17 September 2025,

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/25786.

[14] Reynolds, The Life of Thomas Reynolds, 50.

[15] ‘Matilda Jerningham (née Waterton)’, Legacies of British slavery, accessed 24 September 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146641247.

[16] Malachy O’Connor to Alexander Brodie, 1816, Sweetman Family Papers, acc.6751, quoted in Windy Hill (aka: Codringtons, The Mountain, Brodies), Antigua Sugar Mills, accessed 17 September 2025, https://sugarmills.blogs.bucknell.edu/windy-hill-aka-codringtons-the-mountain-brodies/.

[17] Susan Piddock, ‘Slate, Slate, Everywhere Slate: The Cultural Landscapes of the Willunga Slate Quarries, South Australia,’ Australasian Historical Archaeology 25 (2007), 7.

[18] ‘Gawler Special,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 24 January 1891, 6; E.H. Coombe, History of Gawler: 1837 to 1908 (Gawler: Gawler Institute, 1908), 10.

[19] ‘Advertising,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 24 April 1850, 2.

[20] ‘Advertising,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 24 April 1850, 2.

[21] Antigua 359 (High Point), British Legacies of Slavery, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/788.

[22] London Electoral Registers, 1839, London Metropolitan Archives, via Ancestry.

[23] Henry FitzGerald Reynolds, ‘Moore of Mount Brown, Co. Dublin,’ Notes and Queries 149, no. 25 (1925), 441; Lady Morgan, Chapter XXIV, Lady Morgan Memoirs, 402, accessed 1 October 2025, https://lordbyron.org/monograph.php?doc=LyMorga.1863&select=II.chap24.

[24] ‘Ireland,’ Preston Chronicle, 20 December 1851, 2; ‘Births, Deaths, Marriages and Obituaries,’ Morning Chronicle (London), 6 December 1851, 8.

[25] ‘Edward Moore’, Legacies of British Slavery, accessed 24 September 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/40861.

[26] Will of Edward Moore of Benmore, Galway, 22 January 1852, PROB 11/2146/48, National Archives UK (Kew).

[27] Geoffrey H. Manning, Nomenclature of the Streets of Adelaide and North Adelaide (State Library of South Australia, 2012), https://published.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/placenamesofsouthaustralia/Streets_of_Adelaide_and_Nth_Adelaide.pdf.

[28] Town of Gawler: History of Gawler street names, Gawler, accessed 24 September 2025 https://www.gawler.sa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/217951/history-of-gawlers-street-names.pdf.