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Alfred Moores was born in June 1914 and educated at Sefton Park Junior and Senior Schools. He showed an early interest in his father`s draughtsman`s engineering drawings and at the age of nine he was helping out on the drawing board. Conventional painting and drawing also began to attract him and at the age of 14 he won a scholarship to Bristol School of Art. At 17 he gained a 5 year apprenticeship in the studio of Mardon Son and Hall, where he became a general designer, concerned mainly with advertising and packaging. On joining the RAF at the outbreak of the Second World War he was posted to the Marine Aircraft Establishment at Helensburgh conducting research with flying boats. Here he was required to turn draughtsman`s plans into pictorial views, a job for which his early training made him ideally suited. This establishment had a brilliant staff of scientific experts evolving improved systems of destroying U-Boats from the air. By making clear explanatory perspective views from the `not always easy to understand` draughtsman`s plans and elevations, machinists, fitters and operators could see at a glance what was required of them. What had been a happy time for the U-Boats in 1940 41 turned into misery and defeat by autumn 1942. His painting Winter Snowscape was accepted by the Royal Scottish Academy for the 1942 Annual Exhibition. Working on other stations Alfred carried out similar projects for the Second Front. And in between times he decorated many an airmen`s mess with dramatic panels of aircraft in action. Four of these were exhibited in the National Gallery in 1944. The Daily Telegraph Art Critic noted that Sgt. Moores’s panels while losing nothing in accuracy rose nonetheless to decorative quality. Posted overseas in 1944 he made many sketches of life on a troopship. In 1985 one of his sitters unexpectedly visited him and told his story to the Evening Post. As a result a whole page was devoted to Alfred and his sitter Donald Pears. Setting up his drawing office in Calcutta he was soon roped in to design and paint the scenery for a Christmas Pantomime in the ENSA Garrison Theatre and it was so successful that it toured outlying Units. Later he moved to Rangoon when “the Bomb” brought the Japanese surrender and the end of the war. During the interim before repatriation Alfred set about depicting as many aspects of Burmese life as possible. The sketches of pagodas, street scenes, riverside life in sampans and so on eventually gained his admittance to Bristol Savages after his introduction by his great friend and fellow artist Harold Packer in 1946. Alfred was President in 1960 and again in 1970. . In 1971 he took up regular Evening Institute Art Teaching for Bristol Education Committee mainly at Twyford House, Shirehampton, where his classes became oversubscribed. Helped by his wife Peggy, he started Annual Exhibitions in Shirehampton Civic Centre and these still continue. He also ran sessions on Advanced Photography at Filton Technical College. He gave lectures to the Bristol Royal Photographic Society on making abstracts using normal photographic techniques. No doubt but that the influence of home training, plus art school, Mardons, the RAF experience and the Savages evening exercises have had something to do with the fact that Alfred has never seriously specialised. As he comments Variety is the Spice of Life and every Artist must do whatever he finds most fulfilling at the time. Apart from his wartime pictures mentioned above and the Annual Savages` Exhibition, his works have been exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, National Portrait Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain Touring Exhibitions, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol City Art Gallery, Clifton and Clevedon Arts Clubs and the Annual Exhibition at Shirehampton Civic Centre. (M.G.W)
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