Recently I turned the television on to find a broadcast of The 39 Steps, a film from 1959 with Kenneth More in the lead. More was one of the first British stage and screen actors that I ever took a passing interest in as a child, as I had never been much of a film buff until his appearances got my attention. My fascination with him stemmed from the fact that, while he was then appearing in The Forsyte Saga on TV in 1967, I found myself being sent as a pupil to his old school. At Victoria College in Jersey it was well known that he was a successful ‘Old Victorian’ and so someone to aspire to. There was a painting of King Charles I hanging in the Great Hall that he had presented to his old school in 1957 and then there was also an annual Kenneth More Prize for Drama, instituted by him in 1962.

As a screen and stage actor he portrayed a brand of extremely likeable, middle-class, ex-officer type of persona who exhibited a sense of moral rectitude, all of which fitted in with the values that the school promoted – though they would have brushed under the carpet his two divorces and the age difference of 26 years between More and his third wife.

Kenneth More became one of Britain’s most successful and highest-paid actors of his generation, gaining a multitude of awards in theatre, film and television that spanned over four decades. The height of his fame was during the 1950s when he appeared in some of the most memorable feature films of the decade including Genevieve (1953), Doctor in the House (1954), The Deep Blue Sea (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), The Admirable Crichton (1957) and, of course, The 39 Steps  (1959).

The early days
The young Kenneth More and his family had come to the Channel Island of Jersey when his engineer father, Charles Gilbert More, was appointed as the manager of the Jersey Eastern Railway. More recalls the crossing on 29 July 1924 in his autobiography More or Less (1978). In the book he tells readers that with no more than the possessions that they could carry, the family sailed to Jersey on the SS Reindeer, a railway steamer. A picture of this elegant GWR vessel can be found by searching TheGenealogist’s Image Archive and shows it leaving St Helier Harbour and passing Elizabeth Castle.

From exploring various actors’ information sites we find out that Kenneth More was born in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire on 20 September 1914. A search for a Kenneth More in the General Register Office birth indexes, however, draws a blank for someone of this name. Using TheGenealogist’s records search, however, that offers us close alternatives to the searched name reveals a Gilbert K. More registered in the second quarter of 1915 in the Eton district of Buckinghamshire and is the most likely contender for the future actor. Gilbert was a family name borne also by his father as his middle name and, as we shall see, was the name of their ancestor. We can’t know why, though we may speculate that the late registering of More’s birth was as a result of this event being during the First World War.

More’s parents were Charles and Edith Watkins, whose marriage had been recorded when it took place in Cardiff on 1 December 1910. A search of the Welsh parish records on TheGenealogist affords us a look at a transcript as well as the image from the church register page for St Andrew’s Church in Cardiff. This tells us that Charles was the son of Charles James More, also a civil engineer, and the bride, Edith Winnifred Watkins, was the daughter of Richard John Watkins, a solicitor.

With the information that More’s maternal grandfather was a Cardiff solicitor we are able to go on to find him in the Solicitor’s Diary, Almanac and Legal Directory 1900 in TheGenealogist’s Occupational records, noting the name of the firm for whom he practised and that he also held the position of the superintendent registrar for the area. Another search, this time in the Trades, Street and Telephone Directories on TheGenealogist, finds More’s grandfather listed in 1913, practising at 62 Charles Street. We have to wonder what, as a superintendent registrar, his opinion would have been on the late registration of his grandchild up in Buckinghamshire a year later!

We Joined the Navy
Before the next war, when aged only 17, Kenneth More had applied to join the Royal Air Force – but was not accepted because he failed a test for equilibrium. He would, of course, go on to play the part of a RAF. officer when portraying Douglas Bader in the 1956 film Reach for the Sky. Another of the many films that More made was called We Joined the Navy. This had been a comedy released in 1962 in which he played a problem Royal Naval officer given to speaking his mind at inopportune moments. As it transpired, in the Second World War Kenneth More had actually joined the Royal Navy, receiving a commission as a lieutenant and serving on a cruiser, HMS Aurora, and on the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious. In the previous conflict his father, Charles, had also been an officer in the Senior Service – though he had been a naval aviator at the time and had transferred to the newly formed RAF when it came into being in 1918.

The first record that tells us this information is the entry in the Bradfield College Register 1850–1923 for More’s father that we can find in TheGenealogist’s Educational records. As well as giving us his birth date we learn that he left the school in 1903 and went to King’s College, London until 1907 when he was articled to a civil engineering firm in Westminster. His service in both the RNAS and RAF is noted, as is his marriage in 1910. From here we can then do a search of the military records on TheGenealogist, which returns us More’s father named in the Navy List for 1916.

While both father and son had joined the navy, but to fight in different wars, it seems that at first More was going to follow his father and grandfather by training to be a civil engineer. The difference was that Kenneth More didn’t stick with the profession, giving it up to travel to Canada to work in the fur trade. This, however, was short lived as he was deported for not having the correct papers! We can discover his passage from Southampton to Montreal on 13 April 1935, when he was aged 20, by searching for him in the passenger lists found on TheGenealogist.

Tracing back another generation to More’s paternal grandfather, Charles James More, we are able to locate him in the census collection for 1851. This record tells us that he had been born in the East Indies (India) in approximately 1841; we can also note from this that he is living with his widowed mother, Jane More, and his eight-year-old sister Emily, whose birth had also been out in the East. This census is for St Helier in Jersey and so reveals to us that More’s family, when they moved here in the 1920s to run the Jersey Eastern Railway, were not the first generation to live on the island. In 1851 Jane More had been recorded as an annuitant.

Jersey was an attractive place for an army widow in receipt of a pension at this time. Here she would have joined a community that included Royal Navy and Army officers in semi-retirement on half-pay and others, like her, who had lived in India. Unlike today, the island was a place with a low cost of living compared to the mainland. By the time of the next census, however, Jane More and her two children are now recorded in Falmouth in Cornwall where the 20-year-old Charles James More was now a civil engineer.

Delving into the Army Lists on TheGenealogist finds us Captain George More of the 24th Native Infantry in 1839, who would have been Kenneth More’s great-grandfather.

A clue from a name
Sometimes, when researching back through a family tree, it is well worth keeping an eye on recurring family names. For example we have noted that both Kenneth and his father Charles shared the second name Gilbert. On occasions a second name may have been the surname of another branch of the family that parents had wanted to honour by bestowing it on their offspring. In this case it turned out to be the first name of a paternal ancestor from Scotland. I found this by an interesting route and by using some lateral thinking.

It was while I was looking at the Trades, Residential & Telephone Directories on TheGenealogist that I noted the name of the house in which More’s father was the head at the time of our actor’s birth in 1914: Raeden in Vicarage Way, Gerrards Cross. Later, when methodically searching for a combination of the names George and More I happened across an entry in the History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain on TheGenealogist. The search facility had found a family called Moir and drew my attention to a George Moir of Raeden (1752–1828), who was ‘sometime Provost of Aberdeen’, and his father Gilbert of Raeden, who had been born in 1719 and whom the record referred to as an ‘eminent merchant of Aberdeen’. Realising that More could also be spelled as Moir, it made me question whether there was a link from Gilbert Moir from 18th century Raeden in Aberdeen to Charles Gilbert More in 1914 Buckinghamshire…

Of course it was not a coincidence as with this clue it was possible to find that the Captain George More, from the 24th Regiment Native Infantry and who was the actor’s great-grandfather, was the son of George More the Provost of Aberdeen (More’s 2x-great-grandfather). In turn he was the son of Gilbert of Raeden (3x-great-grandfather) and so the middle name that both the actor and his civil engineer father bore was in honour of their Scots ancestor from 200 years beforehand.

Were it not for the powerful search abilities of TheGenealogist and its diverse collection of records, it is unlikely that I could have found this useful link or added some of the other interesting records to the story of this gentleman actor.