Remembering Claus Moser
Staff and trustees of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation were saddened to learn of the death of Lord Moser, at the age of 92.
Claus was a much loved and very active member of the Board who, over the 25 year life of the Foundation, played a significant role in influencing its direction and shaping its values. He brought to the boardroom table an awesome perspicacity, a mischievous sense of humour, and a gentle chivalry that made it difficult to resist his will.
Staff members at the Foundation – most of whom were generations apart from the young refugee who came here from Nazi Germany in the 1930s – respected him as a member of the House of Lords, with a distinguished career in academia, government and the City, but they also developed a real warmth for someone whose passion for the arts, music in particular, and social justice, was so evident and energising for those around him.
His list of achievements is formidable: twenty years at the LSE after time in the RAF as a ‘grease monkey’, becoming Professor of Social Statistics; head of the Wilson Government’s new Statistical Service; senior non-executive positions at the Royal Opera House, the British Museum and N.M. Rothschild. The list is extraordinarily long, and the fact that many heavyweight voluntary positions overlapped is testament to his great energy and stamina. He defined for many of us the very idea of public service.
His extensive knowledge of music and the arts meant that he was trusted to establish some of the Foundation’s most high profile programmes. In 1986 Claus worked with Paul Hamlyn to inaugurate the Paul Hamlyn Performances at the Royal Opera House, which provided a first experience of ballet and opera at an affordable price to some 200,000 people. More recently he was Patron and passionate champion of the radical new music education programme that became Musical Futures, now an independent charity and operating in about half of English secondary schools. The idea for it came from his typically simple but prescient question – why is it that young people make music with friends in their bedrooms and garages, but are turned off by music in classrooms?
Jane Hamlyn, Chair of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation said:
“Claus was a great friend of my father Paul. They shared similar histories, both leaving Berlin for Britain in the 1930s, both making immense contributions to public life in their adoptive country, and our families were very close. He was instrumental to several of PHF’s most decisive early initiatives, including the Hamlyn week at Covent Garden and the Royal Commission for Education, and after my father’s death, he accepted my invitation to become a Trustee of the Foundation. Talking quietly and with an ever-present twinkle in his eye, Claus was unfailingly progressive, always persuasive and sometimes irreverent. We will miss him a great deal.”