IT was a family reunion with a difference.

For the relatives of Joseph Warwick Moore, musical director of Southampton’s legendary Grand Theatre, are on a musical mission to find his hit making compositions.

Born in 1869, he became a global music sensation and his popular tunes rang out from hundreds of thousands of pianos.

His easy on the ear music was all the rage in Edwardian and pre-WWII times.

Daily Echo: Southampton composer Joseph Warwick Moore.

Warwick Moore’s eye catching and expensively printed compositions were published in London, Leeds, Birmingham, New York, Boston, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney.

The 1911 census lists the composer as a Professor of Music living at 63, Portland Terrace, Southampton, with wife Jennie and five children. He played a major role in Southampton’s musical heritage.

For more than 30 years he was the musical director of the legendary Grand Theatre which in its day was the city’s entertainment mecca.

He died on December 27, 1931 aged 62, at the city’s Royal South Hants Hospital.

But Alan Warwick-Moore and his sister Joan Stevens, both from Southampton, never realised that they had such a famous grandfather until they started digging into the family history.

Daily Echo: The Grand Theatre, Southampton.

They traced his grave, tucked away in a corner of Southampton’s South Stoneham Cemetery.

It was only when he started working on the family tree that Alan discovered that his grandfather was such a famous composer.

He said: “The more I found out, the more I was gobsmacked by how much music he had written.”

Meanwhile the hunt for Warwick Moore’s music sheets has become a real family affair. Jazz musican Andy Leggett is also playing a major role in the search for his great-greatuncle’s sheet music.

Andy met up with Alan and Joan for the first time as they got together for a Warwick Moore music sheet count which revealed that they had about 80 compositions between them.

There are also some in the British Library and by contacting other members of the family they are hoping that one day they will have the complete collection.

The reunion was at the The Concorde Club, which has become a musical mecca and where Andy was headlining a jazz night.

Poring over the vast array of beautifully illustrated music sheets spread across a table in the Stoneham Lane club’s band room, Andy said: “It has been great to meet up with other members of the family and it has been a very fruitful meeting.”

Now he hopes that Daily Echo readers might help in the search and says: “Joseph Warwick Moore is likely to have sold a lot of sheet music in the area as a result of his popularity in the Grand Theatre.”

He would also like to see Southampton stage a concert of Warwick Moore compositions.

By the age of 20 Warwick Moore was first violinist at the famous Drury Theatre in London and it was about then his first tunes hit the music stands. He also published under the pseudonym of Emile Gastelle.