The last five years of his life (1914-1919) had, to him as to others, been years of unusual stress.  Disqualified for active service, he had readily undertaken the extra work entailed by the departure of his younger colleagues for the war.  He had also discharged the semi-military duties, such as acting on guard against enemy aircraft, which fell within his powers; and, both on the outskirts of Leeds and round his Lytton Dale cottage, he had devoted all the time he could spare to allotment work, so as to take his share—­it was, in truth, much more than his share—­in increasing the yield of the soil.  All this, with a host of miscellaneous duties which he voluntarily shouldered, had put an undue strain upon his strength.  Yet, with his usual buoyancy, he had seemed to stand it all without flagging; and even when warned by the army medical authorities that his heart showed some weakness, he had paid little heed to the warning, had certainly in no way allowed it either to interfere with his various undertakings or to prey upon his spirits.

The Armistice naturally brought some relief.  Among other things, it opened the prospect of the return of his colleagues and a considerable lightening both of his professional and of his manifold civic duties.  He was, moreover, much encouraged—­as a man of his modest, almost diffident, nature was bound to be—­by the recognition which Songs of the Ridings had brought from every side:  not least from the dalesmen, for whom and under whose inspiration they were written.  And all his friends rejoiced to think that a new and brighter horizon seemed opening before him.  Those who saw him during these last months thought that he had never been so buoyant.  They felt that a new hope and a new confidence had entered into his life.

These hopes were suddenly cut off.  He had passed most of August and the first week of September (1919) at his cottage in Lytton Dale, keeping the morning of his birthday (8th September), as he always delighted to do, with his wife and children.  In the afternoon he went down to bathe in the river, being himself an excellent swimmer, and wishing to teach his two younger children an art in which he had always found health and keen enjoyment.  He swam across the pool and called on his daughter to follow him.  Noticing that she was in some difficulty, he jumped in again to help her, but suddenly sank to the bottom, and was never seen alive again.  An angler ran up to help from a lower reach of the stream, and brought the girl safely to land.  Then, for the first time learning that her father had sunk, he dived and dived again in the hope of finding him before it was too late.  But the intense cold of the water baffled all his efforts, and the body was not recovered until some hours later.  It is probable that the chill of the pool had caused a sudden failure of Moorman’s heart—­a heart already weakened by the excessive strain of the last few years—­and it is little likely that, after he had once sunk, he could ever have been saved.