Tales of the Ridings | Page 5

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.
The death of Moorman called forth expressions of grief and of grateful
affection, so strong and so manifestly sincere as to bring something of
surprise even to his closest friends. Much more surprising would they
have been to himself. They came from every side, from lettered and
unlettered, from loom and dale, from school and university. Nothing
could prove more clearly how strong was the hold he had won upon all
who knew him, how large the place he filled in the heart of his
colleagues and the county of his adoption. It was a fitting tribute to a
literary achievement of very distinctive originality. It was also, and
above all, a tribute, heartfelt and irrepressible, to the charm of a
singularly bright and winning spirit: to a life which had spent itself,
without stint and without one thought of self, in the service of others.
Endnotes (were footnotes):
(1) To this family is believed to have belonged John Moreman, Canon
and eventually Dean of Exeter (though he died, October, 1554, "before
he was presented to the Deanery"), of whom an account will be found
in Prince's Worthies of Devon (ed. 1701, pp. 452-453), as well as in
Wood's Athenoe and Fasti Oxonienses and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. He
was "the first in those days to teach his parishioners to say the Lord's
Prayer, the Belief and the Commandments in the English tongue"
(whether the contrast is with Latin or Cornish, for he was then Vicar of
Menynhed, in East Cornwall, does not appear). He was imprisoned, as
a determined Catholic, in Edward VI.'s reign, but "enlarged under
Queen Mary, with whom he grew into very great favour," and was
chosen to defend the doctrine of Transubstantiation before the
Convocation of 1553.
(2) His thesis for this degree, on _The Interpretation of Nature in
English Poetry from Beowulf to Shakespeare_, was published in 1905.
(3) He published editions of The Faithful