Ralph Mossop was a cousin descended from the Stockdale family. He was born in 1899 in Whitehaven to a working class family – his father was a compositor for a printers. Ralph gained a scholarship to St. Bees Grammar School, and when he left school he worked as a clerk for the poor law office in Whitehaven. He enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in November 1917, and was being trained as a pilot at Waddington, Lincolnshire when he was killed in an accident, just a few days before the war ended. He was at the controls and gliding in to land an R.E.8 aircraft, when it nosedived into the ground. He was killed instantly. The Court of Inquiry found that he must have felt faint and fallen forward on to the control column, thus putting the aeroplane into a steep dive. How they knew he felt faint is not recorded, and the original records have been lost. However it sounds rather more likely to us that the aircraft stalled and he was too low to recover.  The RE8 had a reputation for stalling suddenly without warning, so perhaps he allowed the speed to fall off too much. His body was buried in his local church in Whitehaven.