IT was a remarkable final year of a truly remarkable life.
During the first Spring lockdown, Captain Tom Moore had a small idea – to walk 100 laps of his garden using his walking frame in the hope of raising £1,000 for hospital staff working on the front line against coronavirus.
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But in just four weeks he ended up raising an incredible £32MILLION in donations for the struggling National Health Service.
And the modest, quiet, unfailingly polite and impeccably smart war veteran, ended up with a knighthood, global fame and a Hollywood film script of his life in the pipeline.
More importantly, he managed to raise the spirits of people not only in Covid-hit Britain but around the world with his uplifting catchphrase “tomorrow will be a good day”.
But it wasn’t until you met Captain Tom in person that the enormity of the effort it took him to complete his walk became apparent.
TV viewers always saw the blazer-clad Yorkshireman either standing behind his walking frame, completing laps of the garden at his Bedfordshire home.
Or, he would be sat in a specially-adapted chair, medals gleaming on his chest doing one of the 700-plus interviews Captain Tom gave to the media in just eight months.
But this proud man never allowed the viewers to see how just how frail he really was.
Or the immense pain he endured just getting from the chair onto his frame, let alone walking 25meters on each lap.
He promised his fans he would keep on walking and that is what he did, almost every day since April.
By the time he died, Captain Tom had actually walked 25 kilometres – an amazing achievement for a man who only planned to complete 100 laps by his 100th birthday.
But when his birthday came, on April 30, Tom had actually done 200 laps for which he raised the most money ever by an individual.
Captain Tom’s incredible fundraising effort
CAPTAIN Tom had earned only £11 for charity on April 6, the day his daughter Hannah sent details of his walk to local newspapers, radio and TV.
Tom wrote: “None of us could have imagined that in a million years that Hannah’s press release would set an unstoppable ball rolling.
“People told me there was something about my little walk that captured the hearts of those still in shock with this crisis.”
His daughter says: “I wrote a nothing little press release wrote about this amazing 99-year-old World War II veteran and he is going to walk to raise money for the Covid-19 appeal.
“I only ever thought let's make the local community happy. I thought we would pick up the Bedford Times but by four days later, on Good Friday, we were on national television.
“I thought no one will watch that. They are all barbequing. And we said, ‘Look, no one has got any money. A thousand pounds would be amazing’. Kaboom! It started to rack up.
“Then we went onto Michael Ball’s Radio 2 show and by the time we hit Good Morning Britain we were at £300,000. The next day we had broken £500,000 and Piers Morgan tweeted ‘why stop at £500,000? Let’s go for £1million.”.
That £1million target was soon smashed and quickly rose to £1.3million as donations poured in at £5,000 a minute.
In the end an astonishing 1,519,442 people donated an average of £21.58, making a total of 32,796,436.
With Gift Aid added, Captain Tom’s JustGiving page handed over £38.9million to NHS Charities Together to support health workers and make life easier for patients.
Captain Tom said: “I couldn’t even summon up an image of what that amount might look like in real times but I knew it would go to those who needed it most.
“One tranche of the money helped pay for a new befriending phoneline for carers, to help them feel less alone.”
Last September (2020) he launched the Captain Tom Foundation to support the lonely, bereaved people suffering from mental health as well as the Royal British Legion.
Hannah said: “He knew that 40 per of the population will suffer from mental health issues as a fall out of Covid.
“The Captain Tom foundation is his legacy that will live on. It was his vision to inspire hope where it is needed most.”
He also became the oldest person to have a No 1 single.
Captain Tom was also knighted by the Queen and promoted to Colonel by his old regiment as a thank you from a grateful nation.
His daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore told The Sun: “If someone had said to a media agency ‘here is £10million go and create the biggest media storm that you can’ they couldn’t have done it could they?
“It was about the love and total integrity of Captain Tom’s message.
“He gave people hope and positivity and it came back in seven and a half thousand birthday presents and in 150,000 letters.
“He received 225,000 birthday cards and they still keep coming. We got a box recently that had 300 birthday cards from children in China in it, saying in English, ‘I love you Captain Tom. You are my hero’."
He was a hero to 1.5million people in 163 countries who donated a total of £38.9million – including Gift Aid – for NHS Charities Together.
Captain Tom was tickled to learn that that per step he had earned more than sprinter Usain Bolt.
As well as receiving 1.5million emails in days – which crashed his family’s computer system – Captain Tom was inundated with thousands media requests for interviews from all over the globe.
Two weeks after beginning his extraordinary walk, Captain Tom was doing 30 TV and radio interviews a day – gruelling for someone half his age but incredible for a man approaching his 100th birthday.
Meanwhile, the media were camped outside his home in Marston Moretaine near Bedford and every time he went to do a lap of the garden he was met with a barrage of clicking cameras, while video drones hovered overhead.
Arise Sir Tom
THE Sun and Piers Morgan campaigned for Captain Tom Moore to be knighted for his incredible fundraising achievement.
And there were also calls for him to receive an honorary upgrade from the rank of Captain.
In his life story, ‘Tomorrow will be a Good Day’, he wrote: “I didn’t think there was a ha’p’orth of chance of any of that happening, not least because I didn’t feel as if I had earned the right.”
Following calls from Prince William and Kate as well as Prime Minister Boris Johnson, on his 100th birthday Captain Tom he was made honorary Colonel of the Yorkshire Regiment.
And a petition for him to become Captain Sir Tom reached 580,000 signatures.
On May 18, a sunny evening just like on the day he began his walk, the family were again having a barbecue when a message arrived from the PM.
The Queen had decided to give him a knighthood.
Captain Tom said: “I joked that I hoped the Queen wasn’t too heavy-handed with the sword as I’d be a weak old soul by the time she got round to me after lockdown.”
But he only had to wait two months before the Queen laid her sword on his shoulder in a special ceremony at Windsor Castle.
He was also given a gold Blue Pater badge, which he treasured because it was a programme he watched with his daughters when they were growing up.
And Captain Tom was awarded the freedom of his home town, Keighley, as well as the City of London which he received in the first-ever virtual ceremony.
Captain Tom was so concerned for his family he asked them: “Can you make it stop? How can you survive this?”
Daughter Hannah, 50, remembers: “It wasn’t through negativity, it was through concern. He was worried that it was getting out of hand and that we would not be able to manage. How could we control it?
“It was really difficult and super challenging. We didn’t go to bed for two weeks.
"We sat round our kitchen table drank Prosecco and lived off crisps trying to deal with being at the centre of the world’s biggest media storm. Nothing could prepare you for that.
“Dad was worried for us. He could see that my husband, Colin, and myself were working so hard. We were literally cat napping at the table and starting all over again.
“We said to him, ‘don’t worry, we are okay. We’re not going to make it stop because we shouldn’t make it stop. We’re going to just lock together and find help’.”
Within one minute of a top PR company announcing they were taking over dealing with the media, 1,000 emails came in requesting interviews with Captain Tom, Hannah and her children Benjie, 16, and Georgia, 11.
Hannah says:“We were just an ordinary family without an extraordinary bone in our bodies.”
Thomas Moore was born at home in Keighley, West Yorks, on April 30, 1920, second child of mum Isabella and dad Wilfred who, although he was deaf, ran a successful family building firm.
He and sister Freda had a happy childhood but Tom realised that because of his deafness, his father was condemned to a life of loneliness.
And for much of his life Captain Tom tried to help people overcome being lonely and he understood the plight of many elderly people during the pandemic.
When war broke out engineer Tom joined Dad’s Army, the LDV, which later became the Home Guard before being conscripted into his local regiment, the Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding) as a Private.
But Tom set his sight on becoming an officer after discovering they got nice uniforms, smart brown boots and better food.
Quickly selected for officer training, he was sent to India as a tank commander in the fight against the Japanese in Burma.
Captain Tom was hit hard when his best friend, Lt Philip Thornton was among nine men from his regiment killed in February 1943 when the Japanese massacred three tank crews at Donbaik on the jungle-covered Burmese coast.
Two years later the British Army found the tanks stripped bare and the bleached bones of the nine crew laid out in dirt nearby.
Before the war, Tom had competed in motorbike trials and in 1945 his racing skills were put to use as dispatch rider, scouting jungle trails to warn the regiment if the enemy had doubled back or were lying in wait.
He remembered: “Incredibly, in all my missions back and forth, I managed to stay clear of the Japanese and only ever heard the odd gunshot or the sound of men and machines through the trees.
“I never came face to face with an enemy soldier or little Tommy Moore aged just 24 would have been a gonner.”
After the war he returned home, took over running the family building firm, and married Billie, a woman he hardly knew.
Although their marriage was loveless and never consummated, the couple stayed together for 18 years until Billie ran off with a sex therapist.
In his autobiography, which became a No1 best-seller, Tom said: “If she hadn’t done what she did I would probably have stayed with her forever because loyalty is important to me.
“But she gave me a way out and I took it. Although I wasn’t to blame, I felt I had failed and for a time I was as sad as I had ever been in my life.
“While my hand had been forced I have always found that the turning tide brings something better and it did for me, with an advert I spotted.”
The ad was for the northern regional manager selling roofing materials. On trips to the company’s head office in Gravesend, Kent, he met and fell in love with office manager Pamela Paull, 33.
They married in 1968 when Tom was nearly 50 and had two daughters, Lucy and Hannah.
On a whim in 1983 he appeared on TV as a contestant on a Christmas episode of Blankety Blank, hosted by Terry Wogan.
Tom didn’t win but he was intrigued to discover the revolving stage was powered by two stagehands.
Pamela rolled her eyes and laughed: “Only Tom Moore could be more fascinated by the workings than Terry Wogan.”
Hannah says: “There was deep sorrow and loss in his life. My mother died in 2006. She had been ill for ten years with a degenerative brain disorder.
“My father used to visit her every day and she once said to him ‘if you didn’t visit me I would be so lonely’.
“He saw lonely ladies who were sick and sat there month after month and no one came to see them. And the people who were visiting were lonely because they had no one to go home to.”
After her mother’s death at the age of 71, Hannah invited Tom to live with her, Colin and Benjie who was a toddler. Georgia was born two years later.
In the garden that so many people came to know from Captain Tom’s TV appearances, Hannah says: “He would never tell us this but he did say on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories that the best thing he ever did was moving here.
“He became involved in daily lives of a family that is busy with young children, which is energising.
“But when he fell and broke his hip he definitely suffered. He was frustrated because he used to drive the car and mow the grass and he couldn't do anything anymore.”
Captain Tom fell over while emptying the dishwasher, broke a rib, punctured a lung and shattered his right hip and had to stay in Bedford Hospital for two months
It was the dedicated care he received from the NHS that inspired Tom to raise money for the health service on the day that changed history.
On April 5, the first sunny Sunday of lockdown, the family had a barbecue and Captain Tom in his Panama hat shuffled out on his walker, the first time he had left the house since his fall nearly six months earlier.
He remembered: “I looked along the full length of our 25-meter driveway and steeled myself. I hadn’t walked that far since I came out of hospital.
“Colin looked up from his phone and said, ‘Go on Tom, you can do it’.
“Stirling Moss wouldn’t have been much impressed by my speed or my style.
“I plodded forward, one step at a time. I was quite chuffed when I reached the end but then I turned and saw how far it was to get back.
“Colin said he would give me a £1 a lap and why not see if I could do 100 by my 100th birthday. I thought it was a bit of a joke. Who on earth would give me £100 for walking up and down my drive?”
Hannah says: “A Yorkshireman's word is his bond. He did 100 laps in two weeks not four weeks. So by the time he hit his hundredth birthday he had done 200 and raised nearly £40million.”
Captain Tom wanted to make a bet on that he would live to 103 would die but no bookmakers would take him up on.
The man who became a national institution at a time when the world was plunged into crisis said: “Some people can’t bear the thought of death but I draw strength from it.
“If tomorrow is my last day, if all those I loved are waiting for me, then that tomorrow will be a good day too.”
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