Captain Tom aimed to raise 1,000 pounds with garden laps and raised 32 million
In April 2020, at 99 and leaning on a walking frame, Tom Moore set out to walk 100 lengths of his garden before his 100th birthday, hoping to raise 1,000 pounds for NHS charities. Twenty-four days later more than 1.5 million people had donated, and the total topped 32 million.
Moore grew up in Keighley in Yorkshire, where he was born on 30 April 1920, the son of a builder's family and a head teacher mother. After Keighley Grammar School he began a civil engineering apprenticeship. He got his first motorcycle at twelve, raced a Scott Flying Squirrel under the number 23 and won several trophies, and belonged to the local photographic society as a teenager.
Conscripted into the Duke of Wellington's Regiment in June 1940, he was commissioned on 28 June 1941, and his battalion's conversion to armour moved him into the Royal Armoured Corps. In India he set up a training programme for army motorcyclists in Bombay and Calcutta, and with the Fourteenth Army, nicknamed the Forgotten Army, he served in Burma's Arakan region, where he survived dengue fever. From 1945 he taught at the armoured fighting school at Bovington, becoming an expert on Churchill tanks, and he left the army in 1946. For 65 years he organised his old battalion's annual reunion.
Civilian life meant the family building firm, then selling roofing materials for Nuralite from 1960 and managing its northern region seven years later. Sent to rescue or close a failing concrete pipe maker in March, Cambridgeshire, he led a management buyout in 1983 with help from the local MP Clement Freud; it traded for several years before being sold in 1987.
His walk, begun on 6 April 2020 during Britain's first lockdown at ten 25-metre laps a day, made him a household name. On his 100th birthday the fund passed 30 million pounds, closing at over 32.79 million, nearly 39 million with tax relief. The day brought RAF and army flypasts, more than 150,000 cards and an honorary colonelcy. His duet of You'll Never Walk Alone with Michael Ball hit number one, making him the oldest person to top the UK chart. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him at Windsor on 17 July 2020. He died aged 100 on 2 February 2021 at Bedford Hospital.
Source: Captain Tom Moore
