Captain Fantastic’s toughest battle of all? His sexless first marriage
...then along came a fight to wed the love of his life, as revealed in a memoir that’s as joyfully courageous as the man who lifted all our spirits in lockdown
CAPTAIN Tom Moore rose to fame at the age of 99, raising more than £30 million for NHS charities by walking laps of his garden. But, until now, the personal and private story behind this very public figure has remained untold. Here, in our exclusive first extract from his autobiography, we learn about his unhappy first marriage and how the love for his second wife finally brought him the contentment and children he had always hoped for.
MY FATHeR wept on my first wedding day. It wasn’t a good omen. From the day I took my bride-to-be home to meet my parents, I could see he was disappointed. This was 1949 and I wasn’t long back from the War. I went to work for the family building company and, soon after I came back, I bumped into my very first girlfriend, pretty ethel Whittaker. she was pushing a pram.
When ethel showed me her baby, I couldn’t help thinking back to our teens together, and innocent evenings in the twin seats on the back row of the Regent cinema in Keighley, our little Yorkshire town. Now ethel was mother to a little boy. ‘It’s your fault, Tom Moore, that he isn’t yours,’ she said wistfully.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising that, when friends introduced me to an attractive young lady not long after that, I was smitten straight away. everyone called her ‘Billie’ — it wasn’t her real name, but her parents had wanted a boy.
Despite hardly knowing Billie at all, I proposed to her. We were married in 1949, and honeymooned at The grand Hotel in scarborough.
We were happy enough to begin with but, looking back, I realise that the first few months of our marriage were as good as it ever got.
Things in the bedroom weren’t right between us from the start. The marriage was unconsummated. Billie was very shy and restrained and I assumed that she’d relax in time but, to my disappointment, she never did. When I tried to talk to her, I discovered that sex wasn’t something her family discussed.
That was something I could well believe. Once we started to get serious, I had been invited to meet Billie’s grandfather who was a prominent Freemason.
I was appalled to discover that he had a black manservant who lived in a shabby outhouse. I never saw this chap in person, but the mere thought that I was under the roof of someone who was continuing the ethos of the old slave trade which had been abolished more than 100 years earlier bothered me enormously. I never went again.
I don’t think Billie even knew what intimacy was and I soon came to realise that all she wanted was to be married, stay at home and keep house.
she was deeply anxious and obsessed with cleaning. Today, her mental health problems would be better understood, but no one spoke about such things in the Fifties. Because I thought so much of her, I tried to be patient but, as time went on, I became increasingly unhappy and frustrated.
My marriage to Billie represents the darkest period of my life and I think now that it was my fault. I was too impulsive and should have got to know her better. I shouldn’t have married the girl, but I really did care for her to begin with.
As the years passed, I felt as if I had sunk into a deep hole and couldn’t get out. We had little or nothing in common.
I could have been unfaithful but I didn’t believe in that. I had signed a contract, I had a wife and that’s just how it was.
As a distraction, I threw myself into my work, and joined charitable business associations such as the Round Table and the Lions.
I was a member of the Young Conservatives before our marriage. But Billie wasn’t interested in any of it, nor in the regimental reunions which I organised, though most fellows came with their wives.
The idea of an evening of small talk with strangers was terrifying to her, she said.
My friends weren’t ‘her thing’ . . . but then, I never really knew what ‘her thing’ was.
In February 1959, my life took another unexpected turn. The firm’s accountant summoned my parents and me to a meeting and told us that we would have to put the family company into liquidation with immediate effect.
We were almost broke, he announced. Unless we wound up the business voluntarily, we wouldn’t be able to pay off our creditors, which was not an option for a reputable local firm.
THIS news came as a terrible blow. I knew we’d stretched ourselves, and that we’d had a lot more local competition in recent years from rivals prepared to do the same jobs for less, but I’d always believed that our name and reputation would see us through. I never suspected that we were on the brink of collapse.
Now I was 40 years old, out of work and still living in my hometown. I needed to be away from the house, working and earning.
I was prepared to do anything and never had time for anyone who said that manual labour was beneath them. The next few years saw me working as a quarryman, a builder’s mate and even selling books for Woman’s Own door-to-door.
I’m sure Billie disapproved of being married to a manual labourer. she made it plain, though, that she had no intention of working herself. eventually, I landed a job as a travelling salesman for a company called Nuralite, selling building supplies.
The office manager was a pretty young lady by the name of Pamela Paull, who was terribly nice to me. I was very attracted to her and felt we made an instant connection, but I couldn’t do anything about that because I was married. I wasn’t prepared to break my marriage vows, even if I didn’t really have a proper marriage to break.
My wife’s mental health dipped further when we moved house to be closer to my work. I hoped she’d like making a home for us in Northenden, a suburb of Manchester but, sadly, the 60-mile move away from her family seemed to trigger more psychological problems.
Plus, she was home alone all day while I was working hard to keep us afloat.
That’s when she developed what would now be called obsessive compulsive tendencies.
This had already manifested itself in different ways to do with cleanliness and other things but, in Northenden, it became a fear of fire. We had to go around the house together every night checking that every electric switch was off before she’d consider going to bed.
When Billie announced that she’d found herself a job I was so taken aback that, at first, I could hardly respond. she’d never worked for the whole 15 years of our marriage, not even when I was most worried about money. But then she told me what the job was and I was flabbergasted.
she intended to be an assistant to a doctor who treated patients with sexual disorders. I couldn’t believe it and protested: ‘ But Billie, love, you are completely the wrong person for that.’
she was determined to do it, however, and I was so busy working and driving all over the country that I didn’t have the time, or the energy, to argue.
Increasingly worried for her mental health, I made sure to get back to Billie when I could because, left to her own devices, I could only imagine the obsessive rituals she would put herself through. One day I returned