Happy 100th birthday, Captain Tom!
Luke Mintz looks back on the remarkable life of Captain Tom Moore as he celebrates his centenary
Ahundred years ago today, the world was recovering from Spanish influenza, which killed upwards of 50 million people. How history has a way of repeating itself: Captain Tom Moore celebrates his 100th birthday today under the shadow of another pandemic, one that turned “Captain Tom” – as he has become widely known – into a global hero.
The war veteran is now famous across the world after raising £29.5 million for the NHS by walking 100 laps of his Bedfordshire garden over 10 days this month. In honour of his efforts, described as “heroic” by the Prime Minister, he will now be promoted to Colonel.
Here, we look back on Moore’s remarkable century.
Raised among the mills of West Yorkshire
Born to a builder father and head teacher mother, Moore was nine when the 1929 Wall Street Crash plunged western economies into a historic depression. Hit particularly hard were northern industrial centres such as Keighley, the West Yorkshire mill town where Captain Tom grew up.
As a child, Moore is likely to have witnessed hungry adults queuing for hours at soup kitchens, and the lives of many of his schoolmates would have been blighted by the likes of scurvy, rickets and tuberculosis. Moore was “always a very practical boy,” he told one interviewer. “I learnt very quickly that if you hit your fingers, you didn’t do it again.” He won a place at Keighley Grammar School and later channelled his knack for all things practical into an apprenticeship in civil engineering.
‘I remember the whites of their eyes’
However, that budding career was cut short when, in September 1939, prime minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany. Moore was conscripted, aged 19, into the Duke of
Wellington’s Regiment, and eventually rose to the rank of captain. His late sister, Freda, joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in Lincolnshire, recording sightings of German planes.
In 1941, his regiment took a sixweek journey to Bombay (now Mumbai), India, to protect the British Raj, but the most dangerous episode of Captain Tom’s war came in 1942, when he was posted to the Arakan area of southwest Burma (now Myanmar), to retrieve the British colony from the grip of the Japanese army. Years later,
Moore says he still remembers the “whites of the eyes” of the opposing troops. The Allied forces eventually recaptured Arakan, and Captain Tom was awarded the Burma Star – one of three medals that adorned his blazer during his fundraising mission earlier this month.
He said of the medals in a recent radio interview: “It shows that I was part of a very important army at the time, who were all battling for our country, which we’re all so proud of.”
Swinging through the Sixties
After the war, Moore moved to Borvington, Dorset, to teach soldiers how to use armoured vehicles. Still single, Moore moved back to his native Yorkshire in the late Sixties, to work for a roofing company and finally fell in love – with a woman called Pamela, a “rather attractive young lady… like a model”, who worked at the firm’s Kent headquarters and was 15 years his junior.
The couple married in 1968 – two years after Bobby Moore captained England to its first and only win in the football World Cup – and soon had two daughters, Lucy and Hannah. They settled into a pleasant suburban life: Pamela’s “dream day out” was a trip to Marks & Spencers, while Moore spent much of his free time taking apart motorcycle engines and fantasising about his dream car – not a high-speed
Ferrari, he has said, but a “four-wheel drive to get me through the muddy parts of life”. Eventually, in 1992, he retired aged 72.
A tragic start to the new millennium
At the start of 2000, the world was looking ahead to what it thought would be a uniquely peaceful era. But for Moore, it became the most difficult period of his life, after his wife Pamela fell ill. He cared for her at home for the first two years and then visited her every day in a home until, in 2006, her brain “quietly died”. Two years later, around the time of the global financial crisis, Moore moved into his daughter Hannah’s 16th-century family home in the Bedfordshire village of Marston Moretaine, with her husband, Colin, and their two children. There, he remains independent, waking at 6.30am each morning to release the dogs, followed by a daily jog on a running machine. In the evening, he pours himself a glass of sweet wine to drink in front of the television – Judge Judy is a particular favourite.
Fighting coronavirus
Aged 99, as Covid-19 began to besiege British hospitals, Moore decided he had to do something. He set up a Justgiving fundraising page for his garden adventure with an “optimistic” target of £1,000.
But as the total approaches £30 million – money that goes to NHS Charities Together, which supports front-line workers – Moore finds himself at number one in the pop charts, with his charity rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone. Later today, he will be given an RAF fly-past.
But the gift he is keenest to receive is the 100th birthday card from the Queen – not guaranteed, his daughter says, because of operational difficulties at Buckingham Palace during lockdown. Until it arrives, happy 100th birthday from us all, Colonel Tom.