Captain Sir Tom has helped build respect for the older generation

WE live in an age when, sadly, true heroes are sometimes taken for granted while celebrities whose main talent is self-promotion are fêted far and wide.

Coronavirus has helped to redress the balance somewhat. Our weekly clap for carers, celebrating the work of the doctors, nurses and other staff in the NHS, demonstrated that ordinary people do value the extraordinary work of healthcare.

Other front-line staff essential to the smooth running of daily life in a pandemic – from van drivers to teachers, supermarket check-out workers to refuse collectors – all kept the wheels of society turning and were, perhaps belatedly, appreciated for what they do too.

But there is another group in society whose importance and contribution had, for too long, been overlooked. The elderly, still revered in some societies for their experience and wisdom, have, in much of the youth-dominated western world, seen their status subtly, but significantly, fall.

We talked of the burden and cost of care, the pressure put on the health service, the proportion of retired people to those in work becoming out of balance. And while, as individuals, older people are loved and cherished by their families, as a section of society, the way they were viewed altered over the years, and rarely for the better.

One man helped to change all that. Captain Sir Tom Moore emerged during the first lockdown in early spring last year as someone determined to do his bit for the NHS, as he had done for the nation in the Second World War.

He took on a challenge suited to his 99 years and began a slow-paced sponsored walk in the garden of his home. The rest, as pretty much everyone in the country now knows, is history. His fundraising made £32 million for NHS charities and prompted others to raise hundreds of thousands more; his modest yet inspirational words, in interviews and – amazingly – in a number one hit single recorded with Michael Ball, helped see many through the darkest days of this crisis.

That is why his death, at the age of 100 earlier this week, was so widely marked and why his memory is cherished. He was hardly known outside of his family and friends a year ago. On Tuesday, at the news of his passing from the disease he did so much to fight, the Union flag over Downing Street flew at half-mast to mark his death.

His achievements can be counted in cash terms, of course, and very important they are. But they can also be counted in the impact they have had on the way the older folk of Britain are viewed.

Sir Tom, knighted in a special ceremony last year by Her Majesty the Queen, was one of a fast-diminishing band of combatants in the Second World War who survived to the 2020s, and we owe that wartime generation so much. But those who came after, who rebuilt Britain after the war, deserve respect just as much. Like Sir Tom, they bring experience of years and an outlook on life from which we can all learn lessons. More respect for them will be among the legacies of Sir Tom’s long life.