Tom Moore, British army officer knighted for charitable work, dies at 100 of coronavirus - Washington Post

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In early April last year, few outside his friends and family had heard the name of Capt. Tom Moore, a former British army officer and World War II veteran approaching his 100th birthday.

By the end of that month, the frail centenarian was described as a “national treasure” by Britons and made headlines around the world after he paced his 82-foot garden patio for days — pushing his walker to raise funds in support of Britain’s state-supported National Health Service (NHS), struggling under the weight of increasing coronavirus patients.

His aim was to raise 1,000 pounds (about $1,370) for NHS-related charities by doing 100 laps of his garden in the Bedfordshire village of Marston Moretaine, wearing his war medals over a blazer, to mark his birthday, April 30.

As news reporters, photographers and TV networks flocked to record his effort, he ended up raising 32 million pounds (around $45 million), entering Guinness World Records for the largest amount raised in a charity walk by an individual.

Then at 100, he became the oldest person to have a No. 1 hit single on British pop charts, voicing the lyrics of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as popular singer Michael Ball rendered the melody along with a choir of NHS doctors and nurses.

Another singer, the Canadian known as the Weeknd, who was vying for the No. 1 spot at the time, graciously tweeted to his fans that they should buy Captain Tom’s record so that the British “national treasure” could top the charts on his 100th birthday. He did.

He formally became Capt. Sir Tom Moore when Queen Elizabeth II, herself in isolation in Windsor Castle during a covid-19 lockdown, tapped his shoulders with a sword in July 2020 and bestowed a knighthood. It was the queen’s first face-to-face meeting with a member of the public for four months, following public clamor for her to make him a “sir.”

She also promoted Capt. Moore to the rank of honorary colonel, but the nation continued to call him simply “Captain Tom.” (A British intercity train was renamed the Captain Tom Moore, and his autobiography, “Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day,” co-written by novelist Wendy Holden and published in September, became a bestseller in Britain.)

He died Feb. 2, in a hospital near his home, two days after he was admitted for treatment for pneumonia and covid-19, according to his daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore on the family’s Twitter account.

He had lived with his daughter and son-in-law since his wife, Pamela, died in 2006. Ingram-Moore did not specify a cause of death but said he had tested positive for coronavirus infection last week and was admitted to a hospital for “additional help” with his breathing. She said doctors had not given him a coronavirus vaccine because of his pneumonia medication.

Although he had achieved near-sainthood status in Britain, a small but vociferous minority of online “trolls” attacked his daughter and her husband for letting him take a pre-Christmas holiday to Barbados (paid for by British Airways). Amid covid-19 restrictions, they protested, a seven-hour flight for a centenarian with underlying health conditions — he had skin cancer and had broken a hip in 2018 — was a bad idea.

Ingram-Moore responded that the trip was “legal” despite the covid-19 “guidelines” against unnecessary travel. Under current lockdown rules, Britons are advised to “stay home” — the government’s top pandemic slogan. She said the trip had been on her father’s “bucket list.” An overwhelming majority of Britons supported her, and news of his passing threw the nation into mourning.

Thomas Moore was born April 30, 1920, in Keighley, Yorkshire, in northern England. His father helped run the family’s home-building and repair company, while his mother was head teacher at a local school. Young Tom attended Keighley grammar school before starting an apprenticeship with a civil engineering firm.

A motorcycle aficionado, he got his first bike when he was 12 and — usually carrying his lucky number, 23 — went on to compete in local road races against adults, winning several trophies on his British-built Scott Flying Squirrel model. He also was a keen photographer.

His hobbies and apprenticeship were interrupted by the war. In May 1940, along with all able-bodied British men age 18 to 41, he was conscripted into the British army to fight Hitler’s Germany. He was assigned to the 8th Battalion, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, based in Cornwall, on the southwestern tip of England, to bolster coastal defenses in the face of a predicted German invasion.

In 1941, by then a second lieutenant, he was moved to the 9th Battalion, which converted from infantry into an armored unit as part of the 146th Regiment Royal Armored Corps. “Most of us had never driven a car, never mind a tank,” he recalled years later.

His corps was sent to India, still a British colony at the time — a grueling, six-week sea voyage — where he was tasked with setting up and heading a training program for British and Indian army motorcycle units, first in Bombay (now Mumbai) and later, after a three-week road odyssey during the monsoon season, in Calcutta (now Kolkata).

In early 1944, he was assigned to the British Fourteenth Army, including Indian, African and other allied troops, aiming to drive the Japanese out of Burma (now Myanmar), which they did. They later became known as the Forgotten Army because their heroism received little media coverage compared with the Allied landings at Normandy and the push to Berlin.

Promoted to captain Oct. 11, 1944, Tom Moore survived a bad bout of dengue fever and returned to Britain in February 1945 to become a tank instructor until the end of the war and his demobilization in early 1946.

In Yorkshire, he worked first as a salesman for a firm selling roofing materials, later as managing director of a concrete manufacturer. In 1949, he married a woman named Billie, but they divorced after a few years — “the darkest period of my life,” he told the Sun newspaper last year. He said the marriage had been unconsummated and that his wife had lived with what would now be called obsessive compulsive disorder.

In 1968, Capt. Moore married Pamela Paull, an office manager from Gravesend on the Thames estuary outside London. They went on to have two children, Lucy and Hannah, and two grandchildren. “[She] was a rather attractive young lady — she looked terrific to me, like a model,” he recalled. “So I had to do various trips and, shall we say, the attraction with the office manager became stronger, and I eventually married her.”

At his retirement, the couple fled the English weather and moved to Costa del Sol in southern Spain but returned to Britain after his wife developed a form of dementia and had to move to a nursing home. It was then that he moved in with his daughter and family in Marston Moretaine, where he got out his medals and his walker and hit his garden path for the health workers for whom he was so grateful.

His walk inspired countless others to emulate his fundraising efforts, including 5-year-old double amputee Tony Hudgell from Kent, in southern England, who having watched Capt. Moore’s effort, walked 10 kilometers (a bit over six miles) on his prosthetic legs. He raised 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) for health workers and proved that Capt. Moore was right: “You’ll never walk alone.”