Captain Sir Tom Moore
Walked 100 laps of his garden at 99 and raised £38 million for the NHS
Tom Moore grew up in Keighley in Yorkshire, trained as a civil engineer and was called up in 1940. He served in India and Burma with the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, rising to captain, and later ran a concrete company, raced motorcycles and, in 1983, appeared on the television quiz Blankety Blank.
In 2018 he broke his hip and was treated on the NHS, which he had been born four years before. In April 2020, as the country locked down and hospitals filled with Covid patients, his family suggested a small fundraising challenge to keep him active: 100 laps of the 25-metre garden loop, with his walking frame, before his 100th birthday. The target was £1,000.
Something about the sight of him, upright in his regimental blazer and medals, doing his slow laps every morning, caught the country's mood. Donations passed £1 million within days, then £10 million. He finished the 100 laps on 16 April with a guard of honour from the 1st Battalion Yorkshire Regiment. The final total for NHS Charities Together was more than £38 million, the largest amount ever raised by a single JustGiving campaign.
He became the oldest person to have a UK number one single, with a recording of "You'll Never Walk Alone", received 150,000 birthday cards, and was knighted by the Queen in the grounds of Windsor Castle in July 2020. He died in February 2021 after contracting Covid while being treated for pneumonia.