Captain Tom Moore showed us all what heroes really look like

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Evening Standard
Matthew Dancona3 February 2021
WEST END FINAL

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I came along on 30 April 1920, a few months after the virus burned itself out.” So wrote Captain Sir Tom Moore of his birth in his memoirs, Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day — the virus in question being the Spanish flu that claimed more than 220,000 British lives.

Yesterday, Captain Tom died in hospital aged 100, having tested positive for another deadly virus that has already swept away 108,000 of his fellow Britons. In this respect, his long life — and the extraordinary fundraising campaign that made its final chapter so magnificent — represented a twitch on the thread that connected two terrible pandemics.

Why did a 99-year-old’s decision to walk slowly, stoically and with quiet determination, dapper in his blazer and service medals, strike such a chord? Because heroism involves a convergence of context and action: the dogged simplicity of Captain Tom’s bid to do something for the NHS, that started with a family bet at a barbecue, and ended up raising more than £32 million.  

Though he was feted by the famous and became famous himself — knighted by the Queen, breaking world records, and topping the charts with his version, recorded with Michael Ball, of You’ll Never Walk Alone — his actions defined the difference between heroism and celebrity. A veteran of the Burma campaign in the Second World War, he knew that true courage does not advertise itself but can inspire by example.

The culture of celebrity is driven by envy. Heroism is characterised by a readiness to do what is necessary, great or small. His relentless walk dramatised the easily-forgotten truth that triumph over great adversity is achieved not only by the decisions of the powerful but by millions of what George Eliot called “unhistoric acts” — in this case, the sleepless work of doctors, nurses, front line workers, and parents, often fretful about their jobs, doing their best to home-school their children. He was, by fate rather than design, precisely what the nation needed.

A flinty, no-nonsense Yorkshireman, he also embodied the endurance and resilience that — as it has turned out — are the key human capacities required to get us through this pandemic.  

Few could deliver such a message with credibility. But Captain Tom had earned that right: already 19 when the Second World War broke out; born when Lloyd George was prime minister, living to see his 25th PM, Boris Johnson, enter Number 10; and having survived malaria and dengue fever himself. As such, he was entitled to urge us, with flawless manners, to dig deep. “We’ve gone through these kinds of scares before and lived through them all,” he said, “and I’ve always believed that we’ll get through this too.”

In word and deed, he reminded us by example that a society exists in time as well as space. One in three babies born today in the UK will live to 100. But for a man of his vintage it was remarkable to become a centenarian (there are only 600,000 of them on the planet). He incarnated the values and hardiness of the Greatest Generation, and of the Second World War, to which he frequently compared the present national emergency.

Yet, refreshingly, he was the absolute opposite of a stern nostalgist. He embraced the new, from the “special Bluetooth gizmo that beams the sound (from a big-screen television) straight to my hearing aids”, to a step machine ordered online, to the power of social media and hashtags. He was especially sensitive to “how this surreal period might impact long-term on the next generation”.  

Likewise, his first wife, Billie, had suffered mental health problems, but received no professional help in the Fifties: so he was keen to do his part for those similarly afflicted in the 2020s, with a particular emphasis upon the terrible toll of loneliness. Like Marcus Rashford — born when Captain Tom was already 77 — he filled a space in national life by his polite insistence that help should go where it was needed.

He was also the right person to press home a message of hope, having lived so long and done so much. “There is a future for everyone and there is always room for a global expansion in kindness,” he wrote. The challenge was to “build resilience through optimism” — no small challenge.  

In that sense, his legacy is a remarkable one, captured in a single sentence: “I was determined to continue walking until somebody told me to stop.” It is for the rest of us now to honour his memory, and to keep on walking.

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