Sir Tom Moore's charity walk raised $75 million for the NHS. Now the foundation set up by his family is being investigated over its handling of his legacy. They speak to David James Smith.
Somewhere out in the multiverse there may be a reality in which Tom Moore lived out his life anonymously, without becoming globally famous. Indeed, he nearly made it in this world: for almost a century he was really only known to himself and his family.
If not for the sliding doors of fate, as his daughter Hannah likes to describe it, Tom would have celebrated his 100th birthday on April 30, 2020, with a party for family and friends, a hog roast and a singer performing hits from the 1940s. It was all planned. There would have been bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover on the long way to Tipperary. Sometime later he would have passed peacefully from this world to the next, and his family would have lived on quietly with their private memories of him.
But that is not what happened. Instead Captain Tom became a media sensation, raised millions of pounds for charity and was knighted by the Queen. Rather less well known is the turmoil his family was plunged into as they grappled with the impact of his celebrity and how to handle the foundation they created in his name. All kinds of accusations were thrown at them, some wildly and obviously false, but others raised enough concerns that they are now caught up in an investigation by the Charity Commission amid the suspicion they trademarked Captain Tom's name for profit not charity. Were they naive or self-interested? This is the family's story of how it all happened and the toll it took.
Sunday, April 5, 2020
The UK's first Covid lockdown is 13 days old, deaths already number almost 5,000 and Boris Johnson is admitted to hospital with coronavirus, where things could go "either way" as he is treated in intensive care. In middle England, in the garden of the Old Rectory in the Bedfordshire village of Marston Moretaine, the Ingram-Moore family are basking in the early spring sunshine as they contemplate an uncertain future. Having a barbecue are Hannah and Colin (also known as David), who run a business consultancy called Maytrix, and their children, Benji, 16, and Georgia, 11.
Then the fifth member of the household appears. Hannah's father, Tom, aged 99 years and 11 months, is using his outdoor walking frame for support. It is his first venture outside that year — he is still recovering from a fall while unloading the dishwasher six months earlier that left him with broken ribs, a punctured lung and a fractured hip. He spent eight weeks in hospital and when he came home he ordered a running machine so he could do his walking rehab in front of the television through the winter months. He now hopes to start walking up and down the drive of the family home.
"Well, Tom," says Colin, "since we can't celebrate your 100th birthday, why don't you walk up and down a hundred times and Maytrix will give you a £1 a lap."
"That seems like a fair challenge," says Tom. They discuss who will receive the £100 ($192) donation and agree it will be a Covid appeal.
On Hannah's computer is a press release she had prepared about her father's 100th birthday party, thinking the local media might mention his centenary. It had never been sent and now there would be no party because of lockdown. She decides to rewrite the release to announce her father's sponsored walk and send it off to the local press, in support of NHS Charities Together, an umbrella group for charities supporting the health service. "We need to call you something in the press release," she says to her father. "I know, we'll call you Captain Tom."
Her father had indeed been an army captain, but that was 75 years ago. "You can't do that," Tom says. "I retired in 1945!"
"I don't think anyone will mind," Hannah says, "and anyway, I doubt anyone will read it, so it won't matter."
The children make an iMovie about their grandfather's fund-raising and send it out to a few family and friends. Hannah sets up a JustGiving page with a target of £1,000 ($1,927). She sends out the press release, and to their surprise there is a quick response. They do some local radio interviews and then the local TV news comes calling. It is Wednesday by now, and they have already raised £2,000 ($3,855). "Do you think we might make £5,000?" Hannah asks the TV crew. Hmm, they say, doubtfully, no one's got any money at the moment, right? Hannah changes the JustGiving target to £5,000 ($6,640) anyway.
On Thursday BBC Breakfast picks up on the local interest and calls, asking them to go live to the nation on Friday morning. Because of social distancing rules, they are working out how to do the broadcasts on their own. Hannah's laptop is no good as Tom is deaf and the laptop speakers are too quiet. So Benji holds the phone and Hannah is on hand to act as Tom's ears and explain to him what is being asked. For a longer broadcast to Breakfast they realise that holding the phone by hand isn't going to work, so Hannah retrieves her 1970s school music stand and they perch the phone on that instead, secured with Blu Tack.
Some 95km away in Reading, Tom's first-born daughter, Lucy Teixeira, is outside the family bubble and separated from what is unfolding. Soon she will be watching her father on television like the rest of us. In the years before lockdown Lucy had been a regular visitor to the Old Rectory, where she and her father clashed repeatedly in "robust debates" about Brexit. She was anti, he was pro. "I found that challenging," she says. In the end they agreed to differ and if neither of them mentioned it they'd get along just fine.
Lucy speaks of her childhood in idealistic terms, with a loving father and mother who never argued. Tom had repeatedly reinvented himself in the years after he left the army, moving on after the family construction firm back in Yorkshire failed, doing labouring work when necessary, before finding a succession of sales roles, travelling the length and breadth of the country. He had been married before he met Hannah and Lucy's mother, Pamela. His first wife, Billie, had mental health issues and left him for a psychiatrist. He met Pamela at work. She was significantly younger than him and, it appears, she too suffered from mental health issues — "By gum, I certainly knew how to pick them," Tom wrote in his autobiography.
Lucy says her mother's anxieties related to her own childhood and that Tom's optimism was the perfect antidote. In his world tomorrow would always be a better day. He might have been an old dad, nearly 50 when Lucy was born, and people might have mistaken him for her grandfather, but he was always very smartly turned out, her mother was glamorous and they were content together.
When Pamela became ill with dementia Tom looked after her as best he could until eventually she needed full-time care. When she died in 2006 Tom was initially quite lost. Hannah, who flew a million miles a year as a Swatch Group executive, and her husband, Colin, a chartered accountant, resolved to "take the plunge", going it alone with their business consultancy, Maytrix, and finding a new house large enough to be a workplace and a home. They wanted Tom to move in with them too.
Lucy says her father had been frustrated in his eighties that no one would give him a job. Soon after the move to the Old Rectory he told Hannah he had become invisible to the world as an old person. "People had started to look through me, past me", he said. "But I've come here and you've given me my visibility back."
As Hannah puts it: "He'd got purpose. Every day he got up, fed the dogs, let the dogs out, cut the grass, made things in his workshop, fixed things, chopped wood …" Most weeks, before he had his fall, he cooked a Sunday roast, plain and traditional. It was quite incredible, says Hannah, how the multigenerational household evolved. They would eat together, no phones at the table. "It sounds ridiculous, we weren't the Brady Bunch, but we didn't argue."
World famous in a fortnight
It had been a giddying few days in the Old Rectory. After Tom's first live appearance on BBC Breakfast, the BBC had called again wanting him back on air, and he had gone live on Saturday afternoon. Tom was walking in the background as Hannah was interviewed in the foreground by Reeta Chakrabarti. That broadcast went out on BBC World too. Next came an interview on Michael Ball's Radio 2 show and that day, barely a week after they'd started, the JustGiving total hit £200,000 ($385,600).
From then on it became unstoppable. The next day they were on ITV's breakfast show, Good Morning Britain, with Piers Morgan. "Piers Morgan chucked ten grand in," Hannah says. "He said, 'Let's get you back tomorrow, let's get you to half a million.' So within a week we're at half a million and the world is talking to us. And we're just a family, right?"
Back at the Old Rectory, Colin is on his laptop in the kitchen, trying to manage the emails coming in — 1.5 million in the first ten days — with help from Benji. Georgia is handling the reporters turning up at the gate. "I'm afraid he's not free now" or "My mum will call you" she repeats over and over. Benji and Hannah are handling the tech for the interviews, which soon escalate to 15 a day. They will peak at about 35. They don't want to turn anyone down, because it's for a good cause. "But we quickly realised we had to protect him, because they would have talked to him every minute of every day if we'd let them."
On one occasion, during a rush of requests, Hannah asks her teenage son to cover an interview. "I can't," he says, feeling out of his depth, and Hannah replies, "No, for grandad, you have to do it." So he does.
Captain Tom is the man for the moment, a symbol of the fightback against the global pandemic. Comparisons are drawn with the Second World War. Captain Tom — who was stationed in Burma during the war — is cast as the embodiment of Britain's indomitable spirit then and now. Hannah fields calls from the office of the US president, from the director-general of the United Nations, the head of the World Health Organisation and numerous other heads of state and political leaders.
Tom, meanwhile, gets up every morning, has a bowl of porridge and a cup of tea before he continues "racing" through his laps. The media storm continues and the family start to feel besieged. There are drones, helicopters, satellite vans outside the gates and hundreds of thousands of birthday cards and gifts flooding in from all corners of the globe. A sorting centre is set up in the hall of Benji's school, manned by volunteers.
Captain Tom inspires people across the world to do their own fundraising too. "People were walking in Zambia, because they'd heard of my father, raising money for their own local charities." But amid all the attention and well-wishing, it doesn't take long for the haters to emerge on social media. There is some "really vile stuff", as Hannah describes it, such as people hoping Tom breaks his leg or worse. And then the personal hate starts for her too.
"I was called devious, a shrew, all those words we use because we are still suspicious of successful women. Words used to demonise." She doubts she would have received such abuse if she were a son of Tom. "I was [accused of] making him do it, I was cattle-prodding him, I was treating him abysmally and forcing him into it."
Hannah is also accused of raising money for herself, of taking all the money, of using her business, Maytrix, to manipulate the public to her own advantage. "We had been thrust into this world travelling at speed and never contemplated any negativity," she says. They shield Tom from the unpleasantness. As far as they know he was never aware of it. But they cannot shield their teenage son. "There was a particularly dark time when Benji did a live stream with a friend of his, celebrating that we'd hit £1million and he got a barrage of hate: you're fat, you're ugly, you're manipulating your grandfather. It affected him badly at the time."
Some of the intrusions are in real life. When Georgia is out playing in the garden in her bikini they spot press cameras in the hedge. Hannah tells her to go inside. Friends post on Twitter to ask for help. Nick Knowles, of the TV show DIY SOS, responds and helps to put up a high fence around their property. He brings in his own PR consultant to help them manage the media and a legal letter is sent out warning against intrusive conduct.
Within two weeks the JustGiving page is at £20 million ($38.5 million). The money does not go to the family but to NHS Charities Together, which expands in a hurry to cope with the dramatic increase in donations, not just from the efforts of Captain Tom. All of this money goes into one big pot, so it is impossible to separate the money Tom raised from the rest.
Keep calm and carry on
April 16, 2020. Hannah is at home, live on the Chris Evans radio show. Behind her the Yorkshire Regiment are just leaving the grounds of the Old Rectory and ahead she can see an army of press advancing up the drive, one of the big networks setting up in front of her. "We need you live in three minutes," they say. "Yes, of course," Hannah says, but she is thinking, "Help! I don't know what to do." It is chaos, inside and out.
So they have a family powwow. Who wants to stop? No one — they all want to carry on. "Remember, we are compelled. Every time we speak the money goes up. We can't say no," Hannah tells me. She asks her father, but he wants to carry on too. He says, "If I can speak just one word and it gives people hope, then I need to keep talking and walking."
It is then, says Hannah, that the idea of a more lasting project begins to form, one that would eventually become the Captain Tom Foundation. They feel they are the guardians of his legacy and need to do something to preserve it.
By the time Tom finishes his 100 laps that day, the family can see that people are starting to exploit his name online using what Hannah calls "subsites" selling Captain Tom merchandise for profit, without Tom's permission. They are advised by a lawyer, as Hannah later tells me, that his name should be retained and protected within the family. That is Tom's wish too. So with legal advice, on April 24 — day 19 of the whole adventure — they set up a new company, Club Nook. The directors are Hannah and her husband, Colin. The couple sit up one night in late April registering every variation of the Captain Tom domain name they can think of and registering his name as intellectual property. Tom pledges to keep walking.
Tom turns 100
As Tom celebrates his 100th birthday on April 30, there's a fly-past by Second World War fighter planes. The JustGiving page closes at midnight with a tally, including Gift Aid, of £38.9 million ($74.95 million). "What are you going to do with it all?" Hannah is later asked. But she has no part in distributing the funds. "We thought the world knew where the money went," she says.
So where did that money go? It "helped us fund hundreds of projects supporting NHS staff, patients, and volunteers," says Ellie Orton, the chief executive of NHS Charities Together, adding that in total the umbrella group allocated "over £143 million" across a network of NHS charities, funding mental health support, training and equipment.
On May 5, five days after Tom's birthday, the Captain Tom Foundation is formed and is registered as a charity a month later. Hannah concedes they set it up at speed. It wasn't built around money, she says, but around values and the human connectivity of her father's endeavours. They hope the foundation will lead the fight for "a world without ageism" and "supporting our older population". Hospices, mental health and nursing charities are among those to be supported.
In July comes the crowning glory, when Tom is knighted by the Queen at Windsor Castle. The Queen speaks to each member of the family, chatting with Georgia about schools and dogs. Tom quips that he hopes Her Majesty won't be too heavy-handed with the sword and the Queen replies that she is quite gentle having done this a few times before.
When I ask Hannah's sister Lucy about this moment, she becomes upset, because she was not invited and was unable to attend, primarily because she was outside the family bubble. She takes a moment to regain her composure. "That was really painful. Who wouldn't want to be with their father to be knighted. That was hard."
It's also a bit hard, she says, that she and her family couldn't be more involved generally in the Captain Tom phenomenon. She has no involvement in the Captain Tom Foundation and would go on to set up her own charity initiative, raising £20,000 ($38,500) for Trees for Tom, reforesting a woodland area near her father's original home in Yorkshire.
Meanwhile the foundation begins selling merchandise on its website — T-shirts, roses, gin — with a proportion of the profits going to charity. They will later be removed, though the internet remains alight with others selling Captain Tom merchandise either for pure profit or with a proportion of each sale to charity. Hannah tells me how they collaborated with an old friend from Yorkshire to create a Captain Tom gin, which attracts the wrong attention because it is unclear how much is going to charity and who is benefiting. That is among the items that will later be removed.
The captain's last trip
Tom then mentions in public a kind of bucket list that includes going to Barbados to meet the cricketers. He and the Ingram-Moores are invited out over Christmas 2020, the trip paid for by British Airways and Visit Barbados, and he participates in several public engagements but also spends time on the beach with his grandchildren.
The trip provokes renewed criticism on social media, especially when he becomes ill. None of the family knew, Hannah says, that he had pneumonia. Back in the UK he is hospitalised and it seems likely he catches coronavirus there, as he tests positive soon after he is discharged. "He just couldn't fight that," Hannah says. "Not on top of the pneumonia." He returns to the same hospital and dies there on February 2, 2021.
There is an outpouring of love and affection for him — though the scrutiny of his family continues.
Hannah is invited to sit in the Royal Box at Wimbledon as a guest of the All England Club, when her name is announced and the crowd rises to applaud her. The club's chairman gestures for her to stand, so she stands and waves vigorously. But it's replayed on social media as her milking the moment, basking in her own celebrity. "You can judge a story any way you want," she says.
Sometimes the negativity on social media leaks into the real world. Even Lucy is confronted in public a couple of times, people demanding, "Where's all the money gone?" And Hannah has some awkward moments, including being harangued by a woman in a crowded pub for revealing her father's home to the world and on another occasion, in London, where a man tries to grab at her.
Investigations begin
At the beginning of this year a flurry of news articles focus on the Captain Tom Foundation and the published accounts of its first year. There are claims Hannah had wanted to pay herself a £150,000 ($290,000) salary as the chief executive, while critics observe that the foundation has paid out more in expenses, including fees to her own company, Maytrix, than in donations to charity.
Hannah did serve as temporary chief executive of the Foundation, on a salary of £85,000 ($164,000) — benchmarked, she says, to match other charities. As the Charity Commission recently disclosed, it had refused to allow the foundation to pay Hannah £100,000 ($193,000) as the salary was neither "reasonable nor justifiable".
Hannah tells me that the other payments reflected the start-up expenses and were quite proper uses of the funds to reimburse Maytrix. She says that nothing can be hidden as everything has to be reported for transparency and is easily accessible on the Charity Commission's website.
When, in June, the commission announces its next-level statutory inquiry, it accepts that the expenses paid were "reasonable" but that there are other "concerns" to be investigated.
These include the apparent conflict of interest between the foundation and the company Club Nook. The commission suggests the registering of Captain Tom trademarks might have benefited the company and disadvantaged the foundation. The family and the foundation have said they support the commission's inquiry.
Club Nook's first-year accounts show income of just over £809,000 ($1.5 million), against which costs of nearly £350,000 ($675,000) are set. Hannah confirms to me in an email that "Club Nook has not profited from branded merchandise/memorabilia, that Club Nook has not been paid by the foundation for use of its trademarks and that Club Nook's revenues have been generated by other activities." When I ask how Club Nook made its money she does not reply.
I wonder if Hannah now considers the family's decision to trademark their father's name a mistake and how she feels about the family's success with Club Nook, which now includes her two children as shareholders. But she is reluctant to comment further now the investigation is under way. Meanwhile the negative publicity of recent weeks has attracted a whole new round of unpleasant trolling. "Die bitch!" is a phrase Hannah is all too familiar with. I can't help thinking that if the family's philanthropy and generosity — the £38.9 million standing pure and untainted — really did tip into self-interest, the price has been high.
As a result of the investigation the foundation has delayed plans to launch an annual Captain Tom Day of fundraising to celebrate the elderly until 2023. Hannah says she remains determined to press ahead with the foundation's ambitious aims believing that most people are with them, not against them. That will be for her replacement, though — she stepped down from the foundation at the end of April, as planned, to make way for a new, independent chief executive.
"We are not going anywhere, we have our ambitions, and we absolutely believe we can create a positive impact with the foundation," she says. "This is just part of weathering the storm."
Written by: James Smith
© The Times of London
