The Old Man and the Wrecking Crew

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An old man walked up and down his garden.

Then he walked up and down his garden again.

The next day, the old man walked up and down his garden.

This may not sound very interesting, but in April 2020, the old man walking up and down his garden was big news in the UK.

Day after day, the old man was on all the newspaper front pages.

The BBC sent a camera crew to the garden to broadcast live to the nation as the old man shuffled carefully along, gripping the handles of his walking frame, his shoulders hunched, smartly dressed in a shirt, tie and blazer, army medals pinned to his chest.

In endless television interviews, the old man shared his homespun optimistic philosophy.

Tomorrow will be a good day.

Lord knows we needed some optimism in April 2020, a month into the first COVID lockdown.

What else was on the news in Britain?

Daily government press conferences with their grim statistics about infections, hospital admissions and deaths.

The slogan on the lectern exhorted Brits to stay home, protect the NHS.

Ah yes, the NHS, the National Health Service.

In windows of houses, people put up posters, their children's crude drawings of rainbows, adorned with the words, thank you, NHS.

once a week at 8 p.m.

on Thursday we'd all open our doors stand on our doorsteps bang spoons on saucepans and applaud the clap for carers then we'd all go back inside to resume the business of staying home it was a strange time

Along came a man who captured the zeitgeist, an old man walking up and down his garden.

Captain Tom Moore was 99 years old.

He was recovering from a fall that had fractured his hip.

He wanted to walk up and down his garden a hundred times before his 100th birthday.

A sponsored walk, to raise money for the NHS nurses who'd cared for him.

The British people took Captain Tom to their hearts.

Thousands of pounds rolled in for Captain Tom's sponsored walk.

Then millions.

Then tens of millions.

It was the feel-good story of the lockdown.

I mentioned that this story started in a strange time, but as the world got back to normal, the story itself just got stranger.

It tells us something about our own impulse to give to good causes, and it ends in disgrace with a wrecking crew in the old man's garden.

I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

Tom Moore's family had his 100th birthday party all planned out.

They'd roast a hog and hire a singer to perform hits from Tom's youth, like the Vera Lynn classic, We'll Meet Again.

When that song came out in 1939, Tom was 19 years old.

Young men were going to fight in the Second World War.

And Vera Lynn gave them the words for their goodbyes to their families.

We'll meet again.

Don't know where, don't know when,

but I know we'll meet again some sunny day.

Tom served for six years in the British Army, rising to the rank of captain.

He built a career in sales and management, raised two daughters, retired, and nursed his wife through dementia.

After his wife died, Tom moved in with his younger daughter, Hannah, her husband and their two children.

Hannah Ingram Moore is one of Britain's leading businesswomen, as she says on her website, which offers her services as a brand marketing coach and acclaimed business strategist.

The family lived in a big house in a village in Bedfordshire, an hour north of London.

The move gave Tom a purpose, as Hannah later explained to a journalist.

He had started to feel invisible in old age.

People look through me, he complained.

Even in his 90s, he could still make himself useful.

In the Ingram Moore's big house, Tom fed the dogs, mowed the lawn, tinkered in the workshop, and cooked roast dinners.

One day, unloading the dishwasher, he tripped.

I got tangled up in my own feet, he recalled.

He hit his head, fractured his hip, and punctured his lung.

From his bedside, Hannah called her sister.

You'd better come.

He's not going to make it.

But he did.

After weeks in hospital, Tom was well enough to go back home and determined to get back on his feet again.

He ordered a treadmill so he could keep up his physio exercises during winter.

The family started to plan his 100th birthday party for the end of April.

Not many heroes of the Second World War made it to that age.

Maybe the local newspaper would like to print his picture.

Hannah drafted a press release.

But then came COVID.

Nobody would be holding any parties in April.

As the weather improved, Tom moved his physio-regime into the garden, walking up and down with the aid of his walking frame.

Hannah's husband suggested a challenge.

Could you do a hundred laps of the garden to celebrate your 100th birthday?

I'll give a pound a lap to the charity of your choice.

Fair enough, said Tom.

He chose NHS Charities Together, an organization that supports frontline healthcare workers, like the ones who'd nursed him back to health after his fall.

The children took a video of Tom walking with his frame and sent it to friends and family.

Hannah set up a page on the website, justgiving.com.

She set a target of a thousand pounds, about $1,250.

Then she remembered the draft press release about the party that wasn't going to happen.

She rewrote it, sharing details of Tom's sponsored walk instead, and sent it off to the local media.

You can never be sure what's going to go viral.

Lots of people set themselves personal challenges and ask for pledges to charity to motivate them to see that challenge through.

The vast majority hold no interest at all for anyone beyond friends and family.

Why did Captain Tom make headlines?

One answer comes from metaphor, the language we choose to talk about events.

When the COVID pandemic came along, for example, some used the metaphor of a natural disaster, a tsunami of illness approaching our shores.

Some used metaphors from sport.

We had to think of lockdown as a marathon, not a sprint.

But the most common metaphor, war.

COVID was an attacker.

an enemy that must be fought.

The choice of metaphor matters.

In times of war, governments can impose authoritarian measures that we'd never normally let them get away with.

People can be asked to make sacrifices for the common good.

In a broadcast to the nation, early in the first lockdown, the Queen, herself 93 years old, asked Britons for those sacrifices.

I hope in the years to come, Everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge.

And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.

As strong as any.

The Queen was asking us to compare ourselves to the strongest generation, the one that defeated Hitler.

In case that wasn't clear enough.

It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made in 1940.

The Queen ended her message to the nation by asking us to endure the loneliness of lockdown lockdown and have faith that better times lay ahead.

We'll meet again.

Don't know where, don't know when.

The virus was the Nazis.

The pandemic was the Second World War.

Enduring the lockdown was like surviving the Blitz.

Then, into the national consciousness shuffled Captain Tom.

Here was a man who'd served his nation in the Second World War, a living link to that spirit of collective sacrifice that had got us through the war and would get us through the lockdown.

Determinedly plodding up and down his garden, raising money in aid of frontline NHS workers, here was a man who personified the very best of British, selfless, stoical,

steadfast.

With hindsight, you can see why the nation latched on to Captain Tom.

You couldn't have come up with a better symbol of British lockdown spirit if you had tried.

But when Hannah Ingram Moore pressed send on her email to the local press,

she could hardly have imagined the perfect storm she was about to unleash.

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Hannah Ingram Moore's press release leads to an interview on a local radio station.

Donations on justgiving.com pass the £1,000 target.

She gets a call from a local television station.

What might be a realistic new target?

Hannah wonders.

5,000?

The local TV people are sceptical.

It's a lovely story, they say, but don't get your hopes too high.

The economy is ground to a a halt with a lockdown.

Nobody's in the mood to spend money at the moment.

The piece on local television catches the attention of national television.

The BBC want to interview Tom, live on their breakfast show.

Hannah and the family scramble to figure out the technology.

They put an old music stand in front of Tom's favourite chair and secure Hannah's phone to it with Blu-Tack.

Tom's a bit deaf, and the phone speaker isn't very loud, so Hannah perches on a chair next to him to repeat what the BBC presenters say.

So, how are you going to?

What would you say to the nation in order to help us all to keep calm and carry on?

Yes, I think

the thing is, remember, tomorrow is a good day.

Tomorrow, you will maybe find everything much better than today.

Donations on Captain Tom's Just Giving page flash past 5,000, then 10,000, 100,000.

The broadcaster Piers Morgan invites Tom and Hannah onto his morning show on ITV.

By now, the total's closing in on half a million, and Morgan says he's going to help.

Here's what I'm going to do, Tom.

I'm going to put £10,000 of my own money into your fundraising today, and I hope that encourages everyone watching at home to do do the same, to be as generous as they can.

Two days later, Tom's in the middle of yet another interview on the BBC when the presenter cuts in with breaking news.

Donations have just passed 5 million with no signs of stopping.

In 2007, the economists Dean Carlin and Daniel Wood worked with the charity Freedom From Hunger to conduct an experiment.

They wanted to explore a simple question.

Why do people donate to charity?

There's an obvious answer.

We want to do good in the world.

Obvious, but often wrong.

The researchers tested the impact of two kinds of direct male appeal.

Both male shots started with a photo of a sad-looking woman and some heart-rending text.

Sebastiana has known nothing but abject poverty her entire life.

One group of donors got a mail shot that went on to explain how caring people like you had helped Sebastiana to turn her life around.

Her young son Aurelio runs up to hug her.

She says, I do whatever I can for my children.

The other group's mail shot instead talked about how rigorous scientific methodologies attested to the cost-effectiveness of the charity's intervention.

The result?

A few larger donors gave more when they received the text about rigorous scientific methodologies, but most smaller donors gave less.

They weren't moved to donate by evidence that their donation would be maximally cost-effective.

They were moved by the thought of a young boy hugging his mum.

They gave not to do good, but to feel good.

Economists call it the warm glow effect, and it surely explains why Brits in the pandemic threw so much money at Captain Tom's fundraising appeal.

Not many will have read up on the detail of how NHS charities together proposed to use their donation and carefully weighed it up against against alternative potential recipients of their generosity.

No, they wanted to see the look on the old man's face as a journalist tells him the total has blasted past another milestone.

Captain Tom's fundraising made Britain feel good about itself in a difficult time.

You got a warm glow from being part of it.

At the Ingram Moores House, lockdown life has gone crazy.

Tom is doing dozens of interviews a day.

The local post office is groaning under the weight of hundreds of thousands of cards to congratulate Tom on his 100th birthday.

Far too many cards for the family to cope with.

Volunteers at the local school put them on display.

Soon, they've taken over the whole school hall.

Satellite broadcast vans descend on the village.

Drones buzz buzz over the Ingram Moors garden.

Cameras poke through the hedge.

It's overwhelming.

Intrusive.

Exhausting.

But as long as the money keeps rolling in for charity, Tom and his family decide they can't possibly stop.

When the day arrives for Tom to complete his 100th lap, Tom's old army regiment sends soldiers to line up in his garden in a guard of honour.

Socially distanced, of course.

The BBC broadcasts the event live to the nation with a reverential commentary as Tom carefully pushes his walking frame towards the camera.

And here he comes, Captain Tom Moore,

approaching his 100th birthday.

100 laps of his garden during lockdown.

All of the money going to NHS charities, a guard of honour from the 1st Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment.

Inches to go, and there he is.

Congratulations.

The moment might have seemed just a little bit absurd.

All this pomp and ceremony for an old man walking up and down his garden, but it was touching nonetheless, and it wasn't over yet.

Tom had completed his laps with a couple of weeks to spare before his birthday.

The singer and Broadway star Michael Ball got in touch.

He wanted to release a song with Tom, a cover of You'll Never Walk Alone.

Tom recorded his part from his favorite armchair, Michael Ball from his home studio.

The screen split into dozens of Zoom call boxes filled with nurses from the NHS Voices of Care choir.

The song went straight to number one.

All proceeds went to NHS charities together.

When the appeal on Justgiving.com came to a close, on the last day of April, Tom's 100th birthday, he'd raised an astonishing £38.9 million

for NHS frontline workers.

That's about $50 million.

The Royal Air Force celebrated by flying two wartime planes, a hurricane and a Spitfire, over Tom's garden.

The Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that Tom would be knighted for his services to fundraising, becoming Captain Sir Tom.

The whirlwind appeal was over.

What next?

Tom could, of course, have chosen to withdraw from the public eye and live out his days in the privacy he had enjoyed until a few short weeks ago.

But he was now a famous, much-loved figure.

Captain Tom had become a powerful brand.

There must be opportunities to use his public profile to do even more good.

The family decided a new charity should be set up, the Captain Tom Foundation.

It would raise money and make grants to causes close to Tom's heart.

The family also set up a new company and trademarked Captain Tom's name.

The charity's website linked to and looked very much like an online store from which you could buy official Captain Tom t-shirts, a Captain Tom Rose or Captain Tom Gin.

That would give you a warm glow twice over, from the name on the label and the booze in the bottle.

If you clicked through to buy something from from the online store, the proceeds would go to the Captain Tom Foundation.

Right?

The online store also promoted Captain Tom's memoir, hastily commissioned by a publishing company and titled, Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day.

In the prologue, Tom wrote, Astonishingly at my age, With the offer to write this memoir, I've also been given the chance to raise even more money money for the charitable foundation now established in my name.

That seemed pretty clear.

Buy the book, and the money would go towards the charitable foundation.

Or some of the money, at least, wouldn't it?

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In December 2020, the UK had just emerged from a second lockdown, and people briefly dared to hope for a festive Christmas.

But as the nights grew darker, the virus started spreading again and quickly.

Hesitant to impose yet another strict lockdown, The government tried a touch of social pressure, asking people to keep their celebrations short, small and local.

Limit who you meet.

Do you really have to travel?

Just because it's legal to do something doesn't mean it's sensible.

The Ingram Moore family, meanwhile, had jetted off to Barbados, courtesy of free flights from British Airways.

As the mood back in the UK became grimmer, the Captain Tom Twitter account tweeted out a photo of Tom, Hannah, her husband, and their two children.

Enjoying a beautiful family day in the Barbados sunshine, it said, followed by a sunshine emoji and hashtag, tomorrow will be a good day.

The response on Twitter was mixed.

Enjoy every moment, said one user.

Read the room.

advised another.

I've omitted the swear words.

The Captain Tom brand took a bit of a dent.

Some people started to mutter.

Are the family really in this for the purest of motives?

The following month, January 2021, Britain entered its third national lockdown.

Tom himself caught COVID.

and went into hospital.

Well-wishes flooded in.

The singer Michael Ball, for instance, instance, tweeted, Love and prayers for Moore and his lovely family.

Stay strong, sir.

But this time, Tom didn't make it.

He died at the start of February.

Amid the tributes, some people on Twitter said unkind things about the Barbados Jolly.

The broadcaster Piers Morgan leapt to the defence of the Ingram Moore family.

He'd spoken to Hannah.

They'd been deeply hurt hurt by the online trolling, Morgan said.

It was despicable.

It should also have been a warning.

Captain Tom was dead, but the Captain Tom Foundation lived on with a real chance to do good in the world.

And that would mean that the Captain Tom brand would need to be looked after.

But if anyone was going to understand the importance of managing public perceptions, it would be a brand marketing coach.

Lucky then that this was precisely Hannah's area of expertise.

By law, charities and companies must publish their accounts once a year.

The first year of the Captain Tom Foundation's accounts showed it had raised over a million pounds.

It had given out some grants to good causes and spent a larger amount on support costs, including tens of thousands of pounds paid to companies controlled by the Ingram Moore family.

But those were costs incurred in getting the charity up and running.

It was fair enough that they be reimbursed.

As for the company set up to own the Captain Tom trademarks, the accounts showed income of over £800,000,

about a million dollars.

Where exactly had all that money come from?

A journalist emailed Hannah to ask.

She didn't reply.

The muttering grew louder.

Journalists asked more questions.

That official Captain Tom Limited Edition gin, for example.

Exactly how much of the purchase price went to the Captain Tom Foundation?

Well,

some of it.

But how much?

The gin was quietly pulled from sale.

Hannah began working as the interim CEO of the Captain Tom Foundation.

She asked for a salary of £150,000 a year, but the Charity Commission, which regulates charities in England, said that was too much.

For the CEO of a new, small foundation, £85,000 should be plenty.

That's still more than $100,000.

and nearly three times the average wage in the UK.

Still,

a bit disappointing.

Not to worry though, there were other ways to make money.

For example, Hannah made a deal to provide ambassador services for a media company's charity awards using Captain Tom's name.

It was later revealed the company paid £20,000 for these services, but just £2,000 of that went to the Captain Tom Foundation.

£18,000 went to Hannah Ingram Moore.

Charities, by law, must have independent trustees who act in the charity's best interests.

Both Hannah and her husband served for a time among the trustees for the Captain Tom Foundation.

But were the foundation's trustees doing a good enough job?

The charity commission started to wonder.

They set up an inquiry.

Meanwhile, Hannah and her husband submitted a planning application to put up a new building in the garden of their big house.

In English villages, you can't just build anything you like on land you own.

Development is strictly controlled by the local government.

The Ingram Moors applied for permission to build a Captain Tom Foundation building.

It would be used for charitable purposes.

How could the local bureaucrats refuse?

Here's a curious thing though, When the building actually went up, neighbours noticed it was somewhat bigger than the plans for which permission had been given.

Also, it contained a luxury spa pool.

How exactly was a spa pool going to be used for charitable purposes?

Well, it...

had the opportunity to offer rehabilitation sessions for elderly people in the area on a once or twice per week basis, said the Ingram Moors as they appealed to the local authority to grant them retrospective planning permission for the building they'd actually built.

As the negative news stories piled up, in 2023, Hannah and her husband decided they should do an interview.

They turned to the broadcaster Piers Morgan.

It was his donation that had kick-started the initial fundraising drive in the first lockdown.

He had defended them staunchly against the online trolls after Tom's death.

But when they appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, they soon discovered that Morgan wasn't going to pull his punches.

It's very hard to argue that you need a spa pull to pay tribute to your father.

Morgan turned to the mysterious question of the £800,000.

Where exactly had that come from?

The Ingram Moors tried to be vague.

Morgan kept pushing.

This is a really unfair line of questioning, said Hannah.

She demanded that the cameras be turned off.

When the cameras came back on again, Morgan had evidently persuaded them to answer.

Most of the money had come from the book deal.

Tom's autobiography, Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day, had become a bestseller.

But shouldn't some of that money have gone to the charity?

asked Morgan.

No, said Hannah.

It was my father's book.

He wrote it.

He was very very clear about that.

The regulator, the Charity Commission, published its investigation report in 2024.

Among other things, they considered the question of Tom's book.

Remember what he'd written in the prologue.

With the offer to write this memoir, I've also been given the chance to raise even more money for the charitable foundation now established in my name.

Emails from the Time showed that the publishers expected some cash to go to the charity, and there was a press release too, published in support of the Captain Tom Foundation.

The Ingram Moores argued that publication of Tom's autobiography did support the foundation, in the sense that it was prominently mentioned in news coverage of the book's launch.

That amounted to thousands of pounds worth of free advertising, promotion, and media space.

The Charity Commission didn't buy it.

Their report says the inquiry formally wrote to Mr.

and Mrs.

Ingram Moore to provide them with an opportunity to rectify matters by making a donation to the charity.

They declined to do so.

The inquiry looked at the gin

and the spa and the deal with the media company.

It found that there had been repeated instances of a blurring of boundaries between private and charitable interests and repeated instances of misconduct and or mismanagement on the part of Hannah and her husband.

The Ingram Moors had damaged public trust and confidence in charities generally.

The broadcaster Piers Morgan tweeted his response to the report.

Shameful.

The singer Michael Ball recalled how incredibly proud he'd been of his duet with Captain Tom and added, To see it twisted, really, it's a real shame.

It's easy to criticise Hannah Ingram Moore.

Too easy.

I want to suggest another villain of this story.

You

and me and everyone who's ever donated to a charity without pausing to ask what evidence exists that the charity is effective and well run.

Just think think back to April 2020, when the British public were pledging millions upon millions of pounds inspired by the sight of an elderly veteran hobbling up and down his own garden.

What did most of us know about how the network of NHS charities would use the money?

Not much.

And yet we gave anyway.

Because giving felt good.

No harm done, you might say.

In this case, the charities probably use the money well.

But the problem is the culture it creates.

We give money to get a warm glow and don't give much thought to how the money will be spent.

Later, when the fundraising effort moved to the brand new Captain Tom Foundation, what did we know about how this foundation would be run?

Nothing.

Yet, some people gave anyway, because giving felt good.

In his book, Doing Good Better, the philosopher Will McCaskill points out that the charity world often lacks effective feedback mechanisms.

Invest in a bad company and you lose money, but give money to a bad charity and you probably won't hear about its failings.

Which may explain why Hannah Ingram Moore didn't see a problem with her plans.

Bad charities cruise on goodwill all the time.

That said, there's not usually as much goodwill as there was for Captain Tom, and charities aren't usually quite as bad as the Captain Tom Foundation was.

We can blame Hannah Ingram Moore, of course, for giving in to the temptation to blur the boundaries between private and charitable interests.

But if donors routinely did as much due diligence on charities as investors do on companies, that temptation might never have existed.

The Captain Tom Foundation shut up shop.

The Charity Commission disqualified Hannah and her husband from running or being a trustee of any charity.

But the Ingram Moors had one last ignominy to suffer.

They'd appealed to the local authority for retrospective planning permission for their spa building.

The planners said no.

it would have to be demolished.

The media once again converged on the Ingram Moore's house with their cameras.

This time to film an excavator knocking down a spa.

In the garden where Tom Moore had once inspired a nation, now lay a pile of rubble.

Sometimes the metaphors write themselves.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHarford.com

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Vines and Ryan Dilley.

It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.

Thanks also to Barry Wise, who provided the pieces on piano for this episode.

Ben Nadaf Haffrey edited the scripts.

The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrah, Sarah Jupp, Masaya Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kiera Posey and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.

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