100 year-old WW2 veteran closes NHS fundraiser at £32.7m

World War 2 veteran Captain Tom Moore has now raised over £32.7 million to help the NHS through the coronavirus crisis.

Moore's story has taken the UK by storm as his initially-unassuming plan to raise £1,000 by walking laps of his garden rapidly turned into a multi-million pound fundraiser.

Earlier in the month, Moore announced that he was aiming to walk a hundred lengths of the garden (which is 25m in length) at ten laps a day before he turned 100 years old.

His initial goal to raise £1,000 was surpassed in less than 24 hours, so his family kept raising the bar.

By the time Moore completed his final lap on April 16, his JustGiving page had registered over £14 million in donations – a jump from £13 million earlier in the day, and up from just over £1 million on April 14.

Donations kept coming in, and as the JustGiving page closed on his birthday his final total was at £32.7m.

The celebration was marked with an RAF flypast and birthday greetings from the Queen and prime minister Boris Johnson.

On his page, Moore said he was doing the walk “because our fantastic NHS workers are national heroes”.

The money is being donated to NHS Charities Together – a collective representing, supporting and championing the work of the NHS' official charities.

Upon finishing the challenge, he told the BBC that the total amount raised was "an absolutely fantastic sum of money".

"I never dreamt I would be involved in such an occasion as this," he said at the end of his final lap, adding that he “felt fine”.