Did the captain Tom foundation charity really use the money to build their own spa pool??

[Terryer]

Just reading the paper this morning and see the family of Captain Tom have been ordered to pull down a building in their garden with a spa pool. I think it's a planning issue but the inference is that they used the money raised to build it. Did they really?

I don't know anything about this particular charity.

What I do know about charities in general is that a lot of them are fairly thinly disguised money making machines for their owners.

Exactly this - especially the bit about what happened if anyone dared to sound a note of caution

But then that's the nature of so many social media "campaigns", especially amongst those who have the attention span of a gnat; the excitement of whatever-it-is seems to be enough, and when that one's over they just ,move onto the next, apparently having learned nothing

I didn't give them any money at the time because I find the whole old people/medals/war hero (when they were doing what millions were doing at the time) quite embarrassing, and so didn't pay it any attention, let alone donate.

Now it seems even barmier!

I hope I don't get the thread pulled. Sorry.

Don't be sorry, that's what happens when perfectly ordinary people become deified and made to be some heroic nation uniting figure by their own families, they come under intense scrutiny and not many people's lives are so perfect it can take that.

The whole thing seemed incredibly desperate, exploiting the good fortune of genuinely scared people who saw him as a hero. The poor man was used to gain fame and generate a revenue stream. Terrible for those who genuinely believed in the cause, shameful for those who appear to have misled the public.

I found it all very distasteful from the off, but I knew it was proper dodgy when they took him to Barbados on a plane during Covid! At his age. No-one was doing that type of international travel at the time, let alone with a very vulnerable oldie. I think that Christmas we celebrated outdoors for a short time and most people didn't see their families.

How embarrassing if true, people
really have no shame. I remember talking about it in our family group chat, we all thought the whole affair and attention was pretty bizarre. But it just shows how easily people fall for these types of grifts.

@JogOn123 I donate to war charities for veterans and am proud of my own family who served in the same war (who are dead now). I am not interested in people who wheel out their dads with medals on their chest 70 years later and do laps in the garden. It's disrespectful IMO. Perhaps he didn't feel that, obviously others didn't. The right place for medals and celebrations of heroes is when you are celebrating their heroic achievements, not using it as a blatant tool to make others sympathetic and get money out of them to pay for the NHS which is a state funded healthcare system!

Yes, humans as social cooperative creatures get a dopamine hit when we help others - we seek out this dopamine hit and get rewarded for helping others and cooperating. This is why humanity has succeeded so well as a species. It’s a feature not a bug and nothing to be ashamed of.

Acting selfishly, lying and stealing for your own gain at the expense of others is completely different to this.

My trust did receive some money that was used to motive staff areas and relative rooms.

I didn't give any money to it and quite frankly found the whole thing nauseating. He seemed like a decent enough chap though.

I'm amazed a builder would go against plans though. Don't they check the paperwork to ensure they are themselves legal. If a tree surgeon is ordered to cut a tree by a client and it turns out that it was protected. The tree surgeon is also liable.

Those NHS staff who said they didn’t receive anything. Maybe check with someone at the trust, charities office or someone who deals with donations.

My Trust definitely received money from NHS charities. It was used for improving staff/wellbeing rooms and maybe relative rooms. Obviously it probably wasn’t enough to do every ward or area. But i do have friends at other trusts that received money too.

I’m not sticking up for his family. They obviously contrived onto a money making scheme.

I assumed her husband built it?

I agree - and I work for a charity.

In fact, understanding the self-interested nature of volunteering, fundraising and other acts of altruism is critical to doing it well and safely.

I could spend all day listing the harm done by hugely passionate and motivated volunteers, because they selfishly cast themselves as the hero and don't follow safe process.

This isn't saying charity work is bad or wrong (I can say plenty more about shitty attitudes to decent pay in the sector!). But you can't manage complex organisations and situations well without hacking into the human psychology of self-interested service.

Our next door neighbours are builders. They bought a bungalow on a nearby road, levelled it, and then exceeded the planning permission for the rebuild by a hugely obvious amount. Not a few inches, a few feet in height.

It's been say with hoardings around it for eight months now.

I have a sneaking suspicion that they did the same with their annexe too, but haven't looked into it.

The husband and wife argue about it a lot, but they're Romanian, so I only understand the odd few words where the wife breaks into furious English.

Did the "charity" also pay for that "once in a lifetime" family trip to Barbados that they took him on just before he died? I'm not sure it's medically wise to take someone that old on a long haul flight, but I guess they felt they all needed the holiday, after all that hard work raising the money 🤨. The whole thing was a massive swindle.

From what I can gather, they have managed to set up separate businesses in variations on Captain Toms name and the charity are also investigating this - looks like yes they have continued to try to grift off his name

They have tried to claim the building was office space for the charity yet as far as I am aware, her employment with the charity has been ceased. Even had the audacity to name the charity on the application - the trustees were not aware of said application

The actual size of the building has been their downfall too - the pool extension alone is 20ft x 50ft, meaning the actual overall footprint of the building is around 80ftx50ft - it’s bigger than most houses

Well done to the neighbours for putting in so many complaints!!!!!!

Haven’t read the whole thread so apologies if this has been mentioned, but I heard the family was mates with Carrie Johnson and it was part of their ‘PR’ convenient to bring everyone together, and deflect attention from the government and the fact that they weren’t actually funding the NHS…also probably a good news story to bury bad news 🤷‍♀️

Good god what is that ? Has it been taking out of context perhaps Hannah got a bit over excited!

As a pp has said, I definitely don't think Captain Tom was a victim in this. He appeared of a game show, not afraid of a bit of spotlight.

I heard from somebody who works in tv that the family obtained a super injection or similar to prevent a story about him being published. It was about him, not their charity exploits