Sussex war veteran: it is 'insane' not to get Covid-19 vaccine

Major Ted Hunt turned 100 on March 23 last year - the same day that Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown.

Major Hunt, who lives in Lancing, has urged people to to keep following coronavirus rules and get a vaccine, as the UK reaches the anniversary of its first lockdown.

Speaking to the PA news agency, he said: “All it needs is a little discipline, have your vaccination because it’s insane not to do it,” he said, telling people “not to gather together because you owe it to the NHS staff who are going to be overworked because of your decision to go with a crowd”.

Having received his own first dose, Major Hunt urged people to get their Covid jabs, saying any hesitancy was “the same as deciding not to look both ways before you cross the road”.

Major Ted Hunt as a young man. Photo: PA Media

The veteran, who commanded landing craft on to Gold Beach in Normandy in June 1944, said he had been “quite content” over the past 12 months and had “plenty to do at home”.

He said: “I’d like to be 102 and if it requires some discipline on my part – OK.”

Being classified as particularly vulnerable due to their advanced age, surviving servicemen from the 1939-1945 conflict have seen their lives restricted more than most during the pandemic.

The Taxi Charity for Military Veterans is among the organisations that has had to negotiate Covid restrictions while trying to support vulnerable ex-servicemen.

Vice president Dick Goodwin said a year of restrictions has had a “serious effect” on veterans and “put a lot of them into a much deeper isolation”.

While many have coped with the support of families, Mr Goodwin said that with some “you just can tell when you’re talking to them on the phone, they’re talking to you but with some of them there’s very little life in their voice”.

“We know some people three floors up in a block of flats, just looking at the four walls,” he added.

“They’re not going out, most of them are in the vulnerable group. They’ve obviously been vaccinated now… you can see that the loneliness must get to them.”

Mr Goodwin said that, when rules have allowed, veterans have been “meeting at their comrades’ funerals” to give them a guard of honour, saluting the hearse as it arrives.

“There’s so many people… they deserve so much more at their funeral. It’s criminal in a way just to sort of say ‘well that’s it you can only have 10 people there’ or whatever,” he said.

Mr Goodwin said the charity helps between 60 to 80 Second World War veterans as well as others who served after the conflict.

He has been maintaining a list to keep track of the charity’s veterans who have passed away, which currently features some 29 names.

Taxi drivers have been helping veterans where they can, keeping in touch, doing shopping on their behalf and taking them to vaccine appointments.

Mr Goodwin said the high profile of fundraising hero Captain Sir Tom Moore had helped ensure people “are still aware that the veterans are still around and they’re still with us” and that “there might be people alone who need a bit of help and a bit of company and a phone call”.

But overall he said: “You don’t hear any word of complaint from the old boys at all”, adding: “It’s that generation, they just get on with it.”