Simon Weston(1961–)

Simon Weston was born on 8 August 1961 on the council estate at Nelson, on the south side of Caerphilly mountain in Glamorgan. He was working to pay for his school dinners by twelve, took the apprentice form for the Welsh Guards at thirteen, and joined as a sixteen-year-old recruit in 1977. He spent his late teens on the regiment's routine of London ceremonial duty, Pirbright training and a tour in Berlin.

He was a lance-corporal of twenty when the Welsh Guards embarked for the South Atlantic with 5 Brigade after the Argentine occupation of the Falkland Islands. On 8 June 1982 the logistics ship Sir Galahad was lying off Bluff Cove on East Falkland, the Welsh Guards aboard waiting to disembark, when three Argentine Skyhawks bombed her. The ship caught fire. Forty-eight British servicemen were killed; Weston was among the most badly burned of the survivors, with burns over forty-six per cent of his body.

What followed was one of the great recoveries in the British public record. Through more than seventy reconstructive operations at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol over the next decade he kept the use of his hands and rebuilt the structure of his face for the work of the rest of his life. The BBC documentary Simon's War followed the recovery on the nation's evening news through 1982 and 1983, and he came home to Wales in 1985 having decided, in time, to turn what he had been through into work for others.

He became the public face of British military burn-survivor welfare. In 1987 he co-founded the Weston Spirit charity in Liverpool with Roger Daltrey and Bob Geldof, on the principle that the recovery he had been through could be extended as a model to young people facing their own disruption; it ran for twenty years. In 1991 he travelled to Buenos Aires and met Carlos Cachón, the Argentine pilot who had led the attack on the Sir Galahad, an act of reconciliation recorded on camera and sustained as a friendship since.

He was appointed OBE in 1992 and CBE in 2016, holds an honorary doctorate and an honorary colonelcy of 203 Field Hospital, and has lived in Cardiff with his wife Lucy and their three children since 1990, working the lecture circuit and serving British burn-injury and veterans' causes. The Weston name, the locative west-tūn or western settlement scattered across the parish maps of England and the Marches, carries its border variant in him as the Welsh Guards survivor whose recovery and service the British public has followed for over forty years.