Simon Weston(1961–)

Simon Weston was born on 8 August 1961 in the council estate at Nelson on the south side of Caerphilly mountain in Glamorgan, the only son of a small-scale Welsh chimney-sweep family that broke up when he was a small boy. He was schooled at the local Nelson Primary and at the Lewis Boys' Grammar School at Pengam, was working twelve hours a week from twelve at the Caerphilly butcher's shop to pay for his school dinners, and at thirteen took the apprentice form for the Welsh Guards depot at Pirbright in Surrey, joining as a sixteen-year-old recruit in 1977. The Welsh Guards were the youngest of the five household-division Guards regiments and were, in the 1970s, garrisoned at Wellington Barracks in Westminster on royal-ceremonial duty and at Pirbright on training rotation. He spent the four years between sixteen and twenty on the regimental routine: London ceremonial summers (the Trooping of the Colour, the Queen's Birthday parade, palace guard duty), Pirbright training winters, and a brief tour in Berlin with the British Army of the Rhine in 1980.

He was a guardsman of nineteen, just promoted lance-corporal, on 12 May 1982 when the regimental orders came that the Welsh Guards were embarking with the rest of the 5 Brigade for the South Atlantic on the requisitioned Cunard liner *Queen Elizabeth 2*. The Argentine military junta had occupied the Falkland Islands on 2 April; the British task force had sailed on 5 April; the post-Goose Green ground offensive across East Falkland was rolling, by early June, towards the final position at Stanley. The 5 Brigade was the second-wave reinforcement landing at San Carlos Water on 1 June. The Welsh Guards were transferred from the *QE2* to the smaller logistics ship *Sir Galahad* at South Georgia, and on the morning of 8 June 1982 the *Sir Galahad* was lying off Bluff Cove on the south coast of East Falkland in clear weather waiting for the disembarkation order. Three Argentine Air Force A-4 Skyhawks came in over the cove at low altitude shortly after 1:10 in the afternoon and put three five-hundred-pound bombs into the *Sir Galahad*'s tank deck where the Welsh Guards had been waiting. The bombs detonated. The ship caught fire. Forty-eight British servicemen were killed, thirty-two of them Welsh Guards; ninety-seven were burned. Weston was on the tank deck.

The burns ran over forty-six per cent of his body, the worst on his face, the back of his hands, the back of his neck and his upper arms. He was the most-burned survivor of the *Galahad* tank-deck. The fire-rescue from the deck onto the rescue helicopter took thirty minutes; he was transferred through three medical-aid stations to the hospital ship *Uganda* and from there, after three weeks of intensive burn-stabilisation, to the burns unit at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. The reconstruction work over the next decade ran to seventy plastic-surgical and orthopaedic operations under the burns surgeon Dr Charles Beere at Frenchay, and through them he kept the use of his hands and rebuilt enough of the structure of his face for the work of post-army adult life. He came back to Wales in 1985 at twenty-four. The army had medically discharged him in 1984.

He did not, by his own account in the autobiographical *Walking Tall* (1989), have any working plan for the rest of his life when he was discharged. The BBC documentary *Simon's War* in 1983 had put his recovery on the British public's evening news every fortnight through 1982 and 1983, and the post-discharge speaking and charity-fundraising work came to him through the same channel. He became, through the 1980s and 1990s, the public face of British military burn-survivor welfare; he set up the Weston Spirit charity in Liverpool in 1987 with Roger Daltrey of The Who and Bob Geldof, on the working principle that the recovery work he had been through at Frenchay was a model that could be extended to civilian young people struggling with similar life-disruption. The charity ran for twenty years before closing in 2008. He travelled to Buenos Aires in 1991 and met the Argentine pilot of the lead A-4 Skyhawk that had dropped the bomb on the *Sir Galahad*, Carlos Cachón, in a meeting recorded on camera by the BBC documentary *The Bombs and the Boy*; the two have stayed in contact since. He spoke at the Royal British Legion service of remembrance at the Cenotaph in November 1992 and has done so each subsequent year.

He was appointed OBE in the 1992 New Year Honours and CBE in 2016. He has lived in Cardiff with his wife Lucy since 1990 and has three children. He works the lecture circuit (six hundred and fifty paid speaking engagements through the period 1990 to 2020, by his agent's count), serves as a non-executive director of the British Burn Association, holds the Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of South Wales and Honorary Colonel of the 203 Field Hospital. The Weston name in the English-side catalogue is the locative *west-tūn*, the western settlement, scattered across the post-Anglo-Saxon parish maps of England and the Marches; he carries the Welsh-and-English border variant of it as the Welsh Guards burn-survivor whose recovery the British public has watched across forty-three years.