YOUNG York soldier Sam Tudor has defied a tough start in life to come out of military training top of the class.

Trooper Tudor, 20, won an award for being best student out of more than 20 troopers on a five-month Royal Armoured Corps course, which focused on communications and maintaining and operating armoured vehicles. He is now a fully qualified gunner on a Challenger 2 tank.

He has been spending this week at the army recruitment office in Micklegate, giving potential recruits an honest insight into life in today’s regular army, before moving on to Catterick next week with the Royal Dragoon Guards.

His achievements are all the more commendable given the difficulties he experienced in his early life.

The Press reported in 2009 how Sam and his brother and two sisters were taken away from their parents by social workers when he was nine. He was placed with the first of a string of foster carers but was too young at the time to understand what was happening, blaming his foster carers for taking him away from his parents and resenting social workers for their interference in his life, and he ran away from his first foster home.

At 16, he was moved to live with Paul and Viv Kind in York, who have been fostering since 1976 and looked after about 100 children. Sam began to feel relaxed and part of the family, feeling a lot of respect for Paul, who was a semi-retired professor of health economics.

Sam said Paul and Viv ceased being Sam’s parents when he turned 18, but he said he still saw them as his parents and their home as his home, returning there when he was on leave.

He said he was now looking forward to regimental life at Catterick, but had enjoyed speaking to potential recruits calling in to the recruitment office. “I have been encouraging them to join up,” he said. “It’s a good life.”