HE made international headlines with more than 80,000 shrouded figures starkly depicting the human sacrifice of the First World War.

Now, after working 15 hours a day seven days a week for over three years on a massive project to commemorate British and Allied servicemen killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and raising £53,000 for a services charity, Washford artist and sculptor Rob Heard has been awarded an MBE in the New Year’s Honours – and has not yet got over his surprise.

From his remote tree-shrouded studio at Bardon, where he worked alone on his mammoth project of binding every figure in a hand-stitched calico shroud, Rob said: “I certainly wasn’t expecting anything like that – it came totally out of the blue.

“It’s a huge honour. I don’t know if I deserve it but the shrouds do. There were also so many people who did so much to make the project possible and the response it got was far beyond anything I had expected.”

Rob was remembering the massive response to his feat of creating more than 80,000 foot-high figures which were visited by 200,000-plus people when they were put on display in Exeter and at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London as part of the nation’s Armistice Day centenary tribute to the million killed in the Somme campaign.

In London they covered the equivalent of two football pitches. They were visited by the Princess Royal and a video of the work was viewed 14 million times.

The figures were delivered in four articulated trucks and put in place by scores of servicemen and women.

For the full story see this week’s West Somerset Free Press.