Artist makes 70,000 figures in moving tribute to the heroes of the Somme

WITH the ghosts of 70,000 soldiers looking on, one man is working to complete the most moving tribute imaginable in time to mark the centenary of the end of World War One.

For the past five years, and with barely a day off, artist Rob Heard has been diligently hand-sewing shrouds on small plastic figures and tying each one with a ribbon.

By the time he finishes his mammoth task he will have made 72,396 shrouds and completed 1.6million stitches.

The models represent all the officers and men who were slaughtered in the Battle of the Somme and  still remain unaccounted for — but thanks to Rob, they are not forgotten.

This November, to commemorate the 1918 Armistice that ended the war, every one of his 12in shrouds  will be laid out side by side in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, East London. There are so many that they will cover almost an acre of grass.

And from today and over the weekend there will be 1,561 figures laid out at Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire — one to mark every day of World War One.

Rob’s amazing tribute to 72,000 fallen soldiers represents less than a tenth of the 800,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen who lost their lives in the so-called War To End All Wars.

The vast majority of the British casualties lie beneath white headstones — side by side, whatever their rank — in neat military cemeteries dotted across the Western Front in France and Belgium.

But the 72,396 Somme victims commemorated by Rob still lie unburied. The names of all the missing are carved into the towering walls of the Thiepval Memorial, near Albert, in Picardy, northern France.

For more than four months in 1916, in fields around the site of the monument, three million men fought the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest conflict of the whole war.

An astonishing 20,000 lost their lives on the first day of the battle alone. Among the victims who have no known grave are seven holders of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry, as well as the ancestors of some of today’s best-known celebrities.

Rob has never been to see the list of their names at the Thiepval Memorial and has no plans to go. He fears it would all be too emotional for him.

Instead, he stays at home near Watchet in Somerset, where to carry out his memorial project he reads those names from a comprehensive list, set out in alphabetical order in 13 buff-covered books, like phone directories.

He began five years ago with Military Medal winner Private James Aaron, 23, of the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, who died on the first day of the battle. Year after year Rob has carried on working through the list, crossing off each name as he goes.

For every single one of the 72,000 names he has bought a 12in plastic figure, which looks like an Action Man doll. He has begged and borrowed the money to pay for them.

Rob places each figure in a shroud of cream calico cloth that he has painstakingly cut and stitched by hand, then crosses their name off the list.

Working up to 14 hours a day, he produces an average of 200 daily — and with less than six months until the Armistice centenary, he is convinced he will finish them all just in time.

Among the near 60,000 names he has already completed is David Bowie’s grandfather, Private Robert Heywood Jones, who also served with the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.

The 34-year-old father of two was reported missing, presumed dead, in fighting at Beaumont-Hamel on November 18, 1916 — the last day of the Battle of the Somme.

Another name Rob has crossed off the list is Private Frank Nowell, of the West Yorkshire Regiment — great uncle of England and Exeter Chiefs rugby star Jack Nowell. Rob says: “Some of the names are amazing. One of the Heards, which is my name, was Basil George Christmas Heard.”

Walking into the lean-to shed where Rob has stacked 20,000 shrouds from his Somme project, the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

In black and white photographs that line the shed walls, 150 of the missing men keep a ghostly guard over a 17ft-long pile of the plastic “bodies” that completely fill the 8ft-wide shed to chest height.

Imagining each shroud as a man killed in battle graphically illustrates the scale of the carnage — and this is only around a quarter of the number Rob will eventually have produced.

He says: “If there was ever a space that is haunted, it’s this shed. But if you stand here at a quarter past two in the morning then you just know you are doing the right thing by them. When you’ve been in the company of these men for as long as I have, it is a humbling experience.

“For five years I have lived with nothing but the dead. Knowing just something of what every one of them went through, how can you say I’m going to stop because it is too difficult —  I can’t stop.

“Is it mournful? Is it morbid? Not at all. It’s a genuinely positive thing.”

Rob, 52, began his labour of love even before the commemorative display of thousands of ceramic poppies appeared at the Tower of London in 2014 to mark the centenary of the start of the war.

And it all began literally by accident. Rob was a carpenter who created beautiful miniature wooden houses that look as if they belonged in The Lord Of The Rings.

But in October 2012, driving in the narrow lanes near the stunning barn-conversion home he built himself, he was involved in a head-on collision.

Rob says: “I walked away from the crash but I’d lost much of the grip in my hands and was in pain.

“After a lot of surgery I was told I wouldn’t be doing too much physical work again.

“I was in that dark place that a lot of people go to. But it was at the time when the lads were coming back from Afghanistan with their arms and legs missing and I just thought, ‘This is ridiculous. There are a lot of people worse off than you’.

“I got to thinking of these big numbers of the men coming back. For some reason I focused on 19,240, the number killed on the first day of the Somme. I just thought, ‘What does that look like?’ Then I came up with this idea of making model figures.

“To this day I don’t know how or why. One morning I wasn’t doing it and the next morning I was.”

In the spring of 2013 Rob made his first shroud, more than a year before the famous ceramic poppies appeared in public in London.

He has the total support of his wife Karina, 53, and their daughters, Lily, 17, Rose, 15, and 14-year-old Daisy.

Rob says: “When we made the first 500, Lily would hug them all. She loved what we were doing because it’s such a positive thing.”

On July 1, 2016 — the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme’s first day  — Rob laid out all the 19,240 tiny figures he had made in a park in Exeter, to raise money for the military charity SSAFA.

With no advertising whatsoever, word spread fast and 60,000 people turned up — that is more than attended that year’s Radio 1 Big Weekend festival at nearby Powderham Castle.

Rob says: “It was so emotional because the people who came to see the shrouds shed so many tears but the reaction was 100 per cent positive.”