Steven Sykes ( artist ) Steven Sykes ( born Steven Barry Sykes ; 30 August 1914 – 22 January 1999 ) was a British stained glass artist , known for his Gethsemane Chapel in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral . He was active in the British desert camouflage unit in the second world war , and was responsible for the dummy railhead at Misheifa , and for the effective camouflage and large - scale military deception in the defence of Tobruk . Early life . Sykes was born in Formby , Lancashire . His father was a family doctor , A . B . Sykes of Ashhurst , Formby . He went to the Oratory School in Caversham , Berkshire and studied stained glass design at the Royal College of Art . He then won a travel scholarship to France and Italy in 1936 . On his return he joined Herbert Hendrie ' s stained glass studio in Edinburgh . Sykes married artist Jean Judd in February 1940 . World War II desert camouflage . Sykes ' s RCA tutor , Barry Hart , who knew Freddie Beddington , founder of the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Farnham Castle , suggested he become a camouflage officer . Richard Buckley , one of the Farnham lecturers , promptly recruited Sykes as an officer in the Royal Engineers . He was posted to France in March 1940 and evacuated from Dunkirk in May . Only then did he go on a camouflage training course at Farnham . Sykes had a difficult start to his next posting , in the Middle East . He was almost killed in a car accident on a steep road to the Horns of Hattin in Palestine . His car was fired on by a French warship as he drove to Sidon ; he noticed tiny flashes blinking on the side of the ship , shortly followed by explosions on the road in front of him . He was violently sick on an aerial reconnaissance flight . And he became very ill with malaria , ending up in hospital in Jerusalem . Sykes quickly realised that camouflage in the desert would need to use different techniques from what he had learnt at Farnham . He described how military units arrived in North Africa " with camouflage nets garnished in greens and browns suited to European landscapes and , as good disciplinarians , they had pegged them out stiffly over the pale sand round their halted vehicles " . The head of the British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate in Egypt , Geoffrey Barkas , described Sykes as " an excellent camouflage officer technically , and one who thinks about camouflage in terms of battle . " Barkas made Sykes the British Army ' s first ever " Grade 2 Camouflage Staff Officer " . Dummy railhead at Misheifa . Sykes ' s first job as Camouflage Staff Officer was to camouflage the " enormous " 70 mile ( 110 km ) long railway line from the sea to the railhead at Misheifa , essential to bring up military " materiel " for Operation Crusader . On timidly entering his first staff meeting , the commander , Brigadier Robertson , memorably asked " Who the hell are you ? " . Sykes replied " Camouflage , sir " . Robertson showed Sykes the plan for the railhead with depot , marshalling yard , sidings , sheds and facilities . " How are you going to hide this lot then ? " , he asked . Sykes suggested a dummy railhead , and was astonished when the brigadier agreed . Later that same day , Sykes proposed a plan to build a 9 mile ( 14 km ) dummy railway ending in a real - looking terminus complete with sidings and buildings . The dummy had two purposes : to divert aerial attacks from the real railhead , and to deceive the enemy into believing that the British attack would not begin until the dummy was completed . Sykes was determined not to make the mistake of the new units with easily - spotted camouflage nets . He asked the Royal Air Force to fly him over the real railhead to see what a mock - up would have to resemble . His plan was to make it good enough to deceive an observer flying at 500 feet ( 150m ) or above , relying on the desert heat haze to make precise observation impossible . Materials were in short supply , so the available wood , just 5000 feet ( 1500m ) of timber , was doubled by laboriously splitting it into two lengthways , by hand . Since Sykes ' s calculations showed there would still not be enough material , he decided to scale the whole railway down to 2 / 3 of life size . The railway wagons were built mainly from palm fronds , which were commonly woven into light hurdles in Egypt at that time . Some of the track was made from flimsy British 4 - gallon petrol cans , hammered flat and then formed into shape over real steel rails . Then Sykes and the Camouflage Unit sat and waited for the dummy installation to be attacked . Barkas remarked " I think that camouflage men must be among the few otherwise sane beings who yearn to be bombed " . Finally on 22 November 1941 , amidst jokes about wooden bombs being dropped on wooden railways , about 9 real bombs were dropped . The camoufleurs over - excitedly let off all 11 flares to simulate fires and explosions caused by the bombing . A captured map showed the enemy had identified the dummy as a genuine railhead . Sykes had succeeded . The author Julian Trevelyan visited Egypt to report back to London on the techniques that the Camouflage Unit were developing . Trevelyan described Sykes as " the most intelligent and sympathetic camouflage officer that I have yet met out here " . The Commander - in - Chief of the Eighth Army , Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie , sent Sykes a signal : In February , after the retreat to Gazala , Sykes met the secretive Dudley Clarke , who he depicted as " a very spruce , senior ( and elderly ) Staff Officer in an immaculate British camel - hair coat . There was an air of mystery about him . " Sykes knew that " Clark " ( sic ) " wielded deceptive powers via wireless messages and agents " . Deception was moving from improvisation to strategic planning . Dummy port at Ras al Hilal . The army was keen to follow up on the success with the dummy railhead , and late in December 1941 Sykes was asked by Brigadier General Staff , John Whitely , how he could protect the ports of Derna , Tobruk and Benghazi from bombing . Stroud suggested building a dummy port apparently suitable for handling large amounts of military " materiel " including tanks . Again , the goal was to distract the enemy from the real ports and to get them to waste effort on attacking the dummy . The plan was approved and named " Operation Belsea " . Sykes chose Ras al Hilal , at the northernmost point of Libyan Cyrenaica . This was where Benito Mussolini had intended to build a magnificent port to welcome Italian settlers to the colony . The dummy installations included oil storage tanks made of wood , thin steel tubing and hessian . A partially destroyed tunnel was made to look as if it was fully restored , using a gigantic " painted cloth " , a canvas painted with a perspective of a working tunnel . The harbour was populated with dummy ships and jetties . By 25 January 1942 the dummy port was ready , and Sykes threw a party to celebrate . While the party was in full swing , an order arrived : Belsea was cancelled , as Rommel was advancing on Benghazi . Sykes destroyed all the plans , and burned or blew up all the dummy installations . Sykes never got the chance to work on anything so large again . He missed out through illness and exhaustion on Operation Bertram , the major deception for the Second Battle of El Alamein : Barkas sent him by flying boat to Baghdad to recuperate , consoling him with promotion to General Staff Officer Grade 2 . In Rick Stroud ' s view , Sykes had made an enormous contribution to British military camouflage . He had , writes Stroud , " helped change the notion that the desert was a hopeless place for camouflage , where the only thing to be done was to disperse vehicles . His deception schemes , especially the dummy railhead , had made the authorities realise that the rock and sand of the desert wasteland was a theatre where the enemy could be deceived by the substitution of the real for the false and vice versa " . These ideas were put to the test by Barkas in Operation Bertram . D - Day camouflage . In the D - Day landings of June 1944 , Sykes camouflaged snipers and made screens to block enemy sight lines , just as he had done at Tobruk . The violent scenes made an impression on him which he sought to recreate in paintings and drawings . Post - war . Sykes taught at the Chelsea School of Art from 1946 to 1979 . His wife Jean taught him pottery , and he became expert in making relief tiles and Picasso - like vases , which he showed at the 1951 Festival of Britain . In 1947 he created a series of neo - Romantic landscape paintings and drawings . He wanted to become known as a war artist , and while he produced a sequence on the D - Day landings , these may have been created after the war . His art came to public notice in 1984 through a " Sunday Times " magazine feature on his D - Day watercolours . In 1989 , Guillaume Gallozzi included Sykes as a " discovery " in an exhibition of British war artists . In 1992 he mounted a group and a solo exhibition for Sykes . Sykes ' s best - known work is the Gethsemane Chapel in Coventry Cathedral . Sykes was invited to contribute to the cathedral by its architect , Basil Spence , who had himself also been a camouflage officer during the war . The figure of the " consciously Byzantine " angel , St Michael , and Jesus ' s disciples asleep at Gethsemane are modelled like his pottery figures in reverse relief , but then cast in concrete . The background is covered in gold leaf and blue tesserae , forming a mosaic . According to Tanya Harrod in The Independent , " The result was dazzling . " He also provided decorations for the Dorchester Hotel , London ; Hammersmith and West London College Library ; and the Pallant House Gallery , Chichester . He left two sons and a daughter .