Teenage model-making champion brings Green Howards' wartime exploits to life

Ted is the youngest member of the North Riding Scale Model Club, but is also one of the country’s most promising young model makers.

He built the diorama to commemorate the role of the 6th and 7th Battalion, Green Howards on June 7 1944 – the day after D-Day.

His scene was inspired by CSM Stanley Hollis VC, the only soldier awarded the Victoria Cross on D-Day and a key figure featured in the museum’s D-Day 80th anniversary exhibition last year, and the VC winner is featured within it.

It took him three to four weeks to create the model, he said, and he is very happy with the end result.

Ted’s model was recently exhibited at the prestigious National Scale Model Show in Telford, where he was named Junior National Champion by the International Plastic Modellers’ Society (IPMS), a national organisation with more than 4,000 members across the UK.

The teenager began building Warhammer models at the age of 11 and founded a Warhammer club at his school – Stokesley School - in Year 8.

His growing interest in historical military models led him to recreate scenes from different periods, and he is currently working on British Infantry soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815).

His D-Day diorama is constructed using an imaginative mix of materials. The base is layered cardboard, shaped and built up to create terrain. Soldiers are hand-painted with exceptional precision, right down to CSM Hollis’s rank stripes.

Landscape elements are created from matchsticks, foam, and cotton wool to simulate explosions—proving that great craftsmanship often starts with everyday items.

The North Riding Scale Model Club meets fortnightly and welcomes all ages and abilities, with members working across genres from fantasy to historical subjects.

A spokesman said: “For those inspired by Ted’s work, this is an opportunity to see a junior champion’s artistry up close, and to learn more about a hobby that’s as much about creativity and community as it is about history. The Green Howards Museum pays tribute to over 300 years of regimental history. The regiment was raised in 1688 and amalgamated with The Yorkshire Regiment in 2006.”

The museum is 50 years old and is in the in old Trinity Church in Richmond’s Market Place. Its archives contain 35,000 artefacts and there are 4,500 medals on display in the Medal Room (including 18 Victoria Crosses and George Crosses), as well as the regimental silver and Richmond Town Hall silver.