Steven Barry Sykes (30 August 1914 – 22 January 1999) was a British artist, known for his Gethsemane Chapel in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral.

He won a travel scholarship to France and Italy in 1936 and on his return he joined Herbert Hendrie's stained glass studio in Edinburgh.

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 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".

Materials were in short supply, so the available wood, just 5,000 feet (1,500 m) of timber, was doubled by laboriously splitting it in half lengthways, by hand.

[7] The dummy railway wagons and other vehicles, including tanks, 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.

[9] The Commander-in-Chief of the Eighth Army, Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, sent Sykes a signal:[7] Most SecretTo G 2 Cam: Will you please convey to all those concerned in the construction and maintenance of the Dummy R[ail] H[ead] my congratulations on the success which the scheme has achieved... Neil Ritchie, Lt. Gen. GOC-in-C Eighth Army[10] In February, after the retreat to Gazala, Sykes met the secretive Dudley Clarke, whom he described as "a very spruce, senior (and elderly) Staff Officer in an immaculate British camel-hair coat.

[11] 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.

The dummy installations included oil storage tanks made of wood, thin steel tubing and hessian cloth.

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.

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".

In the D-Day landings of June 1944, Sykes camouflaged snipers and made screens to block enemy sight lines,[1] just as he had done at Tobruk.

[20] In 1965 Sykes co-operated with the architect Gerard Goalen on the re-ordering of Grade II St Gregory the Great in South Ruislip, for which he produced a lintel sculpture.

The scholar of architecture Robert Proctor says: "Goalen commissioned Sykes to make a bold sculptural lintel in bronze over the entrance.

"[21] Proctor goes on to comment that Patrick Reyntiens, who made the stained glass at St Gregory, and Ralph Beyer who carved inscriptions had both worked with Sykes at Coventry.

[23] "The chapel is centered around a powerful sculpture of The Suffering Christ above the altar by British artist Steven Sykes.

[25] In 1968, Sykes produced a large metal sculpture of Christ (Christus Resurrexit) to hang on the sanctuary wall of St Joseph Church, Retford, Nottinghamshire, which was being re-ordered by Gerard Goalen.

Natalie Rose Bradbury notes: "He regularly submitted both drawings and works on paper to the scheme, as well as reliefs and sculptures.