AFTER five years of campaigning, a statute of Stan Hollis, the only man to win a Victoria Cross on D-Day, has been unveiled in his home town of Middlesbrough. Chris Webber witnessed the pride and passion.

"HE saved my life, Stanley Hollis, more or less," the old soldier smiles, explaining that Hollis was his hero. "I had to come...I was always going to come."

That soldier is Charlie Hill. He has travelled from Sheffield, aged 90, to stand in the cold and wet at the new £150,000 statue outside Middlesbrough's Dorman Museum and pay his respects to the proud Green Howard that was Stanley Elton Hollis, VC, a Middlesbrough lad born in Archibald Street.

Others have come from further afield. There's a mayor from Crepon in Normandy, where Company Sergeant Major Hollis saved two comrades trapped by enemy fire, and even a Norwegian Honorary Consul, here in recognition of the links between Norway and the former Green Howards regiment.

And, of course, there's many other great and good here: Middlesbrough's elected mayor Dave Budd, standard bearers, representatives of the Green Howards and their successors, The Yorkshire Regiment, the Vice Lord Lieutenant of North Yorkshire, Peter Scrope representing the Queen.

But there's ordinary people too, the bulk of the 500-strong crowd. Stood in respectful silence is also a group of leather-wearing bikers; one middle-aged but still sporting a Mohican hair cut. Across Linthorpe Road a Muslim woman stops her two children and makes them stand and watch. There's young mums with buggies, teenage lads. All here to honour this tough man, a soldier who served the entire war and was wounded so often his comrades in the 6th Battalion called him, 'the man they couldn't kill'.

The respect for CSM Hollis is almost palpable: the minute's silence is impeccably observed; the Last Post played. But it is the obvious pride felt by his family that is most moving.

It is Stan Hollis's granddaughter, Mandy Hart, who reads the VC citation, a citation that was enough for Hollis to be awarded the country's most prestigious honour twice over. The crowd are again hushed as Mrs Hart tells how her grandfather single-handedly charged a pill box with his Sten gun on Gold Beach, how later that same day he saved two comrades who were trapped by enemy fire at Crepon, a small community further inland.

The man who campaigned for five years to have this statue of Hollis showing him larger than life, gun in hand in the heat of the action, also has a chance to speak.

Retired businessman Brian Bage, of Guisborough, knew CSM Hollis in the 1960s. "He was a man's man," he says. "But he saved a lot of men's lives. He was a soldier's soldier."

Later he explains that the memorial is "not to glorify war," but to "honour leadership and bravery."

The national anthem is played, the standard bearers march led by the drummers of the 2nd Battalion Yorkshire Regiment and the ceremony is over.

The crowd mill around, photographs taken of the Brian Alabaster-sculpted statue. Stood by it is Charlie Hill, a 19-year-old comrade of Hollis that day on June 6, 1944, D-Day. He had never fired a gun before but his Company Sergeant Major, Stan Hollis, gave him courage and twice saved him in the arduous fighting days that lay ahead.

Once by stopping him from touching a booby trapped German corpse and another by firing down German soldiers who were trying to kill him and another soldier. "He was a great man," says Mr Hill, simply.

Nearby is Brian Hollis, Stan's son, now in his 80s. For all the talk of father the great warrior, Mr Hollis has a different memory of his dad, who died in 1972. "He was quiet man," he says. "He wouldn't have put himself forward for this, but would have come for the good of the regiment. But really he didn't talk about war. He loved his family, he was a family man first."