🇬🇧 Carmela Chillery-Watson

The honour recognised work that had been going on for most of her life. Carmela was four when she was diagnosed with LMNA congenital muscular dystrophy, a rare and progressive muscle-wasting condition, and she began fundraising and campaigning not long afterwards. Muscular Dystrophy UK, for whom she serves as a young ambassador, has said she has helped the charity raise more than £400,000 across roughly twenty-five separate fundraising and awareness campaigns; Guinness World Records, citing her own projects, records a figure of over £36,000 raised directly.

The campaign that made her nationally known was the Wonder Woman Walk in 2020. For a month she covered ten kilometres every day dressed as the comic-book superhero — partly on foot and partly in her wheelchair, according to contemporary coverage. The choice of costume was not incidental. It reframed a daily physical regime, undertaken by a six-year-old with a degenerative condition, as something closer to a public performance of strength, and it gave broadcasters and readers a way into a rare disease that most of them had never heard of.

Her campaigning has not been confined to raising money. She has produced exercise sessions online for other people with muscular dystrophy and similar physical disabilities — the practical, unglamorous part of the work, and arguably the part that reaches the people the diagnosis is loneliest for. She has also been recognised with a Points of Light award for her campaign, and has worked with the Muscle Help Foundation, planning a twenty-four-hour charity walk across five hospitals.

The record itself is a peculiar one, because it is not awarded for being young. British honours are proposed and vetted through a nomination process that is indifferent to the age of the nominee; the youngest-ever figure is a by-product of the committee's judgement that the contribution was substantial enough to merit national recognition regardless. That is what distinguishes it from a record set by attempt. Nobody set out to be the youngest MBE. The award landed on a child because the work had already accumulated.

She was invested at Windsor Castle by the Prince of Wales. Guinness World Records included her in its International Youth Day feature in August 2026, alongside the inventor Gitanjali Rao and the naturalist Dara McAnulty, under the heading of young people who have changed the world — a grouping that captures the point reasonably well. What Carmela's honour recorded was not precocious talent in a competitive field, but sustained public service undertaken by someone who was, at the time it started, six years old.