The Tin Nose Shop: a BBC Radio 2 Book Club Recommended Read

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In 1932 she was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor — the highest French decoration and among the most famous in the world. But by 1920, the American Red Cross could no longer fund her studio, and it closed despite each mask only lasting a few years. A handful of these photographs record the laborious crafting of facial prosthetics undertaken by the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, who had persuaded the commanding officer of the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth to let him make bespoke masks for severely disfigured servicemen. First used on the battlefields of WWI, machine guns, with their rapid fire and long range, were positively deadly, killing or wounding roughly 60,000 British soldiers at the Battle of the Somme in just one day. While some masks were full-face, most covered just those areas that were damaged — perhaps a chin and one cheek, or a nose and an eye.

After a soldier had recuperated from his initial injury and what were often multiple surgeries to reconstruct his face, plaster casts were made of the face, from which clay or plasticine casts were then made that formed the basis of each mask. After all, this was a time when the most advanced cosmetic surgical procedure was the repair of a cleft lip.HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” character Richard Harrow portrayed one of the war veterans who came home with “broken faces. Its director, Anna Coleman Ladd, had established a name for herself as a sculptor before the war, with portrait commissions from society figures, including prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. She is currently working on a history of imperfection, tracing connections between early twentieth-century plastic surgery and psychotherapy, changing understandings of disability, and contemporary discussions of self-care and authenticity. It was painstaking detailed and painted to match the soldier’s skin color, often while the man was wearing the mask, so the tone would work in sunny and cloudy weather, even capturing the bluish tinge of a man’s freshly-shaved cheeks.

Each plate was effectively a part-portrait of the sitter, meticulously brought to the verge of life. Ladd wrote of one of her first patients, “He had worn his mask constantly and was still wearing it in spite of the fact it was very battered and looked awful. One wall of Ladd’s studio was decorated with rows of plaster casts; finished plates were arranged on a makeshift tablecloth with a vase of lilies. Soldiers with no experience in trench warfare popped their heads above the trenches, thinking they could duck back quickly enough to avoid the hail of machine gun fire. Suzannah Biernoff is a Reader in Visual Culture in the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.Nicholls and Wood were most likely unaware of this longer history of facial repair, but they would have been attuned to the stigma of the missing or sunken nose associated with syphilis. One of them takes the cigarette from his mouth, reaches behind his ear and, with a smile, removes his chin. But her real fame came later in life through a much more gruesome — but compassionate — form of art. Henry Tonks was a surgeon before his success as an artist and instructor at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and his pastel studies of plastic surgeon Harold Gillies’ patients before and after reconstructive surgery lie somewhere between medical illustration and portraiture.

The 16th-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré tells the story of a young man whose silver nose is a source of hilarity among his friends. In late 1917, Anna Coleman Ladd met Francis Derwent Wood, a British sculptor and founder of the 3rd London General Hospital’s Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department.

Wood and his colleagues would painstakingly recreate the patient’s original appearance from remaining features and pre-injury photographs. Suzannah Biernoff looks back at the surgeons and sculptors involved in the experimental work of facial reconstruction. As Official Photographer of Great Britain during World War I, Horace Nicholls was commissioned to make a record of the war at home: the great munitions factories and shipyards, training camps, new recruits and soldiers on leave. Wood’s department was for those patients whose faces remained so irreparably disfigured despite facial surgery they were deemed unsuitable for routine pre- and post-op photographs. Tonks never thought of these intimate drawings as ‘war art’, but they portray the violence of war – and the transformative impact of injury – in a way that still has the power to shock.

And while most prosthetic masks were held in place with wire-rim eyeglasses, thin wire or ribbon could also be used.Facial masks, patches and artificial noses had been made for centuries to cover the disfiguring injuries caused by disease and combat. If the mask included a restoration of the patient’s mouth, Ladd modeled the lips open just enough to allow for a cigarette holder. When we think of The Great War, images of gas masks, barbed wire, trenches and machine guns come to mind. Until his last few scenes, we always saw Harrow wearing an expressionless tin mask molded to his face, painted to match his skin, and held in place with eyeglasses. These strange, exquisite artefacts are an object lesson in how the war-damaged face was understood at the time as a psychological and social wound.