Wandsworth Historian no 102
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Francis Derwent Wood and the Tin Nose Shop
Facial patients at the Third London Generi Hospital in Wandsworth, a First World Wa; "`"serious case" hospital, were some of the most distressing cases in military surgery, writes Pippa Sharp, and yet, owing to the nature of trench warfare, amongst the most commonplace. [1] A man might be shot through the jaw, or have, the tip of his nose blown off. He may have been: lucky to avoid a fatal head shot, but his jaw could be destroyed instead. The ruining of a man's face was a brutal loss of identity and humanity; and one of the medical orderlies at the hospital;; the novelist Ward Muir, was frank when het. described his feelings in his book, The Happy Hospital:
The jagged fragment of a bursting shell wills shear off a nose, an ear, or a part of a jaw, leaving the victim a permanent object ofe repulsion to others, and a grievous burden tot himself. It is not to be wondered at that such( men become the victims of despondency, of melancholia, leading in some cases even toe suicide...
Hideous is the only word for these smashed] faces; the socket with some twisted, moist slit, with a lash or two adhering feebly, which is all that is traceable of the forfeited eye; they skewed mouth which sometimes, in spite of brilliant dentistry contrivances, results from! the loss of a segment of jaw; and worse, far they worst, the incredibly brutalising effects whicha as the consequences of wounds in the nosey ... reach a climax of mournful grotesqueriesi when the nose is missing altogether.[2]]
The artist Francis Derwent Wood arrived as an orderly at the Third London General and within weeks identified an opportunity to utilise his skills as a sculptor. Disturbed by the reactions of relatives to disfigured soldiers and by prospective suicides, he was encouraged by the hospital's commanding officer, Bruce Porter, to;( set up the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Unit in the Plaster Splint Room. Widely known now as the "Tin Nose Shop" this was a frivolous name./
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[image caption: The first coat of plaster is applied to take the mould of the face of a patient who has been blinded in one eye ]
[image caption: Francis Derwent Wood painting the plate to cover the patient's facial injuries.]
for perhaps the most startling and innovative response of any artist to the war.
As Derwent Wood explained in the Lancet, his work began when the surgeon's work was complete. He aimed to make a man's face as near as possible to what it previously had been. Recreating a man's face using electroplated copper would never be possible, but instead he constructed a masked disguise. Making use of recent photographs and helped by his fellow sculptor, Frederick Wilcoxson, and by the engraver, Humphrey Paget, Derwent Wood cast a plaster of Paris impression of the patient's face which was then electroplated to produce a copper mask 1/32 of an inch thick. This was then silvered and painted in enamel paint, which was less likely to chip than oil paint. Eyebrows were painted on and a thin metallic foil used to make eyelashes. This was then fitted around the healed wound and held on using a device which often included spectacles or ribbons wrapped around an ear.
The result was far from perfect given the immobility of the features, a permanently unblinking eye, and the unchanging colour and skin tone of the mask. Nevertheless, Derwent Wood and his team drew facial casualties from other hospitals and inspired the development of other units like the one at Sidcup in Kent run by the dental technician, Archibald Lane. Derwent Wood's unit made over 2000 masks although how long they lasted and what happened to them and their owners is now unknown.
Derwent Wood remained with his unit until the end of the war, although he had lost Frederick Wilcoxson who took a commission in the Royal Field Artillery (RFA) only to return badly wounded in 1917, and Humphrey Paget who joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RVNR).[3] Promoted to captain by 1918 Derwent Wood returned to work as a professional sculptor, and he found commissions through contacts he had made in the Third London General such as the Observer's art critic, Paul Konody, acting
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for Lord Beaverbrook and the Canadian War Museum. He created monuments such as the now famous 'Boy David' memorial to the Machine Gun Corps at Hyde Park Corner. The irony of incorporating two life-size Vickers machine guns, whose damage he had spent much of the war addressing, was probably not lost on him.'
Notes
This is an edited version of a note prepared by the writer for the Chelsea Society Great War Exhibition on behalf of the Chelsea Arts Club, Jun. 2014.
The photographs have been sourced from "The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain", via https://www.scienceopen. com/document/vid/394a77df-eflf-4108-82e0- 3fcbb4c4cdbb.
The Third London General Hospital was based in the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building on Wandsworth Common. For an account of the artistic and cultural significance of the institution during this period see the writer's article 'The Chelsea Artist on the Wandsworth Salient' in WH 98 (2014), pp. 6-11.
2 Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1918).
3 Frederick John Wilcoxson (1888-1940) first joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) before transferring to the RFA. He was treated for shell shock in Jan. 1917 when he caught a direct hit in a trench at Souchez which killed four men around him. The medal and coin designer, Thomas Humphrey Paget (1893-1974), also first joined the RAMC before transferring to the RNVR. A third member of the team was William Bateman Fagan (1881-1935), the architectural sculptor best known for the entrance to ICI House, Millbank which features massive bronze doors and maritime-themed carvings.
4 In the immediate aftermath of the war Derwent Wood achieved some international notoriety as the creator of the shocking and iconic bronze, Canada's Golgotha. Commissioned by Lord Beaverbrook this portrayed an infamous incident on 24 Apr. 1915 when a Canadian sergeant was allegedly nailed with bayonets to a barn door after the second battle of Ypres. Designed for public display two weeks before the start of the peace negotiations in Paris in 1919, it was intended as a shock and warning to politicians not to forget the many atrocities of the war. After outraged German protest and a failure to find sufficient supporting testimony for the incident, the sculpture was withdrawn from public view until 1992.
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