Interwar, England London Wandsworth, 51 Battalion, 1919

The Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth, was established during the First World War in early 1914. The impact of the mechanised warfare on the battlefields led to gross disfigurement and mutilation of soldiers. It is estimated that 60,500 British soldiers suffered head or eye injuries. Furthermore, 41,000 men had one or more limbs amputated. By 1917 the bed capacity of Wandsworth Hospital expanded from 200 to 2,000 beds.

Under military command, Wandsworth provided medical and surgical treatment for wounded soldiers returning from the War. In 1915 a sculptor, Francis Derwent Wood (1871-1926), joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and initially worked as an orderly. As the magnitude of severely mutilated and disfigured soldiers returning from the trenches increased, Wood mooted the idea to make sculpted masks for servicemen with severe facial injuries. The Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department was established with three sculptors in addition to Wood, a casting specialist and a plaster mold-maker employed as staff. This specialised department soon became known among servicemen as the ‘Tin Noses Shop’.

Wood’s aim was to meticulously re-create the original appearance of the servicemen. Using pre-war photographs and close inspection of the patients’ remaining features, Wood tried to match the contours of the face as well as the skin texture and pigmentation. Crafting custom designed masks from metal was labour intensive work. In a sense, Wood was making portraits – “my work begins where the work of the surgeon is completed… I endeavour by means of the skill I happen to possess as a sculptor to make a man’s face as near as possible to what it looked like before he was wounded.”