This post is another in my “maybe a movie” series. It is a story worthy of a major motion picture. I wish to honor the memories Francis Derwent Wood, Anna Coleman Ladd, and all of the soldiers whose ghastly injuries were the reason for the “Tin Nose Shop”.

Soldiers in World War l were new to the speed of machine guns. They might even pop their head out of a trench, thinking they could dodge a bullet.  An American surgeon, Fred Albee, was quoted in Smithsonian Magazine as saying there were many thousands and thousands of soldiers with disfiguring eye and head injuries as a result. Many would isolate themselves rather than endure protracted reconstruction surgeries. That is where the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department offered some hope. The soldiers knew it as the “Tin Noses Shop”.

Sculptor Francis Derwent Wood joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1915 as an orderly. He was able to persuade the commanding officer of the hospital, Lt. Col. H. Bruce Porter, to support the idea of painted metal masks for the severely disfigured soldiers. Using pre-injury photographs as well as their surviving features, the aim was to meticulously recreate their pre-injury appearance. Wood was quoted as saying that his work began where the work of the surgeon was completed. He wanted to use his artistic ability to restore men’s faces as much as possible to their appearance before being wounded.

The mask making process began with a plaster cast of the face and then a clay or plasticene squeeze would be made to replace missing features such as an eye socket or a cheek. A copper mask was made and then paint and varnish was added to match the pigmentation of the skin. A missing eye might be painted on the reverse of a glass plate. Real hair was not used, but eyebrows were painted on one hair at a time. Very thin strips of foil were used for eyelashes. 

The masks were not terribly comfortable, but concealed the damage and allowed them to walk down the street appearing normal – until they had to remove the mask because it did not allow them to  speak . 

By 1917 Wood’s work became known and with the support of the American Red Cross, American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd created 185 masks in her Paris studio. Anna was born in 1878 in Philadelphia,educated in private schools and in Europe and also studied in America under Charles Grafly.

Very few of the masks have survived. Perhaps they were discarded by the soldiers because they were uncomfortable or maybe they were only worn temporarily between surgeries. Dr. Suzannah Biernoff, of Bierbeck College, suggests that perhaps the masks were kept and buried with the owners, but admitted it will remain a mystery.

BBC News online has a feature on this subject and David Friend reported on it for BBC London in 2014. Anna Coleman Ladd’s papers remain in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

And another post for another day… the related story of the extraordinary  London surgeon, Dr. Harold Gillies. He was a pioneer plastic surgeon renowned for developing some of the world’s first successful skin grafts and plastic surgery techniques to treat soldiers who were left severely disfigured during the war.