the times | Saturday June 11 2022 saturday review 17
bodied limbs. Great lists of the depth and
ingenuity of human cruelty get her fired
up. On the Western Front, she writes, you
could be melted by a flame-thrower,
deformed by chemical weapons, punc-
tured by machineguns, blown up by artil-
lery, burnt inside a tank, or bayonetted or
bludgeoned with a hobnail-studded trun-
cheon called a “trench club”. Before the
war was over 280,000 men from Britain,
France and Germany would suffer some
form of facial trauma.
“Europe’s military technology had wildly
surpassed its medical capabilities,” she
summarises. Neither had public sympathy
caught up with the pace of mutilation; as a
contemporary reporter for the Daily Mail
put it, a “shattered arm excites our pity, an
absent leg arouses our compassion, but a
face ravaged by shrapnel... cannot fail to
arouse a certain amount of repulsion”.
Robbed of their identities and shunned
by civilians, these “broken gargoyles” were
known as the “loneliest of Tommies”. In
the book’s most devastating story, a corpo-
ral who no longer feels worthy of love due
to his disfigurement cuts off his engage-
ment to his childhood sweetheart, pre-
tending he has had an affair. “It wouldn’t
be fair to let a girl like Molly be tied to a
miserable wreck like me,” he said. “This
way she will never know.”
The Facemaker hits its stride when it is
explaining Gillies’ surgical methods. He
would cut “flaps” of healthy tissue from a
patient’s face (or elsewhere), stretch them
over cartilage, then cut the other side and
sew them up to make a new nose. The
relentless stream of clients gave him thewar torn Harold Gillies used plastic surgery to reconstruct the faces of men wounded on the Western FrontThen there are the people, like our
Glaswegian singer, who are made sick by
smoking, drinking, eating and drug taking.
McGarvey insists that we empathise with
this suffering even if it is technically self-
inflicted. He reports on the reply one
patient gave when pressed by his GP to
live more soberly: “My life’s rubbish. I
know if I did all these things I’d live longer,
but I really don’t want to live a longer rub-
bish life.”
You can understand his perspective, and
it’s one that McGarvey is desperate to
impress on his readers. Unlike Orwell,
who at times wrote coldly or even cruelly
of his interlocutors, McGarvey feels a
fierce kind of love for the people he writes
of — his people.
This love and loyalty sometimes makes
McGarvey incapable of seeing any fault
in them, even when they do bad things,
invariably to other poor people. And his
vision of society seems to contain just two
classes of people — the poor and the rich
— whereas any pollster will tell you that it
is the working and lower-middle classes
who are most likely to support punitive
measures directed at the underclass, even
if (as McGarvey persuasively argues) it is
the upper class who ultimately benefit
from such policies.
Yet I cannot fault McGarvey for his
clarity and compassion. He ends by de-
manding of people in power an answer to
a question that rang in my ears long after
I’d put the book down: “When it comes to
social inequality in Britain, what if poor
people aren’t the problem?”
Dr Scroggie, saviour of soldiers’ faces
P
rivate Percy Clare would later call
it a “Blighty one”, a wound so
grievous it demanded a one-way
trip back to Britain for special
treatment. At the Battle of Cam-
brai on November 20, 1917, a bullet tore
through both of his cheeks, leaving him
unable to scream in pain.
Conveyed by stretcher to a field ambu-
lance, then by hospital ship across the
Channel, Clare finally reached the recent-
ly established Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup,
Kent, where he met a slender, droopy-eyed
surgeon who would restore his features
and his spirit. Harold Gillies surveyed the
ravaged soldier and, with an Antipodean
lilt, offered Clare the same reassurance he
had given countless others: “Don’t worry,
sonny. You’ll be all right and have as good
a face as most of us before we’re finished
with you.”
Gillies, memorably fictionalised by Pat
Barker in her novel Toby’s Room as an “odd
chap” who called his patients “honey” and
looked “a bit like a bloodhound”, was a
Cambridge-educated New Zealander, an
outstanding golfer, a keen practical
joker and the father of modern plastic
surgery. In 1913 he was bandaging the
buttocks of a ballerina who sat on a pair of
scissors; two years later he was supervising
surgery in the Belgian Field Hospital,
uncomfortably close to the firing line of
the Western Front.
In late 1915, with the First World War
mutilating men in their thousands, Gillies
convinced the British Army of the need for
a dedicated hospital for face and jaw
wounds. He then ran that hospital — first
in Aldershot, Hampshire, and later in Sid-
cup — with tirelessness, compassion and
an insistence on collaboration. By the end
of the war the Queen’s Hospital was a hive
of surgical innovation. It could accommo-
date more than 600 patients and was
staffed by doctors, nurses, dentists and art-
ists from around the Anglosphere. Nowa-
days it is Gillies’ cousin, Archie McIndoe,
who is more widely remembered for
treating burnt pilots during the Battle of
Britain, but McIndoe was reusing and
expanding on the techniques Gillies had
pioneered decades earlier.
The Facemaker is the medical historian
Lindsey Fitzharris’s attempt to correct this
imbalance of collective memory and
chronicle Gillies’ advances in the “strange
new art” of plastic surgery. The cover is
a striking collage of Eugène Burnand’s
photorealistic portraits of the Great War’s
participants sliced up and recombined into
something raw and abstract. The author,
too, is in the business of collage: this is not
a comprehensive biography of Gillies, but
a charcuterie of the grisliest, meatiest
stories from his operating table. With rich,
glossy strokes The Facemaker restores a
sense of immediacy to the daily struggles
facing Gillies and his colleagues as they
improvised under constant pressure.
Fitzharris wrote The Butchering Art, a
gruesome history of the Victorian surgeon
Joseph Lister, and this is another boister-
ous volume of blood, bacteria and disem-ALAMYThe most disfigured
victims of the
trenches turned to a
pioneering surgeon,
says James Riding
ing his stomach. The case was going swim-
mingly until Beloff’s opponent, the wily
George Carman QC, produced a video
that apparently showed Taylforth at a
party enthusiastically simulating the fella-
tion of a beer bottle while proclaiming: “I
give good head.”
That was enough to sink the morale of
any advocate, but Beloff battled on, telling
the jury the video was proof of nothing
more than “Rabelaisian humour”. In his
closing speech he deployed a syllogism
that was perhaps better left unsaid: “All
men who want sex open their trousers. But
not all men who open their trousers want
sex.” It is an insight into the breakneck
speed of Beloff’s life that by the time the
jury returned to find against his client he
was already in Hong Kong on another case.
Beloff emerges as a genuinely likeable
narrator, far removed from the stereotype
of the pompous silk. His one enemy seems
to be the unforgiving minute, and even if,
finally, that battle will be lost, Beloff’s fight
against it has been more heroic than most.
Thomas Grant is the author of Court
Number One: The Old Bailey Trials
That Defined Modern Britain
Shunned by
civilians,
these ‘broken
gargoyles’
were known
as the
‘loneliest of
Tommies’
chance to invent the “tube pedicle”: rolling
a flap of scalpeled skin into an elephant
trunk-like appendage to reduce chances of
infection as it was transplanted across the
body to the desired site like a fleshy Slinky.
Although the fixation on gritty minutiae
is the book’s best characteristic, it leaves
the narrative open to tangents. Several
pages are devoted to retellings of Franz
Ferdinand’s assassination and the Battle of
Jutland, which are enjoyable but extrane-
ous. And why did we need to know that
Franz Ferdinand’s car was “a Graf & Stift
Double Phantom convertible”? Fitzharris
struggles to remove her close-up lens
when a wide-angle would be preferable.
Certainly, however, The Facemaker en-
riches our impression of Gillies. Even for
someone who traded in reinvention he
emerges as a man of amazing plasticity,
using his mischievous alter ego “Dr Scrog-
gie” (presumably) to compartmentalise
what could be harrowing work. At times it
could have been easy to succumb to a
sense of futility given the demoralising
pressure to send patched-up men back
into the meat grinder of the trenches. In
his half-novel, half-poem In Parenthesis
David Jones gives us the utterly disen-
chanted view, revelling in cynicism: “Give
them glass eyes to see/ and synthetic spare
parts to walk... without anyone feeling
awkward and O, O, O, it’s a lovely war.. .”
Gillies, however, persisted. When
wounded soldiers began arriving at his
hospital in their droves as the Battle of the
Somme began, he said to himself: “Let
us roll up our sleeves, for the work really
begins now.”The Facemaker
One Surgeon’s Battle to
Mend the Disfigured
Soldiers of World War I
by Lindsey FitzharrisAllen Lane, 336pp; £20JOHN LAWRENCE; PA IMAGES/ALAMYwill to power Left: Michael Beloff at
Trinity College, Oxford, in 2002. Above:
Gillian Taylforth and her boyfriend
Geoffrey Knights leaving the High
Court during her 1994 libel case