Ellie Grigsby: the forgotten faces of the Great War

According to Government figures, around 60,500 British men returned from the Great War with facial injuries. This, however, is a conservative figure when considering the figures for France (500,000) and Germany (300,000). Ellie Grigsby wrote her Masters dissertation on this subject, becoming aware that there were no memorials to these men who returned home with disfigured faces, “I looked at how the victims were seen as a spectacle. They did not get the same hero status as amputees or physically healthy survivors, they were lost. I was trying to find them again”.

Ellie raised over £12,000 to commission a memorial at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, where many of these men were treated. The Queen’s Hospital, as it was then called, was the first hospital dedicated to facial injuries and was established in 1917 by Dr. Harold Gillies, the ‘father of plastic surgery’.

Our Research Curator, Rosamund Lily West, will chair the event and there will be opportunity to ask questions after the talk.

The event will start at 18:45. You will be admitted into a waiting room from 18:30. This event does not allow for manual joining on zoom — attendees must join from the link on the online event page (ie. you cannot type in the zoom Meeting ID and password alone, you must join via the link). Please note that this event will be recorded on zoom.

This presentation contains images of facial injuries which some people may find upsetting.