‘Something useful in a National sense’: Percy Hennell’s Surgical and Nationalist Colour Photography, 1940–1948

Abstract

Photographer Percy Hennell (1911–1987) is best known for his colour images of Second World War reconstructive surgery, but he also illustrated the books British Women Go to War (1943) by J. B. Priestley and An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood (1948) by Geoffrey Grigson and John Piper. Seemingly disparate, these three groups of 1940s photographs are united by the devices – specifically British colour, the before-and-after trope and detailed documentation – that showcase British nationalisms and anxieties. Hennell’s more commercial projects help to provide a better understanding of the role of propaganda and nationalism in Second World War surgical imagery.

Keywords:

• colour photography
• plastic surgery
• nationalism
• before-and-after
• Second World War
• propaganda

Between October 1941 and January 1942, the British surgical photographer Percy Hennell (1911–1987) accompanied the plastic surgeon Harold Delf Gillies (1882–1960) on a lecture tour of the Americas.¹ Their stops were wide-ranging: ‘In October they were in Chicago and Houston, in November in Lima, Santiago, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rosario, Rio de Janeiro and San [sic] Paulo, and in December lectured in Toronto and Montreal, Washington and New York City’.² On this tour Gillies, the ‘bald, benevolent, world famous … father of modern plastic surgery’, lectured on the unique advances of British surgery, and Hennell showcased his pioneering British colour photography that documented these advances.³ Newspapers highlighted the role of colour photographs as well as a colour film in Gillies’ presentations: after a series of colour photographs of patients were shown, ‘in a technicolor [sic] talking movie the victims later proudly exhibited their new faces, arms, and bodies’.⁴ This film was presumably Plastic Surgery in Wartime, a government-sponsored piece of propaganda narrated by Gillies and produced by the Realist Film Unit earlier in 1941.⁵ The government also sponsored at least part of Gillies’ tour. According to Gillies’ biographer Reginald Pound, ‘The British Council had committed him to a tough itinerary’, during which Gillies had ‘flown 27,000 miles, given 36 lectures and made an uncounted number of speeches, and performed 16 operations’.⁶

Lecture tours by British plastic surgery’s illustrious figures were meant to advertise to other countries, both visually and orally, the standout nature of individual surgeons, and of British plastic and reconstructive surgery as a whole. Gillies did a lecture tour during the First World War and made a later trip to Boston; these visits ‘left him in no doubt of his status as a personage of the international surgical scene’.⁷ In 1948, Archibald McIndoe (1900–1960), a plastic surgeon who came to prominence in Britain during the Second World War, also carried out a lecture tour in America and Canada that was covered in the press.⁸ Both Elizabeth Haiken and Sander Gilman have noted the ways in which plastic surgeons in the twentieth century cultivated a particular image of themselves and their work that would raise the public and professional estimation of their field.⁹ This tour would have not only publicized British surgery, but the international showings of Hennell’s colour photography may have helped to bolster the reputation of British photography as well, which was lagging behind business-led innovations in Germany and America.¹⁰ Showing British photographers pioneering the uses of colour photography, and British surgeons pioneering the reconstruction of faces, Gillies’ tour with Hennell reflects anxieties about British scientific progress in multiple fields. This plastics and photographic proselytizing was beneficial for Britain on an international scale, and these tours fit into the parameters of British propaganda abroad during the war years. Susan Brewer outlines how British propaganda in the United States worked ‘at the intersection of foreign relations with American politics and culture’.¹¹ This cultural propaganda was present not only in art and films, but, as defined by Philip Taylor, cultural propaganda more broadly was ‘the promotion and dissemination of national aims and achievements in a general rather than specifically economic or political form’.¹² The explicit purpose of Gillies’ and Hennell’s presentations during their 1941–42 lecture tour was to tout British achievement in surgery and clinical photography, but it had the additional purpose of bolstering the status of Britain at war at a time when, initially, America was still teetering between neutrality and entering the conflict.

This article adds to the historiography of the nationalist characteristics of science and medicine, linking surgical or medical progress with national pride. Writing about the first facial transplant recipient, Isabelle Dinoire (1967–2016), historian Fay Bound Alberti states that the patient’s surgery in France in 2005 took place (like the first heart transplant, and many other medical firsts) ‘in a climate of nationalistic pride’.¹³ Art historian Mary Hunter outlines how ‘Scientific and medical advances provided France with strength and power’ in the nineteenth century, and that a medical scientist such as Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) could be considered a ‘national symbol’ in his home country.¹⁴ Surgeons like Gillies – even though he was originally from New Zealand – likewise earned this moniker for Britain in the mid-century, the American press coverage proving his international fame and respect.

British plastic surgery, as framed by British plastic surgeons, was the indisputably world-leading centre of the field. The editor’s notes for the British Association of Plastic Surgery’s 1987 history state that the ‘history of the Association is linked so intimately with that of the specialty that it would be impossible to separate the two’, and that this history with a ‘distinctive British shape’ has had ‘world-wide influence’.¹⁵ Like scientific advancements, photography was an important tool for conveying British narratives of global influence from the nineteenth century onwards. Jennifer Tucker argues that photography helped to visualize the cultural and scientific superiority of British, particularly English, society: ‘Many Victorians argued that science and photography demonstrated the superiority of British civilization’.¹⁶ While the British empire was in its decline in the mid-twentieth century, the practice and messages of plastic surgery photography of this period are tied up in this colonialist visual history of scientific exceptionalism.

Hennell’s accompaniment of the eminent Gillies across the Americas evidences that images were a major component of the trip’s directive. Pound highlights that, even on his earlier lecture tour after the First World War, Gillies travelled ‘with seven hundred lantern slides as part of his luggage’.¹⁷ By 1941, Gillies had been a proponent of clinical photography in Britain for several decades, earning him the position of chairman of the Royal Photographic Society’s Medical Group.¹⁸ Gillies and Hennell had been collaborating since 1940, when Hennell began taking photographs in plastic surgery wards, including Rooksdown House at Park Prewett Hospital in Basingstoke, where Gillies was the head surgeon. The photographs that Hennell and Gillies showed in their lectures depicted patients at several key moments: when they arrived at the hospital with burns and facial injuries, in between steps of surgeries and when they were healing after or between operations. Like the words spoken by Gillies on this lecture tour, these images put forward a particular message about the power of British surgeons and surgery. As will be explored throughout this article, the aesthetic and compositional tools of Hennell’s colour surgical photographs also proved useful for writers and publishers outside the medical realm advertising similarly propagandistic, nationalist narratives.

How did Hennell become a photographer who could communicate these large ideas of British pride and progress, both within surgery and in wider contexts? What was his background before he set out with Gillies to the Americas? Hennell was born in October 1911 to a family of silversmiths, goldbeaters and jewellers.¹⁹ He trained as a sculptor at St Martin’s School of Art but afterwards took up photography.²⁰ During the 1930s, he was employed in a photographic studio on Great Portland Street in London.²¹ In 1938 he got a job as a manager for the Colour Photographic Department of the Metal Box Company, where he practised advertising and documentary photography.²² During the war, the Company shifted from producing canning products to making wartime goods ‘used by every service in every theatre of war’.²³ In this spirit, at the beginning of the war the Chairman of the Metal Box Company told Hennell that he should ‘do something useful in a National sense’ with his colour photography, and Hennell was then seconded to the Medical Research Council to take photographs in surgical wards.²⁴ The Metal Box Company paid Hennell’s salary and for his photographic supplies; public funding of clinical photography in Britain did not commence until it had clearly shown its value during the war.²⁵

By looking at how his images advertise British nationalisms that inadvertently reveal wartime and post-war anxieties around the destruction of histories, society and landscape, this article links Hennell’s three major photographic projects of the 1940s: his plastic surgery photography, his illustrations for J. B. Priestley’s propagandistic British Women Go to War (1943) and his images for Geoffrey Grigson and John Piper’s nostalgic An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood (1948).²⁶ By grouping these three seemingly disparate projects together, the nationalist purpose of Hennell’s surgical imagery, and the way that colour played into this purpose, becomes clearer.

Hennell’s colour is a key component of the nationalisms espoused by these photographs. In An English Farmhouse, Grigson writes that he and his photographer-collaborator Hennell ‘believe that colour photography can be revealing without being chromatically hideous’.²⁷ Grigson’s statement may have been a veiled allusion to Technicolor, which was seen by much of the mid-century British population to be garish and too saturated – and therefore distinctly American. A 1951 publication called Colour Cinematography states that a study of the British public’s attitude towards colour in film revealed that there was ‘a marked antipathy to excessive use of vivid colour – apparently popular in Hollywood – which may be due to a national liking for the restrained and rather sad tones typical of the British sentiment for colour during the last hundred years’.²⁸ Film historian Sarah Street suggests that nationalist ideas and stereotypes may have led to the perception of Technicolor as ‘brasher than it actually was’. Playing on long-established ideas of national difference, British colour was perceived as more tasteful.²⁹ Grigson, Piper and Hennell had the common goal of making photography subtler and more appealing, and therefore perhaps more distinctly British. It is interesting, then, that the Technicolor film Plastic Surgery in Wartime was shown on Gillies’ lecture tour. It is likely that the British Council recognized the national and emotional qualities of colour in film and used Technicolor in this instance to appeal more to American audiences. Brewer asserts that British propagandists looking to target American audiences were careful in studying ‘American opinion’ and choosing ‘methods of dissemination’; they ‘studied American beliefs and attitudes in order to identify themselves with the same values or to take care not to tread on them’.³⁰ It seems that the audience for the Technicolor Plastic Surgery in Wartime was American, and therefore this type of colour could have been used to remain familiar and engaging for American audiences, while Hennell’s more British colour was used both in Britain and on the lecture tour. Reading Hennell’s colour photography in his commercial book projects of the 1940s alongside his surgical photographs changes the way that we can think about this medical work, its purposes and techniques. Like these two publications with more overt messaging goals, Hennell’s surgical photographs were invested in advertising British progress.

Before-and-after nationalism: J. B. Priestley’s British Women Go to War

In How We Are: Photographing Britain from the 1840s to the Present (2007), which accompanied an exhibition at Tate Britain, curator Val Williams connects these three major groups of Hennell’s photographs to show how innovative his colour work was. His surgical images ‘departed altogether from the kind of war photography that had been familiar to the British public’; he used his colour and advertising flair in those photographs and in British Women Go to War to create morale-boosting images.³¹ Williams made a similar point in her short piece ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, which argued that Hennell and John Hinde (1916–1997) used their experience in commercial and advertising photography to bring colour into images that anticipated the British documentary photography of the 1980s and 1990s.³²

Hennell’s forty-nine colour photographs in Priestley’s British Women Go to War had a specific, invigorating message to advertise: that women in Britain, more so than in any other nation, were doing their patriotic duty by working, and that they were fulfilling these duties on the home front or abroad with alacrity and panache.³³ Priestley states in his first sentence that ‘No country engaged in this war has mobilized its women for the war effort more thoroughly and efficiently than Britain has’.³⁴ The morale-boosting purpose of this book is visually furthered by Hennell’s patriotic inclusion of brilliant reds and blues in hospital blankets, skies and colourful steel bars in factories. British Women Go to War was published by Collins but was designed and produced by Adprint Limited London, specialists in publishing commercial colour photography.³⁵

Hennell shot these images for Priestley around the same time that he was working in plastic surgery wards. In this capacity he created many before-and-after photographs, often as part of longer narrative series, that succinctly showed the reparative steps of British plastic surgeons’ medical miracles. In a 1945 address to the Royal Photographic Society, Hennell stated that ‘from the medical point of view’ it was important to see not just ‘a series of photographs, but to see them side by side’.³⁶ In hospital, Hennell primarily took close-up bust portraits of people wounded in the face, but injuries on limbs and torsos also populate his oeuvre. These images guide the viewer through the surgical story of each patient, from the initial burn or wound to the (hopefully) healed visage or body part, months and many operations later. Hennell’s photographs from the surgical ward and those in Priestley’s book crafted visual narratives to communicate, or advertise, similar messages of British resilience. The before-and-after pair, used historically in plastic surgery, proved a particularly canny technique for conveying these messages.³⁷

As in many of the before-and-after pastel drawings of Gillies’ facially wounded patients made by Henry Tonks (1862–1937) during the First World War, the narrative maintained by Hennell’s surgical photography suggests that there is a clear, and relatively easy, path from injury to healing for these patients.³⁸ The protracted time in between each step of the operation, or of each operation itself, or of posing the patient, is elided in the singular moments that the camera can capture. Kate Palmer Albers and Jordan Bear state that the ‘contrasts’ at ‘the heart of the before-and-after device’ are the ‘visible and the unseen, the certainties of proof and the imagined processes of transformation’.³⁹ They also argue that the special power of this photographic trope comes from how ‘the photographs relate both to one another, and, most intriguingly, to a third, generally unseen, event’.⁴⁰ Both in medicine and in morale, Hennell’s photography acts as proof of the transformative nature of British industriousness and progress.

Plate 7 and Plate 8 (Figure 1) in British Women Go to War depict the same woman, ‘BEFORE THE WAR … ’ and ‘ … NOW’. In the ‘before’ image, the woman ‘was a housemaid at a doctor’s in a small country town in Somerset’. At the right, she has become a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the army’s women’s branch. The woman looks down in the staged maid photograph, apparently focusing on a task below her to her right, but out of our view. The action of the woman at war, however, is full of upward momentum, her tools of the trade readily appraisable by the viewer. At the left, the satiny, formal maid’s attire puckers and shines at each curve of her body, highlighting the outfit’s impracticality and superficiality, especially when compared with the matte, rough, cadet green of the A.T.S.’s uniform. The frilly femininity of the maid’s cap has been swapped for a hard helmet suggesting the visual imaginaries of martial values. As in the women-at-war images, and as discussed by Emma Chambers in relation to Tonks’ before-and-after portraits, the sartorial status of the figure is important for the narrative being conveyed.⁴¹ There are examples in Hennell’s surgical images of injured patients in their pyjamas, apparently having been woken up by aerial bombardment and taken directly to the hospital; yet in their photographs after their surgeries, the men sport suits and ties. The pyjama photos show these injured individuals in more vulnerable states, while suits and ties align them with traditional masculine roles associated with waged labour, suggesting that they can easily reintegrate into society. In his text about Plate 7 and Plate 8 (Figure 1), Priestley reflects on how this young woman, like some of her peers, may want to get back to pre-war life after the conflict is over. But this may be impossible: ‘These years in uniform will have changed her’.⁴²

Figure 1. Percy Hennell, Plate 7 and Plate 8 in J. B. Priestley, British Women Go to War (London: Collins Publishers, 1943).

This type of double-page spread is used several other times throughout British Women Go to War. In the discussion of ‘Mrs. C’ the trope is deployed to exhibit that, though they have adapted and changed dramatically, these women workers have not lost their connection to their familial duties (Figure 2). Like the plastic surgery photographs that Hennell displayed on Gillies’ lecture tour, these images show a problem and its solution. Priestley describes these two plates in this manner, stating that these photographs ‘present the problem on an heroic scale, and seem to show how it has been solved on an equally heroic scale’.⁴³ During the day, in a ‘before’ image dominated by greys and blacks, Mrs. C works for the railway, soldering and re-glassing engine lamps. But the ‘after’ photograph alleviates the worry that Mrs. C has relinquished her womanhood for this dirty job. At the end of the day Mrs. C returns to her family of seven children (the youngest not pictured) in a cream-coloured family room decorated with painted ceramic amphoras and black-and-white photographs. Hennell frames Mrs. C as a matriarch, with her smartly dressed children – a young red-headed girl in pink, three of the older boys in suits and one in a military uniform – fanning around her in a supportive and attentive bubble as she points (with a strangely prominent tattooed arm, perhaps a coded marker of class) towards a newspaper. Echoing the caption visible on the newspaper, Priestley references the ‘Stalingrad spirit’ of the ‘heroic British working-class mother’.⁴⁴ As with Hennell’s plastic surgery patients, Mrs. C’s time-consuming act of transformation is not shown. Through the before-and-after trope, the viewer is comforted that the indomitable wartime spirit of British women has the power to convert them from worker to housewife and from maid to military woman, depending on the country’s need.

Figure 2. Percy Hennell, Plate 26 and Plate 27 in J. B. Priestley, British Women Go to War (London: Collins Publishers, 1943).

Similar visual tropes of female transformation can be seen in some of Hennell’s surgical pairs. As the suits and ties of reconstructed men align them post-surgery to traditional masculine roles, sartorial details such as pearls and lipstick can suggest a fashionable and modern femininity. The blue jumper, red lipstick and pale skin in one of Hennell’s surgical pairs once again puts forth the patriotic blue, red and white that Hennell used throughout British Women Go to War (Figure 3 and Figure 4). These two images show a much less graphic injury than many of those that Hennell depicted in the wards and theatres. But the visual change – and the appeal to a regenerating and healing Britain – is still succinct, clear, flattering and impressive to the viewer, just like the changes magicked in the British Women Go to War pairs. In the second image, the patient’s reconstructed forehead no longer catches shadows, the dark circles under her eyes have disappeared and her hair is more neatly curled and arranged. As with several of the British Women Go to War images, here Hennell’s use of colour and the before-and-after convention conveys a forceful narrative about female potential and wartime transformation made possible by specifically British innovation.

Figure 3. Percy Hennell, BAPRAS/HEN/4/20/1, c. 1940–45, courtesy of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons.

Figure 4. Percy Hennell, BAPRAS/HEN/4/20/2, c. 1940–45, courtesy of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons.

However, Priestley’s final section, ‘Glance at Tomorrow’, challenges the status of the ‘after’ images. Priestley asks, ‘What will be the effect of all this activity and all these changes on post-war Britain? Millions of women are doing jobs they never thought of doing before the war … What, then, will happen after the war?’⁴⁵ It was worth posing the question of what would happen after the war, because even though these photographs make the change look certain and permanent, the future of women and work in Britain was still unknown. The seeming ease of Hennell’s pairs belies the transience of wartime change and anxieties about the longer-term impacts of these changes on British society. It would have been impossible for Priestley and Hennell to know that it was generally the case, as delineated by Penny Summerfield, that women’s working lives largely went back to pre-war patterns after the armistice.⁴⁶ Clare Wightman explains that some women’s moves away from working after the war were not only because of culture and politics, but also because the women workers themselves were ‘passive and disinterested [sic]’ about their wartime jobs.⁴⁷ This is not the surface message of Hennell’s photographs.

While overall Hennell’s images here feel optimistic with their bright colours and commercially minded in their staging, there is a temporal complication within the publication that muddles the seemingly simple narrative of the before-and-after trope. As Kris Belden-Adams describes in her nuancing of this photographic construct, these image pairs ‘refer not only to the temporal experiences of the past but also to future-, present-, subjective-, and compounded-tense experiences, among many possibilities’.⁴⁸ Hennell’s advertisements of British female adaptability, paired with Priestley’s writing, unwittingly invite this pondering on the potential future timelines. Likewise, Hennell’s before-and-after work from Britain’s plastic surgery wards both reinforces and contradicts a seemingly straightforward account intended to show British exceptionalism and innovation. The surgical photographs are meant to exhibit the miraculous and almost unbelievably talented hand of the surgeon. But taking facially injured patients as subjects complicates this neat narrative. Because of the coloured prominence of scars and red or pink healing patches of skin, the story of outright British medical might is complicated in the mind of the viewer. The varied hues within Hennell’s photographs, in examples beyond the two images of the unknown woman patient (Figure 3 and Figure 4), show the inconsistent aesthetics of the healing process. These images, particularly the final, ‘healed’ photographs of the patients, were supposed to show British surgeons’ finished products. But Bound Alberti points out, in the context of facial transplants, before-and-after images are ‘necessarily reductive’. Because of the complicated and traumatic vicissitudes of injury and healing, there is often ‘no single before or a conclusive after’.⁴⁹ The uncompromising detail of Hennell’s colour photographs shows that these patients, even though healed, will be perceivably – even if subtly – different from their peers. Their scars, physical and psychological, could prevent them from reintegrating seamlessly into civilian life.⁵⁰

Priestley throws doubt onto the staying power of the ‘after’ images by Hennell; Hennell’s colour in his own photographs do this in the surgical realm. These entangled visual narratives represent insidious anxieties about wartime change. What kind of society would exist after the war? What kind of scars would the conflict leave – both literal and metaphorical – on British people individually and as a whole? These complications allow the viewer to go beyond the positivist wartime message of the simple past and simple ‘after’. As explained by Belden-Adams, narrative pairs instead ‘reveal myriad references to time, as future-anterior, future, subjunctive, narrative, viewer-created, and psychological’, confusing the simple diegesis initially suggested by these works.⁵¹ Surgeons would have wanted to convey the tidy simplicity of Hennell’s image constructions – particularly in propagandistic international lectures. They used colour photography, perhaps mistakenly, to advertise this message. Looking at Hennell’s non-surgical photographs in tandem with his medical imagery helps us to understand the complex story of national progress and healing that he and his collaborators were trying to convey.

Preserving, conserving and documenting: An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood

It was Hennell’s experience of colour photography as a nationalistic and documentary tool – for the Metal Box Company, in plastic surgery wards and for British Women Go to War – that made him the ideal photographer for An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood, edited by artist John Piper and written by Geoffrey Grigson. Hennell’s close crops and colourful attention to detail again subtly encapsulate the wartime and post-war concerns around rebuilding and the disastrous effects of decay or destruction of war or modernity, messages also implicit in Hennell’s surgical and overtly propagandistic works.

An English Farmhouse contains thirty colour photographs by Hennell, taking an elegiac approach to cultural nationalism. Here, there is a focus on vernacular architecture in the English countryside, with a lamentation of disused or abandoned rural buildings being replaced by those that are ‘not natives, of native conception and native material’.⁵² This book emphasizes the importance of history and tradition. To strengthen the perceived distinction of the old farmhouse and English farmsteads, Grigson traces the modest history of a farm, meant to stand in for all similar locales, back to sixth-century Saxon predecessors. Grigson’s book fits into a broader group of publications that cemented the study of country landscape history in academic circles while also encouraging the public’s attention to and interest in the countryside. One key example of this is W. G. Hoskin’s The Making of the English Landscape (1954), which includes colour photographs of settlements, roads, houses and ruins.⁵³ Hoskin’s book bemoaned modern changes to the English landscape and emphasized the need to study the countryside not just at ‘a broad regional or county level’ but also at the level of the small minutiae of these regions and counties: the settlements and parishes.⁵⁴ With Hennell’s photographs, An English Farmhouse takes the consideration of minutiae even further. Grigson’s book and Hennell’s photographs also carry on, professionally, the work of amateur survey photographers that Elizabeth Edwards traces from the late nineteenth century to the First World War in Britain; An English Farmhouse, like the work of amateur photographers who documented the Britain around them, ruminates on themes of ‘place – the very soil of England – fragility, and loss’.⁵⁵

Both Grigson and Piper were associated with the Neo-Romantics (until Grigson disavowed them) and Hennell’s photographs communicated the messages agreed upon by the three of them in this collaborative project.⁵⁶ An element of the Neo-Romantic agenda of the 1940s, captured photographically in An English Farmhouse, was ‘a symbolic conservation of Britain’. Piper’s own artwork was very much in the nostalgic and nationalist vein, with David Mellor stating that his ‘representations of country houses and churches’ were spurred on by the threat of the ‘obliteration of the past from Nazi bombing’.⁵⁷

Hennell’s project with Grigson and Piper was, like his surgical work, involved in the profuse documentation of a domestic entity that required reconstruction – in this case, national heritage and culture rather than British faces and limbs. In the preface of one of his other books, about the Romantic artist Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), Grigson ends with a ‘plea’: ‘that more care should be taken to preserve all the various documents which show how and why English artists lived and painted. A terrible destruction must have gone on in the last hundred years … ’⁵⁸ An English Farmhouse serves this documentary role, alongside projects such as ‘Recording Britain’, the ‘Shell Guides’ and Adprint’s ‘Britain in Pictures’ books, of preserving cultural history. Documentation, history and attention to the national flavour of their disciplines were important to both Neo-Romantics and twentieth-century British plastic surgeons. Plastic surgeon Brian Morgan ends his 2016 history of the archive of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons with, similarly, a plea to Association members to ‘think of the instrument you invented or the photograph at the bottom drawer of your desk and let the archive know!’ This was necessary because ‘Obituaries are rarely written and published now so people who have contributed to the development of our specialty will be forgotten’.⁵⁹ Hennell’s photography served the role of record-keeping for these seemingly disparate groups, then and now, preserving British histories against destruction and decay.

Hennell’s colour photographs in An English Farmhouse develop this conservationist agenda by capturing the specifics of the farmhouse to make the dilapidated environs feel as if they are still softly pulsing with life – bringing vitality to ruins like those that Grigson appreciated in Piper’s paintings.⁶⁰ The lens of the camera became the tool for Grigson, Piper and then the wider audience of this book to view and diagnose the structural (read, bodily) ailments of the English farmhouse and countryside. One image, Plate 30, is provocatively titled ‘The dying barn’ – but it is not quite dead yet. This book dissects each element of the countryside neighbourhood’s ‘body’ as if it is not quite yet a corpse, but it soon will be without our attention. As Grigson states in the preface, the point of the publication is ‘to discover how such buildings were made’ and to see the parts that make up the whole anatomy of the farmhouse and its neighbourhood: ‘one must bring one’s eyes to the unfamiliar view … until one sees the grain and the shape, as well as the total’.⁶¹ Here, Hennell reprises his role as medical photographer to document in coloured detail each fragment of the farm while Grigson writes the nostalgically poetic diagnosis of the reasons for the English farm’s decline. Instead of focusing on a burnt face or a fractured arm, or a tin or label of a canned product, here Hennell homed in on bricks, thatch and wood beams. This was exactly the type of profuse documentation that was practised in twentieth-century British surgical wards, where, according to surgeons themselves, ‘documentation had reached a fine art’ with photographers such as Hennell.⁶² Grigson remarks on the importance of this closely cropped element of his book’s illustrations: ‘We include no wide view of the farm – there have been colour plates enough of typical farmsteads; but bringing the camera close up to a quoin, to a piece of paving, to an elm fence, to a patch of lichen – that may reveal what the normal use of cameras does not incline one, certainly does not train one, to notice’.⁶³

Plate 20 of the book depicts ‘The framework of a decayed barn still firm despite the lack of roof’ (Figure 5). This photograph is meant not only to display the strength of native materials and historic craftsmanship, but also to preserve with an image something that may not exist in a few years. The lush greens of the farm can be seen behind the skeletal remnants of this one relatively tiny corner of the farmstead. But the photograph’s tight crop highlights the importance of the minute. Hennell’s colour photography grasps at the deeply creviced beams, pockmarked with knots and holes. His work documents the most seemingly insignificant details – such as yellowed lichen and initials carved into wood – of the English farmstead.

Figure 5. Percy Hennell, Plate 20 in Geoffrey Grigson, An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood (London: Max Parrish, 1948).

This is a type of nostalgic propaganda. Pairing with Grigson’s text and Piper’s vision, Hennell’s photographs show Britons and others the heritage, history and strength of England’s countryside. As was the case with Gillies’ lecture tour, the purpose of this publication was not only to show something uniquely British, but also to ‘produce outstanding examples of what the colour camera can do’.⁶⁴ The colour that Hennell used was lauded by the surgeons and authors with whom he worked. This was the particularly British colour that helped to propagandize the nation’s medical might in the Americas, and it was the colour that avoided being ‘chromatically hideous’ according to Grigson, allowing for a message about Britain’s history and heritage to be preserved in a particularly British manner for British audiences. Viewing these surgical and nostalgic images alongside the overtly nationalistic photographs from British Women Go to War reveals the aesthetic threads and shared purposes throughout Hennell’s 1940s’ oeuvre.

Conclusion

Williams states that during the 1940s, ‘Colour photography, with its vividness and immediacy, emerged from the spheres of business, commerce and advertising to become a vital tool in the boosting of British morale’ and exhibiting ‘a particular vision of Britishness’.⁶⁵ Hennell’s commercially minded colour photography projects not only boosted British morale, but also communicated and ‘advertised’ nationalist messages. Hennell’s projects with Priestley and with Grigson and Piper are not as far removed from what he was doing within the wartime plastics wards as it may first appear. Hennell’s surgical images proselytized a soft propaganda of Britain’s and British surgeons’ medical achievements; in British Women Go to War he propagandized the national spirit and strength of Britain’s women; and in An English Farmhouse this noble perseverance, and the nostalgic need for preservation and documentation, was applied to the country’s farmsteads. In British Women Go to War and in his surgical images, Hennell used the before-and-after trope to demonstrate progress and change in the modern era; in An English Farmhouse and his surgical photographs, he used tight shots of crumbling or damaged entities to document and preserve physical details of British history. In these projects, Hennell’s photographs hint at the anxieties about the impacts of the war and modernization. Hennell was employed as a documentary photographer: one who could and should show what is there in front of him. And yet these photographs are also advertisements created by a trained commercial artist. Through analysing these two book projects, we can more fully understand the political and advertorial purposes of Hennell’s photography in the realm of Second World War plastic surgery. This throws a sharp light onto the nationalistic goals of surgical photography, making it clear why Hennell’s imagery was perfect for a propagandistic tour of the Americas.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Eilis Boyle and Hannah Lyons for providing feedback on drafts of this article and thank you to the attendees of De Montfort University’s Photographic History Research Centre Annual Conference, June 2021, for listening to and responding to a version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in whole or in part by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number 204770/Z/16/Z]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Notes on contributors

Christine Slobogin

Christine Slobogin is an art historian working within the medical humanities whose research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research, and the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She has been published in Medical Humanities. Forthcoming publications include a chapter on humour and surgical cartoons. She has also recently done curatorial work for both the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Notes

1 For more on Harold Gillies from a surgeon’s perspective: Andrew Bamji, ‘Sir Harold Gillies: surgical pioneer’. For a biographical perspective: Reginald Pound, Gillies, Surgeon Extraordinary. For a discussion of Gillies in the context of Henry Tonks’ surgical pastels: Suzannah Biernoff, ‘Flesh Poems’.

2 A. F. Wallace, ‘The Early History of Clinical Photography for Burns, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery’, 456–7.

3 Russell Landstrom, ‘Plastic Surgery Proves Boon to Persons Injured in Raids’, 9. This is just one of the local newspapers in which this syndicated story ran.

4 Marcia Winn, ‘Eyes Get Credit Once Given to Ears in Flying’, 20.

5 Harold Gillies, narr., Plastic Surgery in Wartime. Rainsford Mowlem, F.R.C.S, ‘Sir Harold Gillies Memorial Lecture’, 251.

6 Pound, Gillies, 148, 153.

7 Ibid., 105.

8 ‘Medicine: The Man Who Makes Faces’, Time. For more on McIndoe see Emily Mayhew, The Guinea Pig Club.

9 Haiken’s monograph focuses on the American context, and Gilman structures his book around reconstruction and plastic surgery of the nose. Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy. Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful.

10 Britain has a history of small firms and slow innovation in photographic production (specifically as related to colour photography), especially when compared with Germany and America. By 1914, the main British photographic firm, Ilford Limited, was losing out in business and innovation to larger German and American firms, namely Agfa / I.G. Farben and Eastman Kodak. Into the 1930s, these non-British firms invested more money into the subtractive colour process like that used by Hennell. D. E. H. Edgerton, ‘Industrial Research in the British Photographic Industry’, 108, 124.

11 Susan A. Brewer, To Win the Peace, 3.

12 Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain, 125. A more obviously cultural propaganda in America during the war years appeared in the travelling ‘Modern British Crafts’ exhibition. Imogen Hart, ‘Craft, War, and Cultural Diplomacy’.

13 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘From Face/Off to the Face Race’, 2.

14 Mary Hunter, The Face of Medicine, 8, 64.

15 Antony F. Wallace, ‘Editor’s Notes’, vi. Another history of this association was published in 2016: A. Roger Green, ed., BAPS to BAPRAS.

16 Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed, 9.

17 Pound, Gillies, 62.

18 Ibid., 78. Mowlem, ‘Sir Harold Gillies Memorial Lecture’, 251.

19 Hennell wrote an article about his family’s business, primarily through a genealogical lens. Percy Hennell, ‘The Hennells Identified’, 260-66.

20 ‘Mr Percy Hennell’, The Times (London).

21 Wallace, ‘The Early History of Clinical Photography’, 454.

22 Val Williams and Susan Bright, How We Are:, 214. Editor’s introduction to Hennell, ‘The Hennells Identified’, 260.

23 Sir Robert Barlow, ‘Metal Box Company’, 10.

24 P. G. Hennell, ‘Colour Photography Applied to War Surgery’, 144. Wallace, ‘The Early History of Clinical Photography’, 456.

25 Wallace, ‘The Early History of Clinical Photography’, 452.

26 Hennell contributed to several other smaller projects during the 1940s and 1950s, mostly having to do with injury and surgery. For example: Atlas of Air-Raid Injuries.

27 Geoffrey Grigson, An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood, 6.

28 Adrian Cornwell-Clyne, Colour Cinematography, 663. Art historian Lynda Nead uses this source to great effect in her discussion of the hazy greys that dominated much of British visual culture in the post-war period. Lynda Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke, 147.

29 Sarah Street, ‘“Colour Consciousness”’, 208.

30 Brewer, To Win the Peace, 4, 6.

31 Val Williams, ‘Marks on the Flesh’, 19-20.

32 Val Williams, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.

33 Priestley was a writer (his play An Inspector Calls (1945) is still taught in British schools) and a social and political commentator. As the latter he was a left-leaning progressive who broadcasted the ‘people’s view’ of the Second World War. Roger Fagge, The Vision of J. B. Priestley, 1–4.

34 J. B. Priestley, British Women Go to War, 7.

35 Adprint also spearheaded the ‘Britain in Pictures’ series for Collins (to which Piper contributed). David Mellor, A Paradise Lost, 45. Eva Neurath, ‘London 1939–1949’, 57–8.

36 Hennell, ‘Colour Photography Applied to War Surgery’, 146.

37 Before-and-after imagery has been used in plastic surgery advertisement and imagery since the nineteenth century to show the physical and psychological transformations of patients. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, 36–42.

38 Emma Chambers questions the full truth of the optimistic transformations shown in Tonks’ pastels. Emma Chambers, ‘Fragmented Identities’, 597–8.

39 Kate Palmer Albers and Jordan Bear, ‘Photography’s Time Zones’, 10.

40 Ibid., 2.

41 Emma Chambers, Henry Tonks, 16.

42 Priestley, British Women Go to War, 27.

43 Ibid., 38.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 54.

46 Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War. Harold Smith makes a similar argument. Harold L. Smith, ‘The Effect of the War on the Status of Women’.

47 Clare Wightman, More than Munitions, 171.

48 Kris Belden-Adams, ‘Beyond “This-Caused-That”’, 177.

49 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘The art of medicine’, 1106.

50 Simon Millar has written about the difficulty that facially wounded Second World War patients had in recovering physically and psychologically in their return to civilian life. Simon Robert Millar, ‘Rooksdown House and the Rooksdown Club’. Facially wounded servicemen treated at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, who were part of the ‘Guinea Pig Club’, knew that the ‘return to Civvy Street’ was ‘a difficult process’. ‘Resettlement’, The Guinea Pig. Many scholars have also written about the difficulty of civilian reintegration of facially wounded servicemen after the First World War, including photography historian Jason Bate. Jason Bate, Photography in the Great War.

51 Belden-Adams, ‘Beyond “This-Caused-That”’, 184.

52 Grigson, An English Farmhouse, 5.

53 W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape.

54 Christopher Taylor, ‘General Introduction’, 9.

55 Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian, 245.

56 It is unclear if An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood was published before or after Grigson attacked the Neo-Romantics in his March 1948 Horizon article. In this piece Grigson commented on the Englishness and attention to ruins in Piper’s art, pitting this against the unredeemable destruction and death of Graham Sutherland’s work. Grigson writes that ‘[Piper] paints a ruined house, not because it is ruined, but because it once was whole; a decaying mansion, not because it is decaying but because it symbolizes a past for which he has nostalgia’. Geoffrey Grigson, ‘Authentic and False in the New “Romanticism”’, 206. Elizabeth Edwards also notes the ‘neoromanticism of the interwar period’ as related to photographs of England’s buildings and landscapes. Edwards, The Camera as Historian, 245.

57 Mellor, A Paradise Lost, 34.

58 Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer xi.

59 Brian Morgan, ‘The BAPRAS Archive’, in Green, ed., BAPS to BAPRAS, 135.

60 Grigson, ‘Authentic and False’, 206.

61 Grigson, An English Farmhouse, 5.

62 Mowlem, ‘Sir Harold Gillies Memorial Lecture’, 251.

63 Grigson, An English Farmhouse, 6.

64 Ibid., book jacket, np.

65 Williams, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, 48, 51.