After becoming so emotionally attached to my Masters research, I slipped into the shoes of a historical activist. In 2019, three generations of descendants of a WWI veteran, unveiled the world's first War Memorial dedicated to facially disfigured men. I imagined, designed and managed the project for almost three years, fundraising every penny, from canvassing with leaflets, to delivering talks, to organising fundraiser raffles, working fiercely as an independent. The memorial is inside the cradle of modern plastic surgery, opened during the war, in April of 1917: Queen Mary’s Hospital. The bust, and boots, created by 3-D printing, the helmet, an original brody, donated from The Somme museum in Albert, France. The project attracted support internationally, receiving messages from surgeons in Afghanistan, to people from New Zealand, Australia, Wales, to Kent, Londoners, and messages from America. Just last year, a family flew over 11,000 miles from Auckland, New Zealand, to see the memorial and lay red roses in honour of their grandfather. I am now so proud to say this year will be the 5th anniversary of its existence. The Royal British Legion and local MP in Sidcup as well as the local history society and church organised a service at it the last Remembrance, and told me it will now be included every year in their parades in November moving forward which is just brilliant as the pandemic obviously interrupted the spread of the knowledge of its existence like so many other things around that time. This is without mentioning the parade walk the commemorations tread is the same path the patients from the hospital walked. My family are the only people that maintains and cleans the memorial since its erection, so when I go, step ladder in arm, and find things people have left behind, like ghosts I will never meet, as the seasons change, like remembrance badges, wooden crosses, poppies and flowers, I burst with pride.

I have since delivered talks on the memorial for the Imperial War Museum, (it features on their national database, a department I once managed and volunteered in), the Royal Society of Sculptors, the CRAM conference and the University of Hertfordshire and University of Reading. Last year I was awarded a place on the Oxford and Cambridge University pioneered training and development scheme: SPRINT, designed specifically for female doctorate students and I truly believe the story of the memorial got me in that room. I have had excellent opportunities since like guest editing for Face Equality International’s Blog Content, interviewing novelists and meeting extraordinary people with specialists minds in things like generational trauma, and have treasured every single moment. The memorial proved to be identity defining for me and has boosted my outreach possibilities ten-fold so these men are now being spoken about more and more because of it and I plan to keep on talking about them.

Since the memorial erection, I realised I was far from ‘done’ with the topic and after some years deciding what to do with my life (even considering midwifery!) I decided on pursuing a PhD. For the past 18 months I have been self-funded, juggling 3 jobs alongside the 35 hour week research commitment. I have adored it thus far although it has been demanding. At the over half-way point now of my Doctorate on the psychology of facial disfigurement I have already created a database that has allowed a statistician to draw out averages and percentages that academia has never realised before from a sample of patients with facial wounds and I have conducted interviews with the last living memory of the men, their grandchildren. I have travelled up and down the country to meet grandchildren and where not possible interviewed grandchildren via video-call, e.g a grandaughter living in Philadelphia U.S I found. I spent 5 months last year looking at pension records of facially disfigured veterans at The National Archives and have written a chapter on these soldiers as ‘old-men’ that I understand is the first in academia to do, also. Trawling through boxes of paper work, including coroner's reports on suicides and stress-related deaths, police reports, hand-written letters from strained children and wives, and the veteran's themselves showing brutal honesty and raw emotions war documentaries and films just do not show I was often moved to tears in the archives. My research looking at the the surviving medical files from the war, that has never been questioned or analysed for their authenticity, is something I did exactly, and I believe they are curated versions and the originals were either lost or destroyed. Revealing extraordinary case files from psychiatric patients to suicides, I feel as if I am have overturned something major. I have researched this theory or curated patient files, tracing things like the paper they were printed on, to hand writing matches from surgeons, and more. My PhD has torn its own space and I cannot wait for the world to hear about it. The interviews with grandchildren have been nothing short of a privilege and simply extraordinary human experience revealing more than I ever could have imagined about these men and the legacies they left finding incredible evidence of generational trauma. I have also interviewed Simon Weston CBE in his home as part of my research to try and understand what this does to a human-being, as well as up close conversation with people from the Scar Free Foundation. I am currently writing a chapter on trauma inheritance, psychological legacies and post-memories from this rich oral history and I am sure this will be one of the most if not the enlightening chapter of the entire thing along side the pensions work.

The reason I am on JustGiving today is because I need financial support to continue with my research , to finish this final stretch. The multiple jobs i have been balancing have ceased to exist in unison and so it has brought me to a zone of no-return. I will need to get stuck back into archival research very soon to adhere to the watertight schedule of my research plan and this will mean a need to cover the expensive demands of this life-style, which a Ph.D is, when you are self-funded. From train fares to places like Birmingham and Leeds or Oxford for conferences and specialist archives that I have to go to this year, and regular trips in and out of central London to archives and libraries and universities as well as buying resources like academic books to stationary costs to covering travel expenses when interviewing relatives or academics for peer assisted reading and the general living costs in London as a young woman with a colourful life, is tough. I am a realist, I know if nothing changes in the immediate future with my economic stance the PhD will no longer be viable to continue, so I am desperate, which I will never be able to find the words to choose to describe how heavy my heart is over that. I have dedicated so many years and time of my life to this research and these men, since I was 20 years old, now 29, I have to see it to completion to be able to go on to write a book on these men and continue to teach about these forgotten veterans after acquiring such specialist knowledge and to hopefully carve a space out for myself professionally in War Trauma studies.

I have found ripple effects from a war fought over one hundred years ago, alive in people today; three generations on from these soldiers. We are living in a world where War is still happening, it is still causing facial disfigurement, and much of its impact remains not only undiscovered but miss-understood, and we must lean on other disciplines to get a grasp on it. This research must live-on and be heard.

Thank you for reading my story!