Photography in the Great War by Jason Bate

Author:Jason Bate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Figure 4.1 George Butcher on holiday at Cliftonville, Margate, 1932, photograph by Emily Butcher. Dewhurst family collection. Reproduced by kind permission of the Dewhurst family.

Figure 4.2 George Butcher on holiday at Cliftonville, Margate, 1932, photograph by Emily Butcher. Dewhurst family collection. Reproduced by kind permission of the Dewhurst family.

Butcher underwent seven extensive operations at Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, between October 1920 and September 1921. After admission, he stayed there for four months as his injuries were assessed and two complex procedures performed to rebuild his cheeks using fat graft implants. On 10 December 1920, Butcher was discharged to home and granted twenty-eight days furlough on medical grounds so that he could recover and spend Christmas with his family. In January 1921, he was readmitted as a war pensioner, having been assessed by the Army Board. The following month he underwent two further operations to cover the fat grafts in his cheeks with skin flaps, followed by massage treatments. In May, further plastic operations were performed to realign the downward displacement of his mouth and draw up the soft tissues of his lower lip. Surgeons noted that the results of these procedures were ‘satisfactory’, although, his masticatory disability was described as ‘very severe’. Butcher was discharged to home at the end of May for one month. On his return to hospital in June 1921, his condition had greatly improved, although surgeons described his scarring as very extensive. He spent the next three months at Sidcup having prosthesis measured, cast and fitted. On 3 September 1921, he was discharged on the recommendation that he return periodically for alteration or readjustment of dentures. No further entries exist in the Sidcup medical records.28 Due to the strong anesthetics used in surgery and nasal damage, Butcher suffered from breathing difficulties in later life, and could not eat hard foods for his masticatory disability.

Despite these impairments, Butcher had not considered himself so seriously disabled as to wholly renounce domestic life, presumably thanks to his wife’s caregiving after the war, his war pension as a seriously injured veteran, and resuming his pre-war occupation as a lithographer. A number of factors thus ensured that he was able to live in relative comfort in the postwar world, in contrast with those disabled veterans who had no relatives to care for them, or found themselves unemployed.

Emily’s photographic practice went further than capturing family holidays and became a therapeutic activity that carried traces of participation and a shared burden. The story of a loving wife who coped well despite her husband’s difficulties is recapitulated in the photography as Emily becomes competent at looking after him. Jill Dewhurst, a granddaughter of George and Emily, points out that the couple ‘were married for over fifty years and I believe that one of her main aims in life was to ensure that he was well looked after and lived as normal a life as possible. He was very much a family man, and in later years always interested in what his five grandchildren were up to.

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