Kate Chisholm

Face time | 14 September 2017

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Plus: the secret to being a great gymnast</span></p>

issue 16 September 2017

The inimitably pukka voice of Jacob Rees-Mogg echoed through Radio 4 on Thursday morning. He was not, though, talking about nappies, nannies or even Brexit; his topic instead was death masks and specifically that made of his father William, the newspaper editor and vice-chairman of the BBC, who died in 2012. Not long after Rees-Mogg had passed from this life, his facial features were immortalised in wax and silicon rubber by Nick Reynolds, godson of Ronnie Biggs and son of Bruce Reynolds (whose names you may recall from the great train robbery of August 1963).

In Death Masks: The Undying Face (produced by Helen Lee), Reynolds talked us through the whole process, from the initial making of an impression of Rees-Mogg’s face with alginate (that horrible pink stuff which dentists use to model your mouth) to layering with bandage strips and plaster of Paris to make the negative. From these basic materials emerges a 3-D image, something solid and tangible, a way of cheating death, of creating a form of immortality.

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