Guinea Pig Club: Archibald McIndoe and the RAF in World War II

By Emily Mayhew, Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Harry

'This book speaks to two of the most diametrically opposed yet mutually supportive aspects of war: the ability to inflict horrific injury and the ability to heal Mayhew is to be commended on an outstanding addition to expanding our knowledge of an area rarely discussed by historians. Her book should be mandatory reading for all defence members (both civilian and military) and on everyone's history shelf. This book is highly recommended.' Airforce MagazineThe history of the Guinea Pig Club, the band of airmen who were seriously burned in aeroplane fires, is a truly inspiring, spine-tingling tale.Plastic surgery was in its infancy before the Second World War. The most rudimentary techniques were only known to a few surgeons worldwide. The Allies were tremendously fortunate in having the maverick surgeon Archibald McIndoe nicknamed the Boss or the Maestro operating at a small hospital in East Grinstead in the south of England. McIndoe constructed a medical infrastructure from scratch.After arguing with his superiors, he set up a revolutionary new treatment regime. Uniquely concerned with the social environment, or holistic care , McIndoe also enlisted the help of the local civilian population. He rightly secured his group of patients dubbed the Guinea Pig Club an honoured place in society as heroes of Britain s war. For the first time official records have been used to explain fully how and why this remarkable relationship developed between the Guinea Pig Club, the RAF and the Home Front.First-person recollections bring to life the heroism of the airmen with incredible clarity.This is a revised and expanded edition with new material, including a foreword by HRH Prince Harry, published to tie in with a major new film expected to be released in late 2018.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781784383220

Emily Mayhew

Dr Emily Mayhew is historian in residence in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. She is the author of the Wounded trilogy: A Heavy Reckoning, The Reconstruction of Warriors, and Wounded: from Battlefield to Blighty which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize in 2014. She is Imperial College Internal Lead on the Paediatric Blast Injury Partnership, and co-edited The Paediatric Blast Injury Field Manual

Book preview

The Guinea Pig Club

The Guinea Pig Club

Archibald McIndoe and the RAF in World War II

Emily Mayhew

Forewords by

HRH The Duke of Edinburgh & HRH Prince Harry

This paperback edition published in 2018 by

Greenhill Books, c/o Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS

www.greenhillbooks.com

and

Oratia Books, Oratia Media Ltd

783 West Coast Road, Oratia, Auckland 0604, New Zealand

www.oratia.co.nz

and

Dundurn Press, Ltd

3 Church Street, Suite 500, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1M2

www.dundurn.com

Copyright © E.R. Mayhew, 2004

Publishing history

First published under the title The Reconstruction of Warriors: Archibald McIndoe, the Royal Air Force and the Guinea Pig Club in hardback by Greenhill Books (2004), and in paperback by Frontline Books (2010). The 2004 hardback and 2010 paperback editions contain a foreword by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh. This 2018 paperback edition has been fully updated with new introductory material and a new foreword by HRH Prince Harry.

ISBN (UK and NZ): 978-1-78438-321-3

ISBN (N. America): 978-1-4597-4345-8 (pbk)

ISBN (N. America): 978-1-4597-4346-5 (pdf)

ISBN (N. America): 978-1-4597-4347-2 (epub)

eISBN:978-1-7843-8322-0

The right of Emily Mayhew to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Dundurn Press, Ltd, acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and Library and Archives Canada.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by HRH Prince Harry

Foreword by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh

Re-Introduction

A Note on McIndoe’s Early Life

Introduction

Chapter One Fire

Chapter Two The Burning Blue

Chapter Three Above All, Alive

Chapter Four The Bombers’ War

Chapter Five Beyond Ward III: Canadians and PoWs

Chapter Six The Trustees of Each Other

Chapter Seven The Privilege of Living

Conclusions

Further Reading and Watching

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Unless otherwise indicated, all cartoons and line drawings are courtesy of The Guinea Pig and were drawn by club member Henry Standen, despite his severely burned hands. All photographs have been supplied by members of the Guinea Pig Club and from the archives of the museum at the Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead.

Plates (Between pages 96 and 113)

McIndoe in theatre, observed by trainee surgeons, orderlies and nurses

Canadian WDs who visited East Grinstead every Sunday

Ronald Humphreyes with nurses, June 1942

Ronald Humphreyes returns to his Spitfire Squadron, August 1942

John and Betty Bubb at the outset of the war

An orderly oversees the saline bath, 1942

The intensity of theatre at East Grinstead

Major David Charters on joining the RAMC in 1938

Theatre nurses outside Ward III

Charters and his medical staff at Bad Soden

The immediate results of reconstructive surgery

Nurse Rosemary Parkes in her Red Cross uniform

Patients and nurses outside the Annex

1944: Party at the Marchwood Park Convalescent Home

Patients and nurses enjoying the summer of 1944 outside Ward III

John Hunter, chief anaesthetist, with patients and nurses

Christmas in Ward III, 1944

McIndoe, in surgical scrubs, carves the 1944 Christmas turkey

McIndoe joins his patients at the Whitehall

Jack Allaway, Bill Foxley, Claude Allen, Ricky Rix and Winston Churchill

Bill Foxley in the second stage of his pedicle graft

William Foxley’s Wedding Day, 28 June 1947

Theatre Sister Dorothy Wagstaff in her office at East Grinstead

Squadron Leader Charles Dutt marries Theatre Sister Dorothy Wagstaff

1952 Reunion pre-dinner group at the Whitehall

Dinner, later that same evening

The 1960 Staff Christmas Party at the Camden Town Marks and Spencer

Bill Foxley, Jimmy Wright and Henry Moore with ‘Reclining Figure’

A reunion of the Canadian Guinea Pigs

Spitfire dedicated to the Club by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight

The Guinea Pig Club Reunion, September 1999

A town’s fitting tribute

The boys who came to East Grinstead from all over the world

Text Figures

Commemorative Guinea Pig Club/CASEVAC baton (courtesy of the CASEVAC Club)

An RAF handbook’s depiction of the dangers posed by fire

The Guinea Pig’s real-life animal counterparts

The Guinea Pig Club membership card

The indomitable ‘spirit of Ward III’

The viewing gallery in the East Grinstead theatre

Air Ministry poster (courtesy of the RAF Museum, Hendon)

Derek Martin shortly before the outbreak of war

Derek Martin at East Grinstead after his crash, aged 21

The impressive results of reconstructive surgery at East Grinstead

Cartoon of McIndoe, Tilley and Hunter

‘Scarring of the Retina’

The media attention surrounding the RAF

The Daily Sketch’s take on the Wings for Victory fundraising drive

Wartime advert for Royal Sovereign pencils

The reintegration of the Guinea Pigs into the local community

Squadron Leader W. Simpson

East Grinstead Hospital Christmas dinner menu, 1944

View of East Grinstead (as seen from Fleet Street)

The dedication of McIndoe and the miracles he performed

Cover of the first Guinea Pig magazine, issued in April 1944

Joe Capka

Cartoon lampooning the ignorance of some members of the public

Re-Introduction

2018

Under skies where, a year earlier, the Battle of Britain had been fought,

A handful of people foregathered in a small hut in the grounds of a small cottage hospital. Some wore the uniform of the Royal Air Force; some wore lounge suits, hastily donned after a morning spent in theatre and ward; and some wore dressing gowns and bandages. The company gathered round a table in the middle of the hut where deft hands removed the cork from a Sherry bottle. Glasses were filled and raised, and as the rays of the midday sun poured through the window of the hut onto that medley of costume, on a June Sunday in the Summer of 1941, a toast was drunk to the first meeting of THE GUINEA PIG CLUB.’

By the time you read this, the Club will have held its last meeting. In the seventy-seven years in between, it established itself as something truly extraordinary in British military and medical history. Its members had become, as their surgeon had asked of them, ‘the trustees of each other’. They learned about their injuries in and beyond the operating theatre, and what those injuries meant as their lives went on and war became peace, through careers, marriages, families and retirement. Alongside their medics, they became experts in their own condition, ensuring that whenever it took place, their treatment was the best it could be. They survived and thrived longer than anyone else with their injuries ever had. Along the way, they taught everyone around them so much. From the Guinea Pig Club that he helped to found, Archibald McIndoe learned to reconstruct eyelids, fingers, ears, lips, noses – plastic surgery is, after all, about repairing the human part of human beings – and he also learned how reconstruct their humanity. In and beyond the operating theatre, he helped them find the means to find their new selves; best done as a group, together. Strength in numbers.

Back in 2004, I wrote this history to understand just how important the Guinea Pig Club was in Britain during the Second World War – not just to its members and their medics, but to the Royal Air Force as an independent service, and to the civilian population on the Home Front as a whole. I haven’t altered the main text that follows because none of that has changed. It is a fascinating and vital part of British history, and it was my privilege to relate it. Just like everyone else who came into contact with the Guinea Pig Club, I learned so much, and I went on to apply that understanding to other wars and the injuries inflicted there. Look at the wounds, I say to my students now, and you’ll understand the war.

What I did not foresee was that the history of the Guinea Pig Club would take on a new, urgent relevance in the 21 st century. Britain once again has a cohort of 700 casualties who have unexpectedly survived some of the very worst injuries ever inflicted in two small but brutal contemporary wars. Their resuscitation was miraculous, and their reconstruction long and on-going. Only they understand what it was to survive in those conditions, and none of them know what lies ahead. Every day they challenge medical limits and, helped by their medics, they have started to become experts in their own recovery. One of the few certainties they have is that when they are together, everything seems better – there is more hope and new determination. Strength in numbers.

So they have decided to found a new Club, and they’re modelling it on the Guinea Pig Club. There wasn’t a historian amongst the company who gathered together back in the summer of 1941 inside a hut in the hospital grounds, but there was one when the idea for the CASEVAC Club was born, on a dull autumn Thursday in a research office in a university engineering department in 2015. So I’ve added that history to this book, not very much because it is early days, but the beginning of a history none the less. Here is what happened.

The research office is in the Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College, London, where I work. I was in the office to interview my colleague, Dave Henson. I had been commissioned to write a book on unexpected survivors from the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Dave is one of them, losing both legs to an IED in 2012. He is also an engineer, working at Imperial to develop models and technology to improve the long-term prospects for those without limbs.

During the interview we had talked about how his injury was inflicted, how his life had been saved, and his long road to rehabilitation. Then we talked about his prospects, and he asked me what I thought might happen to him and his comrades who had also unexpectedly survived but were living with some real challenges from their injuries. I said I wasn’t optimistic; that the long-term consequences of severe casualty were often forgotten or ignored. That veterans had to cope with their new lives on their own, and that those lives were blighted, isolated and shortened. Except in one case. Then I told him about the Guinea Pig Club: 649 unexpected survivors who banded together to support each other through lives no-one thought they would have, by becoming experts in their own, complex condition, and by ensuring no-one forgot about them or abandoned them and that the medical treatment they received was everything it could be. He thought, not for very long, and then he said, ‘So let’s have a new Guinea Pig Club’. No sherry, no sunshine, just the inspiration of an engineer on an ordinary working day.

It helped that Dave is part of the Invictus Games Foundation family – the foundation that ‘uses the power of sport to inspire recovery, support rehabilitation and generate a wider understanding and respect for wounded, injured and sick servicemen and women.’ Dave was the first captain of the UK Invictus Team in the Games played in the Olympic Park in London in 2014, and in every interview he gave at the time (and since) he emphasised the need for everyone to understand that the kind of injuries he and his comrades have suffered are for life. The Invictus Games Foundation is full of people thinking really hard and well about helping wounded and sick veterans with their own recovery – to become masters of their fate – so it was logical to go there and ask what they thought should happen next.

When I started to write this new introduction, I looked back at the exchange of emails with the Foundation discussing the idea of some kind of new Guinea Pig Club. Most of them were from Dominic Reid, the Chief Executive, and they were all instantly positive, offering moral and practical support. The most important thing he did (and there have been many) was to host a meeting in the Foundation office in February 2016. A range of people were invited to talk about the challenges posed by complex casualty and not everything covered that day has turned out to be relevant. But there was one moment I remember in particular, when I was outlining the history of the Guinea Pig Club and what made it special. I talked about the annual reunions, where only Club members could be present, and how they had told me that it was the one weekend a year when they didn’t have to explain to anyone about their injuries, where every single person in the room understood completely what everyone felt at that time in their lives, no exceptions, just them, and that this was very powerful and its effects sustained everyone. After I’d finished, Dave turned to Dominic and me and said, ‘That’s it. I want that. I want to go there, once a year, it will be enough, and we should all have that. That’s it.’ So that’s the moment when it became clear that the new Guinea Pig Club would look like the old Guinea Pig Club and that perhaps whatever questions remained had already been answered.

From then on, things moved quickly. In April, Dominic outlined the concept at a meeting at Kensington Palace, and the Foundation’s support for the new Club was formalised. David Wiseman, Head of Armed Forces programmes at the Royal Foundation, was asked to become involved. David (never Dave) had been wounded in Afghanistan, a fire-fight during a patrol leaving him with a high velocity round retained in his chest that he’ll carry for ever and that reminds him every day what it is to be a casualty. He summoned us back to the Foundation offices and for two hours picked over the details of the history of the Guinea Pig Club, back and forth, the past and the present, building up a picture of what it could be in the future. He uses a flipchart in meetings, big sheets of paper and coloured marker pens to plan with, and one of his pages that afternoon had a long line drawn on it in black with 2016 written at one end. He wasn’t interested in the next five years, he said; he wanted to know what the next ten years – marking a dash on the line – and the next fifteen years – marking another dash on the line further along – and the next twenty-five years would look like. I replied that I could tell him what the next seventy-five years might look like and finally he sat down and said, ‘Good, now how about a name because the New Guinea Pig Club isn’t really working for me.’

Which is how they got to the CASEVAC Club. CAS-EVAC is pronounced ‘Cazzyvack’ and is shorthand for ‘casualty evacuation’, which means that the wounds inflicted in battle were bad enough to require rapid evacuation, usually by Chinook helicopter, for emergency treatment at the field hospital. Just like the Guinea Pig Club, which limited its membership to members of the Air Services with burns injury inflicted during or in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, CASEVAC is limited to service personnel injured in the Iraq and Afghan wars of the 21st century. Exclusivity is focus and focus is key. The injuries inflicted on the members were unlike anything that had been suffered before, and so are their lifetime’s consequences. There will be other wars, and other unexpected survivors, but they won’t be the same, and the Guinea Pig Club worked because it was focused.

The CASEVAC Club has a charter and its members pay dues, just like the Guinea Pig Club. Both charters look similar, particularly in their specification that ‘the Treasurer must be a double leg amputee – to prevent them from running away with the money’. It’s not a charity. It meets its own running costs. It has trustees. It has medical advisors, all of whom have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan and saw the point of wounding from the back of the helicopter or in the field hospital and have remained committed to the recovery of their patients years down the line. CASEVAC is run by its members and – based on seeing what the Guinea Pig Club achieved – its members know the unique value and potential of their membership. They will become experts in their own condition and they will be able put their expertise to use beyond their own lives.

The Commemorative Guinea Pig Club/CASEVAC Silver Baton, commissioned by the CASEVAC Club in the year of its founding, 2017. Made by silversmith Sarah Denny from sterling silver and American black walnut. Photographed by David Young

So CASEVAC doesn’t just replicate the Guinea Pig Club, it is building on their legacy. CASEVAC will be, in the words of David Wiseman, outward facing. In their day, the Guinea Pig Club transformed plastic and reconstructive surgery. Today, CASEVAC has the potential to have a similar impact on medical fields such as trauma and rehabilitation. The members offer a unique opportunity for medics and researchers to study the outcomes for the survivors of complex casualty, so they can both understand what is happening to them together. Not just medics and scientists: CASEVAC members will work with patients who may not have been to war but have been very close to death and who need the kind of unique support from other people who’ve been there too and come back. Everyone will learn.

By the time you read this, the CASEVAC Club will have had its first meeting. Its history will have begun. I hope at some point there will be another history book telling their complete story, and to that historian, here is a good place to start, with the invitation that went to the wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan in August 2017 and said,

‘…We have decided to form the CASEVAC Club. It is an exclusive club. It is for us, by us, to make sure that we have someone who has our back in ten or twenty years, and we’re standing here ready to have yours when you need it. We are simple people, we don’t need much, but to get together once a year in a room full of beer and people who have experienced exactly what you have, who have struggled and won, time and time again, exactly as we have. Sounds like a pretty good way to ensure we remain as a community into the years ahead.’

A Note on McIndoe’s Early Life

Archibald McIndoe was the grandson of migrants from the Island of Bute on Scotland’s west coast. When his grandparents arrived in Otago on New Zealand’s South Island in 1859, there would have been much about their new home that reminded them of their old one – dramatic shorelines and beautiful nature. However, there was far more land available in New Zealand for those who wanted to farm it (Bute was only 15 miles long and 4 miles wide), and accordingly, the family took up 20 acres around Dunedin. Dunedin had the same Victorian architecture that they would have seen on Bute and a fierce pride in its Scottish heritage. The McIndoe family were raised to remember their Scottish roots with affection and to love New Zealand with a passion.*

McIndoe’s father, John, became a successful printer in Dunedin and married Mabel, an art teacher, in 1898. Archibald was one of their four children, each of whom attended the prestigious Otago High School. It was a happy and prosperous childhood, but in 1916 this all changed when John died, leaving his wife and children to cope with few savings and a business struggling with the privations of wartime. McIndoe and his siblings did all they could to contribute, including creating an extensive kitchen garden to supply the family with food and supplementing the family income by shooting, skinning and selling the pelts of local rabbits. All the McIndoes were fine shots.

The priority for McIndoe’s widowed mother was to continue her children’s education. Archibald attended Otago High School from 1914 to 1918, his time there coinciding with the duration of the First World War. From this one school alone, over two hundred young men who volunteered for military service were lost. Reminders of the sacrifices being made continents away must have been continual for the students as well as the citizens of Otago. New Zealand troops suffered disproportionately high casualty numbers, with Otago men being in the