In 1941, in a converted cottage hospital in East Grinstead, a New Zealand-born surgeon began a project that changed reconstructive medicine. Archibald McIndoe was treating Royal Air Force aircrew who had been pulled, burned, from the cockpits of Hurricanes and Spitfires over the Battle of Britain. They were young - many were not yet twenty - and the burns were beyond anything pre-war plastic surgery had been built for. McIndoe operated. He also did something less obvious: he encouraged the men to walk into the town for a drink, to dance with the local women, to refuse to hide. Out of this came the Guinea Pig Club, a brotherhood of 649 men who had been operated on at Queen Victoria Hospital, and a town that learned what to do when half the faces in the pub no longer matched what the world expected.
The hospital opened in 1863 as East Grinstead Cottage Hospital, a small local infirmary serving a country town in West Sussex. It took the name Queen Victoria Hospital in the 1930s and moved to its present site in 1936. When war came in 1939 the building was nothing remarkable. What changed everything was the arrival of Archibald McIndoe, a New Zealander trained at the Mayo Clinic and recommended for the post by his cousin, the equally pioneering surgeon Harold Gillies. McIndoe was 39 when he was appointed Consultant in Plastic Surgery to the Royal Air Force. Within months his ward at East Grinstead was full of burned aircrew, and the small Sussex hospital had become the centre of British reconstructive medicine.
On 20 July 1941, a group of patients at the hospital formed a drinking club. They called themselves the Guinea Pig Club, because that was effectively what they were - men on whom new techniques were being tried, sometimes for the first time. The original membership rule was simple: any allied aircrew member who had been operated on by McIndoe or his team was eligible. By the end of the war the membership was 649 - 62 per cent British, with substantial Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Czech, Polish and French contingents. McIndoe was their president; he held the post until his death in 1960. The club continued to support its members and their families for decades, meeting regularly in East Grinstead until 2007.
Pre-war plastic surgery was built around the long, gradual reconstruction of small defects. McIndoe was confronted with men who had lost faces, hands, eyelids, ears. He pioneered the saline bath - immersing burned patients in warm salt water, which he had noticed sped healing for pilots ditched in the sea. He revived and refined the tubed pedicle graft, used to move skin slowly across the body to where it was needed. He performed multiple operations over months and years, building back what fire had taken. Sir Benjamin Rycroft set up the Corneo Plastic Unit at the same hospital in the 1940s and pioneered corneal transplantation; the eye bank he founded was formally established in 1952. Rycroft's work helped shape the Tissue Procurement Act, the legislation that underpins British transplant surgery.
Perhaps the most striking part of McIndoe's approach was social. He insisted that his patients should not be hidden. He arranged for them to walk into East Grinstead - to the cinema, to the pubs, to the dance halls - while still in mid-treatment, faces unfinished, bandages visible. He asked the townspeople to treat them normally. East Grinstead did. The town became known, fondly, as 'the town that did not stare.' Local women danced with men whose faces had been reconstructed. Pub regulars made room at the bar. This was not sentimental kindness; it was a deliberate strategy, agreed with McIndoe, designed to rebuild lives as well as faces. The men who came through East Grinstead spoke of the town's attitude for the rest of their lives. Many married local women and settled there after the war.
Queen Victoria Hospital remains the specialist reconstructive surgery centre for southeast England. The Burns Centre, the Plastic Surgery Unit, the Maxillofacial Unit and the Corneo Plastic Unit between them treat patients from across the region and beyond. The hospital is internationally known for hand surgery; one notable case saw an arm reattached in a 14-hour operation after a chainsaw accident, with the patient eventually regaining use of his fingers. New operating theatres were opened by the Princess Royal in October 2013. In 2011 the hospital was rated the most recommended NHS hospital in the country by the independent Dr Foster Guide. The Guinea Pigs themselves are now almost all gone - the last identified surviving member died only a few years ago - but the institution they helped define has continued to do what McIndoe started in 1941: rebuild the faces and lives the world has scarred.
Queen Victoria Hospital sits at approximately 51.14 degrees north, 0.00 degrees east, on the edge of East Grinstead in West Sussex. London Gatwick (EGKK) is about 7 miles to the north - close enough that visitors who descend into Gatwick today pass over the hospital that rebuilt many of the airmen who flew from RAF Kenley and Biggin Hill in the Battle of Britain. From altitude, look for the hospital complex on the south side of East Grinstead, with the High Weald rolling away to the south.