Courage under fire: East Grinstead's veteran Guinea Pig Club

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RAF Benevolent Fund

Des O'Connell

East Grinstead’s reputation for pioneering plastic surgery began 75 years ago. Emily Horton meets one of the original Guinea Pigs

As Remembrance Day reminds us, the fortunes of war are capricious, indiscriminate and, all too often, unbearably harsh. Savage and enduring are the victims’ scars, stamped indelibly upon the body or etched like acid into the soul. The killing stops, but the battle goes on: the long, arduous and frequently insurmountable task of recovering a zest for life. 

Just ask 96-year-old Des O’Connell, whose entry into adulthood was – almost literally – a baptism of fire. This morning, at his home in Sunbury-on-Thames, the trauma of the past is still clearly on view. Ferocious-looking scars and burns ravage the otherwise smooth skin of his face, ears and hands, defying the fade of age and time. There are stumps where some of his fingers used to be. 

And yet, while his scars scream a history of pain, Des himself is happy in his skin. In fact, he exudes an aura of contentedness and calm. His injuries may have startled the unsuspecting over the years, but to him they are reminders that fortune isn’t always unkind. 

For Des was among the first of the so-called ‘Guinea Pigs’, a wartime club of severely injured airmen who received pioneering plastic surgery from Sir Archibald McIndoe, founder of a specialist reconstructive surgery unit at East Grinstead’s Queen Victoria Hospital in West Sussex – a centre that endures to this day.

For Des, disaster struck early in the war while he was serving in Coastal Command. He and his crew were tasked with protecting British ships from the menacing German ‘U-boat’ submarines. It was a draining and often boring job, surveilling home waters for an enemy that was very difficult to spot. 

So when, on April 27 1941, the squadron was tasked with bombing the famous German battleship Bismarck, the news fired a shot of excitement across the bows of routine. Sadly, however, the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley with which Des and his crew had been equipped – an aircraft ominously nicknamed the ‘Flying Coffin’ – was woefully inadequate for the job. Overloaded with heavy bombs, extra fuel and an additional crew member, it was unable to reach sufficient height and crashed into a hill shortly after take-off.

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Des O'Connell

Fortunately, no one was killed; but Des, drenched in fuel from the leaking tanks, became engulfed in flames. 

“We had only recently been issued with new American leather flying jackets and I believe that saved my life,” he reflects. “It protected my arms and upper body – if they had caught alight as well, it would have been a different story.” 

Des had suffered very deep burns to about 50% of his body, including – horrifyingly – his face. 

“I remember looking down and thinking that my gloves had melted,” he recalls. “In fact, it was my skin falling away from my hands.” 

At the local cottage hospital, staff did not believe that he would survive. 

“My commanding officer actually asked my mother, while I was within earshot, where she wanted me to be buried.”

Mrs O’Connell, however, was not ready to give up on her son and insisted that he be moved to a more specialist medical establishment. Thus he was at RAF Halton, in Buckinghamshire, with other badly burned airmen, when Archibald McIndoe came to call.

“He walked in and announced that he was taking all the worst burns cases to his newly established centre for plastic and jaw surgery in East Grinstead. As an ambitious and determined man, he believed that he could do more for us.” 

Born in 1900 in Dunedin, New Zealand, McIndoe studied medicine at the University of Otago, before receiving a fellowship to the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to study pathological anatomy. In 1930 he moved to London where he was offered a job with his cousin, Sir Harold Gillies, himself a pioneer in the field. Widely regarded as the father of plastic surgery, Gillies was the driving force behind reconstructive work during World War I.

By 1938, McIndoe had also established himself as an expert and was appointed consultant in plastic surgery to the RAF. He was promptly sent to East Grinstead to set up his operating table at the Queen Victoria, and there he provided hundreds of badly disfigured airmen with a much needed refuge of recovery and hope.

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East Grinstead Museum

Des was part of the first group of patients to arrive. 

“When we got there in 1941, Sir Archibald looked at us and said: ‘Right, you are now all members of The Guinea Pig Club.’ We were effectively his human test subjects, as he developed and improved new techniques for treating our badly burned bodies.

“I had virtually every operation you could have, including skin grafts to my eyes, face, hands and buttocks. Luckily, he was a brilliant surgeon. And when you started to feel sorry for yourself, you didn’t have far to look to find someone in the same boat.

“McIndoe was a nice man. He would speak to me not as a patient, but as a friend, but he also demanded a positive mental attitude and a willingness to get back into life.”

However, if patients were to recover from their injuries and lead a full life once again, they would need a sense of purpose. So McIndoe insisted that jobs be found for them.

Treatment was organised into three-month blocks, with patients alternating between surgery and rehabilitation on the ward, and being billeted with a family in the town. McIndoe considered it vital that the men overcome the psychological barriers of their disfigurement, so he would bring chorus girls down from London to entertain them and encourage them to visit the local pubs. 

Bill Foxley, who died in 2010, was perhaps the most badly burned of the airmen. A friend of Des, he underwent 29 operations during his stay at East Grinstead, benefiting from a procedure known as the walking-stalk tube pedicle. This informed what eventually became styled as the ‘McIndoe Nose’. 

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East Grinstead Museum

Burns victim Bill Foxley

The procedure involved McIndoe taking a slice of skin from somewhere on the body, often the arm. He would then sew it together to form a tube and leave one end attached to the arm, while fastening the other onto the burn area. Blood could then flow through the skin from the healthy tissue on the arm to keep the skin on the damaged area alive. In time, the transplanted skin would graft itself onto its new home.

The process would be repeated until the skin on the face was ready for McIndoe to rebuild the feature. This was how Bill Foxley’s face was reconstructed, though he remained greatly scarred for the rest of his life. 

“Bill was a great character,” reflects Des. “Each day of his working life, he would take the train from Crawley to his job in London. His facial scars and fingerless hands would startle passengers so much that, even when the carriage was full, the seat next to him would be empty. That was a hardship for Bill, but he just used to say: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to bite you...’”

Sir Archibald was a leader among men. His physical skill and emotional insight saved the lives of many of his guinea pigs – a gratitude that the men have repaid by returning to the town each year. Worn out by the war years, McIndoe died aged 60. But not before he had made East Grinstead into ‘the town that did not stare’. 

 The Queen Victoria and the Blond McIndoe Foundation continue Sir Archibald’s pioneering research into burns and plastic surgery

Visit the statue of McIndoe in front of the Sackville College Almshouses on High Street and support East Grinstead Museum’s Rebuilding Bodies and Souls project; eastgrinsteadmuseum.org.uk