McIndoe's Army

NB: BOOKS WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR RELEASE ON BATTLE OF BRITAIN DAY "More exclusive than Boodle's, Buck's, White's and the Royal Yacht Squadron rolled into one". This was how Sir Archibald McIndoe, the celebrated plastic surgeon, described The Guinea Pig Club, a unique body of greviously burnt, often seriously disfigured and handicapped Allied airmen treated by McIndoe's team at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. In the Guinea Pig Club's 62th Anniversary year Edward Bishop revises and expands his perceptive account of its members' courage, heroism and self-generated social and welfare activities around the world since McIndoe's earliest wartime patients founded the Club. He tells how it grew into so much more than a hospital ward Grogging Club in which airmen, who had escaped from blazing, exploding and crippled bombers and fighters, drowned their immediate inhibitions. Some well known members include Richard Hillary, Tom Gleave, Geoff Page, Jimmy Wright, Alois Siska, James Sandeman-Allen, Jackie Mann, Eric Lock, Ben Bennions, Colin Hodgkinson, and Brian Kingdome.