‘I usually ask people if they have been in the Services, but it is pretty obvious you were.’
Wilfred Pickles to Guinea Pig Paul Hart, BBC Radio, 1948
This book came about for a number of reasons; primarily it has sought to understand a unique phenomenon in the British experience of the Second World War, when men with severe facial disfigurements became an accepted, even celebrated feature of the wartime landscape.
It is not an exaggeration to state that the Guinea Pig Club was unique. It had no equivalent in either the British Army or the Royal Navy, or in any of the other Allied armed forces, before or since. Before 1940 it had been standard behaviour by the armed forces to contain their most disfigured casualties away from public gaze. Had the RAF wished to suppress or minimise the public exposure of its burned servicemen it could have done so (albeit with some effort and a great deal of hospital relocation), and no amount of pressure from Archibald McIndoe or anyone else could have made any difference. RAFGH Matlock, which provided the psychiatric facilities for disturbed aircrew, was located miles away from anywhere or anyone on the Derbyshire Moors, and what went on there remains, ‘a deeply obscured subject’.1
Part of the process of understanding the story of Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pig Club has been to connect it, for the first time, to wider histories of Britain in the Second World War, and in particular to histories of the Royal Air Force. It is important to remember this very specific service context as often histories concerned with the Home Front see little beyond the influence of the Beveridge Report of 1942. And whilst ideas about fundamental social reform post-war were among the leading topics of conversation in the period, the debates about the future of burned RAF aircrew were not part of this ‘wartime reformist consensus’.2
The RAF’s engagement with the consequences of burn injuries to its servicemen took place entirely within a military framework. There was no reference whatsoever to the civilian state assuming responsibility for these men, indeed it was seen as preferable that the RAF should look after its own, even after the war was ended. The moral responsibility and duty that was emphasised at the highest levels of the service came not from religious or social convictions, but from convictions about how wars should be fought. This is a history in which the burned airmen of the RAF are symbols, not of the new peace, but of the new war.
Each member of the Guinea Pig Club was the visual confirmation of the heavy responsibilities he and his service had borne on behalf of their countrymen as part of those convictions about a new kind of war. The extent of their injuries symbolised the extent to which they had defended millions of ordinary citizens from the enemy and spared them from the rigours of land-based conflict. The RAF believed that it had found the very best of men to shoulder such a burden and the quality of this new model army of technical specialists demanded the very best of care in return. Therefore the coincidence of Archibald McIndoe with the RAF’s commitment to its aircrew was truly remarkable. At East Grinstead he created a therapeutic environment that successfully reconstructed not only the heroes of the new war, but the very concept of heroism itself, and in doing so successfully reinterpreted the RAF’s concepts of war and responsibility.
The public response to McIndoe’s patients was a confirmation to the RAF that its conception and operation of this new kind of war were recognised and accepted as significantly altering the nature of public participation in combat. By acknowledging even the war’s most disfigured casualties, people also acknowledged the necessity of their responsibility and their sacrifice. As the RAF had hoped, the new relationships between the RAF and its servicemen in turn generated a new relationship between the public and the service as a whole. So, as well as Beveridge’s more celebrated version, it appears there was a second, militarily specific, social contract in Britain in the 1940s. This was the contract between defender and the defended, and one of its most important terms was the security of care and of recognition for those who had sacrificed the most to spare the majority.
A secondary aim of this book has been to contribute a new perspective to the histories of the British Home Front in the Second World War – histories which in the case of the relationships between the Home Front and the Royal Air Force are often skewed and incomplete. The ‘campaign of forgetting’ about the strategic air offensive is a significant reason why the relationship between the RAF and the British public is frequently misrepresented. In the main Bomber Command has been isolated from general histories of the war, which instead focus on the activities of one small part of the service, Fighter Command. In the words of one British aviation historian, ‘the many became the Few’, (and this tendency can be seen in microcosm with the treatment in public memory of the members of the Guinea Pig Club).3 This is not only unfair, it is inaccurate and unrepresentative of reality between 1939 and 1945. There is no evidence that the RAF, the Air Ministry or the Air Council thought in terms which segregated one command from another. The effort from the Air Force was an integrated whole, with the commands contributing vital, interlinked components to the conception and prosecution of the war. And it should be remembered that for almost four years, apart from the fluctuating fortunes of the armies in North Africa, this was ‘the only way of intervening’ in a war whose front line was 22 miles from the British coast.4 In the very recent past, there have been new histories of the bombers’ war, but although they provide a long overdue assessment of the men and events of the strategic air offensive, even some of these have a tendency to analyse the activities of the command in isolation from the rest of the war.5
There is another significant reason for the misrepresentation of the Home Front which arises from the preoccupation of a number of historians with the events of 1940.6 The events of the final six months of 1940, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, have come to stand for the entire experience of war for the people of the Home Front. Whether the historians concerned support this interpretation or criticise it, they have made no suggestion for a significant alternative framework for analysing the relationships of the Home Front and the people’s war. Furthermore, such analysis perpetuates the marginalisation of Bomber Command from general histories. Thus ‘the People’s War’ is one where the British people are always victims and underdogs, cheerfully but powerlessly going about their business in the face of almost certain defeat until the arrival of the Americans in 1944.
But, the truth of the Second World War should be characterised entirely differently. Far from being ineffective or vulnerable Great Britain was ‘a technological and militant nation’.7 By 1939 Britain was in possession of a strategic weapon of the utmost modernity in concept and operation, in the form of the RAF. This weapon enabled the country to take the war to the enemy for almost five years, despite the fact that the majority of the land army remained in its camps until the middle of 1944.8 One way that the people of the Home Front were linked to this war was by the highly visible presence in their midst of the patients of Archibald McIndoe. Their acceptance of such injured men marked not only their acceptance of the RAF’s mission, but was also their contribution to a war being fought on their behalf. ‘The People’s War’ was not a war in which they were primarily victims, but participants; and if anything, it was the Bombers’ War that truly was the People’s War.
At the time of writing (2004) there were only 120 members of the Guinea Pig Club left out of the original 649. In 2001, the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the club, the remaining members voted to continue holding their annual meeting at East Grinstead until there were only 50 members remaining. The last issue of The Guinea Pig appeared in the autumn of 2003. Above all, this book was written for them, and for all the men and women associated with the burns units at East Grinstead, Ely, Halton, Cosford and Rauceby, among them my grandmother, VAD Nurse Beryl Daintry who cared for the boys of Ward III. Their story deserves to be more than just a curiosity of the period; it should be recognised for the value of its contribution to our understanding of the history of Britain at war in the 20th century. This work was inspired by the words of Archibald McIndoe who died, exhausted, in 1960, and is the only civilian to be interred in the RAF church at St Clement Danes:
‘One day someone will tell the complete story of Ward III in the way it should be told… This future writer will tell of the return of the men from Dunkirk, tired but undismayed who found their first rest there; of the Battle of Britain fought overhead and the burned pilots who came to regard the place as home, gave it its particular flavour and went back to fight carrying a card inscribed “In case of further trouble deliver the bits to Ward III, East Grinstead.” He will tell of the Blitz, and of the men, women and children of London and what they thought of it all; of the Bombers’ war and the Flying Bomb reply; of D-Day and the return to France… He will tell of the Guinea Pig Club, how and why it started, what it achieved and what has become of all the Guinea Pigs who did not go down to defeat, but rose, from defeat to victory. Perhaps, too, of the vast gifts which came from America, Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand to recognise the sacrifice of those who went back to fight and who encountered The Last Enemy…
This is the story to be told before the name that was Ward III sinks into oblivion. It is a great tale, and worthy of the telling.’
Sir Archibald McIndoe, CBE, MS, MSc, FRCS, FACS.
From ‘The Maestro’s Message’, in The Guinea Pig magazine, April 1948, on the occasion of the closure of Ward III.