Members of the Guinea Pig Club, the world's most exclusive society, have been celebrating 75 years of their association at the Yorkshire Air Museum. MATT CLARK met three of them.

IT was the cruellest minute in Mac Mathieson's 94 years. As a wartime Lancaster pilot, his chances of coming home after a mission were 50/50. But come home he did, day after day, night after night.

Most would offer prayers if they survived a tour of 30 sorties. Mac, from Riccall, flew more than double. Then on the eve of victory he was making his way back to base, when for no good reason the canopy exploded.

Shards of perspex flew into the cockpit; Mac was instantly blinded in one eye; his face torn apart. He was just 22.

But even in that dark, God abandoned moment there was unknown light at the end of the tunnel in, of all places, East Grinstead.

Mac awoke to find himself the newest member of the Guinea Pig Club, which was made up of aircrew patients whose faces or limbs had been rebuilt by pioneering surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe.

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Sir Archibald McIndoe.

In the 1940s there were no text books on plastic surgery for burns victims, McIndoe made it up as he went along. He had no choice – hence the name guinea pigs.

And because the treatment involved long recoveries, patients formed a club where they could meet over a drink or two.

"Archie was a wonderful man," says Mac. "He didn't just put people right with plastic surgery, he put them right both physically and mentally. He made my life worth living again."

McIndoe wasn't just unconventional in the operating theatre. Restoring a man’s confidence was equally important, so he allowed them to see their friends during surgery. The idea being it reduced fear. When fear goes it allows control.

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Guinea Pigs at East Grinstead Hospital. Picture courtesy East Grinstead Library.

"No one was miserable," says Mac "They had every reason to be, and to hate the world, but at East Grinstead there was always someone worse than you."

The club may have played a critical part in the men's recovery, but its committee was carefully selected; McIndoe as the first president; the first secretary had severely damaged fingers to encourage minimal note taking; the first treasurer, whose severely damaged legs made him unlikely to “walk off” with club funds.

Most members were British and by the end of the war their number totalled 649.

"When I first came onto the Guinea Pig Ward there were all these barrels of beer," says Mac. "I thought hang on, this is a hospital, not a pub, but Archie wanted to make life as normal as can be.

"We called him the boss. At the end of a hard day's operating he'd come onto the ward and play the piano for an hour before going home. He was great."

But no pushover.

While recuperating servicemen were meant to wear blue clothes, McIndoe said 'not in my hospitals, they'll wear the uniforms they were knocked out in'.

"A big argument went on from senior army officers," says Mac. "So Archie got on the phone to Churchill. He soon sorted them out."

Support was also needed when the Guinea Pigs left the protection of the hospital ward and re-entered society to face the general public.

"The people of East Grinstead were very good," says Mac. "They accepted these horrible looking people wandering around. It was called the town that didn't stare."

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Guinea Pig Club member Sandy  Saunders at the Yorkshire Air Museum. Picture: Matt Clark.

That wasn't the case elsewhere, as Sandy Saunders would discover at medical school. During an anatomy class one of the students felt nauseous and had to leave the room. 20 years later at a reunion dinner she confessed the reason why.

"She said she felt physically sick and had to go to the ladies and vomit because she was so horrified by my appearance," says Mr Saunders. "And this was from a doctor."

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Sandy Saunders during the Second World War

Mr Saunders, now 93, joined the Guinea Pig Club after crashing during a training flight. Despite nine operations, he was still having problems closing his eyes, the skin grafted eyelids were too small.

"I went to Archie because of his reputation," says Mr Saunders. "I saw him in his consulting room, and he said 'you need some more work done; four new eyelids, nose needs to be rebuilt and I'll have to do something around your mouth. Go over to ward three, I'll do your eyelids tomorrow at 10 o'clock'.

"Just like that."

By then it had become commonplace. Just a few years earlier McIndoe had performed the world's first eyelid operation.

"It was a miracle that Archie was at East Grinstead at the right time," says Mr Saunders. "He had this innovative skill of knowing what to do. Archie was revered. He'd done so much good, everybody was improved at his hands."

Mr Saunders was the only burns victim at his first hospital and says he felt like a freak.

"You feel abnormal, but at East Grinstead everyone was worse than me and yet they were happy."

That esprit de corps, as much as anything else, was the tonic Mr Saunders badly needed. He knew McIndoe would perform miracles, now it was about coming to terms with what had happened.

"I did go through a phase of being horrified, ashamed and miserable that I looked so awful. Gradually that was overtaken by pride in being a Guinea Pig; one of the boys, with the marks of war.

"This face has taken me through life and I feel pretty normal."

For some, disfigured features were too much for their partners to cope with.

"We had a man called Bill Simpson," says Jack Perry, 91. "When his wife first saw him she couldn't face it and the marriage quickly came to an end."

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Guinea Pig Club member Jack Perry at the Yorkshire Air Museum. Picture: Matt Clark.

Recognising this was a regular occurrence, McIndoe insisted his nurses be especially pretty, reasoning that if the men were surrounded by attractive women, who did not find them repellent, it would restore their sense of manliness.

It worked. Some even married their nurse.

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Jack Perry during the Second World War

Mr Perry suffered horrific burns to his hands when his Halifax bomber caught fire in 1944. He woke up to find McIndoe sitting on his bed.

"I loved all sports and I had been lying there thinking I would never play anything again. It was the end of my world," he says.

But McIndoe took his hands and promised: 'You will play again, I'm telling you now'.

He did. Mr Perry went on to build a perfectly respectable golf handicap.

"It was like a holiday camp, a wonderful place to be," says Mr Perry, 91. "You have to remember we had all been in an aircraft crash, so we were happy to be alive. Archie was a wonderful man. Without him we would have been selling matches on the street."

McIndoe also encouraged black humour. He believed it was fundamental in helping help members through difficult times.

"One of our members, Ron Pretty, lost his arm in a Lancaster Bomber plane crash and ended up with a prosthetic," says Mr Perry. "Max Bygraves once came down to entertain us and said I want to sing a new song called You Need Hands.

"As soon as he started, Ron's false hand came skidding across the floor towards him."

You can leave a message of congratulations for Guinea Pig Club members at www.rafbf.org/GuineaPigClub