McIndoe's Army: The Story of the Guinea Pig Club and Its Indomitable Members

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"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 60th 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.

Though not himself a Guinea Pig the author commands the same delicate balance between candour and sympathy, horror and humour which has contributed greatly to the success of the Club and its survival into the new Millenium.

Edward Bishop served in the Royal Navy, including the FAA, during WW2, before becoming a staff writer with SEAC. He later joined Kemsley newspapers and has mingled journalism, authorship, radio and tv assignments. He has worked for The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times and the Daily Mail and is a founder director of the de Havilland Museum Trust.

This is a totally re-written version of The Guinea Pig Club, published by Macmillan in 1963.