IN THE Peace Garden, tucked between the aviary and the Deanes council building, there is a bust of Sir Harold Gillies on a plinth.
Gillies worked at Rooksdown Hospital during the Second World War and after.
He was a pioneer of what was then called plastic surgery. In 2011 Basingstoke Heritage Society unveiled a blue plaque on the building which had been the administrative centre of Park Prewett Hospital, today called Idsworth Court.
READ MORE: Gillies – the genius of Rooksdown
A New Zealander by birth, Gillies, born 1882, was the youngest of eight children.
He came to the UK to study medicine, finishing his training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London (Barts), qualifying in Diseases of the Throat.
In the First World War he had served in France with the Red Cross, where he saw facial reconstruction surgeries carried out by a French dentist using bone and tissue grafts.
By 1915 he persuaded the Army of the need for specialist care to treat the terrible wounds inflicted, particularly by the machine gun.
He worked at the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot for ‘special duty in connection with plastic surgery’.
Henry Tonks, who was head of The Slade Art School, painted watercolours of the facial wounds of the patients as this was the best way of measuring progress through successive operations.
It presumably also aided diagnosis and what treatment was then needed. Many of these paintings survive.
Gillies also worked at Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup - a convalescent hospital - and it became the site of huge forward steps in treatment and became essentially the birthplace of this type of medicine.
By 1918 over 11,000 patients had been treated in Sidcup. In 1919 Gillies was awarded CBE.
For the following years he was in private practice in Harley Street. In 1930, with another surgeon, he founded the school of British Plastic Surgery at Sidcup – training more surgeons was going to be very important.
He took into partnership and trained a distant cousin called Archibald McIndoe, whose work in the Second World War would be significant.
When war broke out in 1939, Gillies was determined that specialist units should be available and he looked for a location.
It is said that he preferred Hampshire because he was a keen fisherman and wanted to be able to fish the chalk streams in the area.
Rooksdown House had been built as the private wing of Park Prewett Lunatic Asylum where, in due course, amazing and pioneering work was carried out both during and after the war.
There were 200 beds at Rooksdown – the patients mainly Army or civilian – RAF patients were mostly treated at East Grinstead under McIndoe.
These bright young flyers, often with terrible burn injuries, were members of what was called The Guinea Pig Club and attracted a lot of publicity although the work done at Rooksdown was as ground-breaking and significant as that done at East Grinstead.
Patients could join the Rooksdown Club, which included civilian and forces’ patients – some of them children with cleft palate birth defects, which required many repeat visits for surgical treatment. Members of the club attended the opening of the Peace Garden.
Gillies’ great achievement was the development of the tube pedicle which involved taking skin grafts in a tube shape which preserved the blood supply – injuries to the face could require the graft being moved up the body in stages until it was able to connect to the face.
The first tube might connect from the torso to the arm and, when established, be disconnected from the torso and connected to the face, which involved massive discomfort and long periods of treatment.
Very disfigured patients were encouraged to go out and about – to the cinema or shops in Basingstoke and to pubs such as The Swan in Sherborne St John.
This quote: “They’d have a nurse to go along with them… the people of Basingstoke were absolutely wonderful in the way they opened their arms, hearts and doors, asking the patients to come in and have tea with them”.
Gillies was well-aware of the need to keep the patients cheerful through their long ordeal.
Some of Gillies’ work done at Rooksdown before the unit moved in 1958 was then considered questionable.
Dr Andrew Bamji, Gillies’ archivist, referred to surgery on a trans man for whom records show that Gillies assisted with surgery involving 17 operations over nine years – the case notes being a little vague about the clinical need for the reconstructive surgery.
Steve Evans, whose father worked at Rooksdown during the post-war period was the driving force behind getting the bust of Gillies into the Peace Garden.
The bust was unveiled on International Peace Day, September 21, 2018 by Dr Bamji.
SEE ALSO: History unfolds in historic heart
In 2019, Dr Simon Millar published his PhD thesis titled Rooksdown House and the Rooksdown Club: A study into the Rehabilitation of facially Disfigured Servicemen and Civilians following the Second World War.
A copy of this was presented to the Local Studies Collection at the Discovery Centre, Basingstoke.
A message from the editor
Thank you for reading this article - we appreciate your support.
Subscribing means you have unrestricted access to the latest news and reader rewards - all with an advertising-light website.
Don't take my word for it – subscribe here to see for yourself.
Looking to advertise an event? Then check out our free events guide.
Want to keep up with the latest news and join in the debate? You can find and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here