TORQUIL MONTFORT BEBB

Torquil was brought up in Sussex but his wife Karen is a New Zealander. They met in the UK but married in Keri Keri, NZ, and subsequently lived there for a time with their four young children before returning to the UK in 2006 and settling in Sharpsbridge Lane, Piltdown.

Tor’s grandfather was Sir Archibald McIndoe, the pioneering plastic surgeon who achieved global fame for repairing the faces and hands of RAF airmen who had been badly burnt in World War II. He was not the first of his family in the field of plastic surgery: in World War I, McIndoe’s cousin Sir Harold Gillies treated many soldiers who had been injured in the trenches, and when McIndoe came over from the US he joined his cousin’s Harley Street practice and the two men worked together. During WWII, McIndoe was based at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, where he developed innovative techniques of repair and recovery, such as skin grafting, and treating burns using a saline bath, having noticed that airmen who had crashed into the sea healed more quickly than those who fell on land.

He was a genuinely kind man, much liked and admired. He was anxious to help his patients to become reintegrated in society. Because their disfigured faces could be disturbing, he arranged for nurses to accompany them into East Grinstead town so that people would get used to seeing them - East Grinstead became known as “the town that doesn’t stare”. The Guinea Pig Club was formed for ex-patients, and by 1948 it had over six hundred members. Perhaps the most famous of all was Richard Hillary, whose brilliant memoir The Last Enemy describes the Battle of Britain, being shot down in his Spitfire, and his debt to McIndoe.

During his life Archie established two charities: The Flying Doctors in Africa, now known as AMREF, and the Blond McIndoe Research Foundation, a UK-based charity which funds research into the treatment of burns and plastic reconstruction. Tor and his brother Gordon are trustees.  The Blonds, noted philanthropists, became close friends of McIndoe, and gave a new wing for him at the Queen Vic; sadly he did not live to see its completion. (For more information about BMRF today please go to www.blondmcindoe.co.uk).

Tor grew up in Cuckfield and went to school at Lancing; knowing the Sussex area well he and Karen and the family settled in Piltdown. The boys became junior members of the golf club and remain so today, and you will often find them playing cricket for Fletching or at Sheffield Park for the Armadillos. The boys are at university, Jack having recently graduated; Jessica is still at Bede’s. Tor’s cricketing days are behind him now, he explains somewhat wistfully, leaving the door ajar to play more golf himself.

Dick Glynne-Jones