How the Battle of Britain 'Guinea Pig Club' helped Daniel recover from burns | Mail Online

Party prank: Daniel Martin's home-made costume went up in flames leaving him with burns to 40 per cent of his body

Daniel Martin's home-made snowman costume was made with cotton wool glued haphazardly to a pair of pyjamas. It was, he felt, just the ticket for a Christmas fancy-dress party. Yet disastrously, that night the 26-year-old became the victim of a prank that would leave him with burns to 40 per cent of his body.

'One minute I was chatting to friends, the next I felt a sensation of intense heat on my back. For a few seconds I couldn't understand what it was, then flames started rushing up towards my face,' says Daniel, from East Sussex, of the incident which occurred last December.

'I remember rolling around on the floor and I think at one point someone used a fire extinguisher. King's College Hospital was just around the corner and, amazingly, I walked to A&E with the help of two friends. At that stage I didn't feel anything much at all. But as soon as I got there, I was surrounded by doctors, and after that everything goes black so I must have been sedated.'

Daniel was transferred overnight to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, where the intensive care unit was equipped to deal with such serious cases. The specialist ward was made famous by pioneering surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe, who performed reconstructive plastic surgery on horrifically burned Battle of Britain pilots.

Facedwith injuries that surgeons at the time had little experience of, McIndoe came up with innovative ways of treating the airmen who, becauseof the experimental nature of the work being done on them, became knownas Guinea Pigs.

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