William Vicarage was just 20 years old when he sustained severe cordite burns aboard HMS Malaya during the Battle of Jutland in 1916. As well as extensive wounds to his hands and upper body, the able seaman’s eyelids and lower lips were turned inside out, leaving him unable to close his eyes or open his mouth. His injuries were horrifying – and also incredibly painful.
Months later, Vicarage came under the care of Harold Gillies, the legendary plastic surgeon and subject of this new book by Lindsey Fitzharris. ‘How a man can survive such an appalling burn is difficult to imagine,’ Gillies wrote of Vicarage’s injuries. ‘It required very considerable moral courage to attempt an operation such as could in any way radically cure the condition.’
Moral courage was not a quality Gillies lacked. Instead, he was a supremely confident individual of whom it was once said that talent was ‘mysteriously inherited rather than laboriously acquired’. As a young man at school, his precocious and rebellious nature rubbed along with a commitment to fairness and hard work. In the words of one of his patients, he was ‘a man of steel nerve and a great heart’.
