Our war: Lady Hilton's amazing story

No-one could have been more eager to go to the aid of his country at the outbreak of the First World War than Captain Richard Hilton.

The young gunner was serving in the wild North West Frontier of India, patrolling the Khyber Pass, when he and his regiment of fearsome Kaharts were despatched to France to back up the British Expeditionary Force, which was about to engage the enemy near the town of Mons.

It was the first major battle in what many believed was the war to end all wars – an horrific four-year conflict in which thousands died and thousands more were to suffer terrible injuries. Captain Hilton was among the first wave of casualties, after an artillery shell blew away half his face on a sunny day in August 1914.

Without much hope, he was rushed to a field hospital behind the lines where another young man, Harold Gillies, was serving with the Royal Medical Corps.

“He had seen the terrible facial injuries that some of the men had suffered – some so horrific that no-one could bear to look at them – and was determined to do something about it,” recalled Lady Winifred Hilton, later to become the captain’s daughter-in-law, who, for the past half a century, has lived at Idridgehay, near Wirksworth.

“He was only recently qualified but when he saw my father-in-law with half his face missing, he decided he must try to help him.”

Maj-Gen Richard Hilton, second left, while serving in India

But what is less well-known about Gillies is that while Richard Hilton was his first, pioneering patient, Richard’s son, Peter, by a remarkable quirk of fate, was his last.

The amazing coincidence was discovered as Major Peter Hilton was undergoing an identical series of 22 operations for a similar facial injury exactly 30 years later, towards the end of the Second World War.

“Mr Gillies told us this had been his last operation as he was retiring. We said it would be a terrible loss but he said he had been training new people and the work would go on.

“Then he said: ‘The first person I ever worked on was a young soldier who had lost half his face at Mons. When I operated on him, my hands were trembling, I was so nervous. Come to think of it, he was called Hilton. Did your husband have a relation who had plastic surgery?’

“At that point, Peter sat up in bed and said: ‘Yes, my father’. Now, wasn’t that remarkable?”

See also:

Newlyweds did not meet again until war had taken its toll

Courage of disfigured Derbyshire servicemen

Hilton, Lt-Col Sir Peter - War hero and Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire

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