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The Guinea Pig was situated on Holtye Avenue. This pub closed in 2005 and has now been demolished with flats built on the site.
This delightful pub was next door to The Queen Victoria Hospital where Archie MacIndoe restored the faces and dignity of heroic RAF pilots with disfiguring burns. As a long haired degenerate student at the Royal Veterinary College, London, I worked in the vacations in the late 1960s as a Ward Orderly at the 'Queen Vic' in the Canada Wing. The ward was populated by burns patients all having skin grafts, often multiple times. One lovely old boy had fallen on to an old-fashioned heating stove in a workshop and needed large grafts to cover the burns. He would regularly give me money to go to The Guinea Pig and buy him a bottle of port and smuggle it back into the ward and hide it within his reach. This was no easy procedure as the ferocious Matron wielded the power of life and death - not just over the patients but the staff as well. The pub was a delight; the bar staff soon recognised me and reached for the port bottle, knowing I would not be stopping! I was baffled by its closing - it always seemed busy and had fabulous photos of Archie M and many of his supremely brave and grateful patients on the walls. The dreary housing there now is no substitute.
Philip Glyn (January 2025)
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