James Partridge: founder of the UK charity Changing Faces

Early life and career

Born in Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, James Partridge was educated at Clifton College, Bristol. A car accident at age 18 left him with 40% burns, including severe ones to his face that changed his life forever. After a period in intensive care, he spent five months in hospital having reconstructive surgery before going up to University College Oxford as planned. He underwent extensive plastic surgery throughout the next five years, including every vacation, before graduating in politics, philosophy, and economics in 1975. He then studied for a master of science in medical demography at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and became a health economist in the NHS at St Thomas’ Hospital and at Guy’s Hospital, London.

He married Caroline Schofield in 1978, and the couple moved to Guernsey, where she had been born and brought up. Partridge left health economics for dairy farming and, later, a part time post teaching A level economics. Early every morning, between milking the cows, he wrote his first book Changing Faces: The Challenge of Facial Disfigurement, published by Penguin in 1990. He had written it to provide psychosocial help to others having to adjust to a …