Sunday, 30 August 2009 Oliver Hemsley, pictured in front of two pieces by the artist Alexander Clarke that were put up for auction, remains
in a wheelchair a year after the attack It is a celebrity turnout that would have been a coup for any well-established charity, but this is actually the launch of an organisation, called Art Against Knives. What is even more remarkable is that it was set up by three 21-year-old students, none of whom really knew what they were doing, but who were galvanised to act after an incident last year turned their lives upside-down. "The plan was to have a little drinks party and maybe see if we could auction off some of our student friends’ work to raise money,” says one, "but it escalated.” Last summer Oliver Hemsley, Katy Dawe and Alice Wilson were three ordinary twentysomethings who had moved to London to study. Hemsley and Dawe were both fashion students at St Martins, while Wilson was doing a design degree at the London College of Communication. "We were all just having a brilliant summer before university,” says Dawe. "We were out every night just having a laugh.” Hemsley, who had never been in a fight in his life, barely made a sound &ndash he never stood a chance. But thanks to the horrified screams of the girl he had been walking with, the police and ambulance service were on the scene within minutes, whisking Hemsley to the Royal London Hospital in nearby Whitechapel. But by the time he got there, his heart had stopped beating, his spinal cord was severed and clinically he was dead.
If there was one bit of luck on Hemsley’s side that night, it was the fact that the incident happened just around the corner from one of the country’s leading trauma hospitals. ‘ The Royal London is home to the capital’s air ambulance, so the staff there are highly skilled at dealing with severely injured people. When Hemsley was brought in, the doctors resorted to one final technique to try to get his heart beating again &ndash a brutal piece of high-risk surgery called a clam-shell thoracotomy, which has a success rate of less than 20 per cent. To do this, they cut him from one side of his chest to the other, lifted his ribs, parted his lungs, reached in, took his heart from his body and coaxed it back to life. Hemsley had lost bucket-loads of blood, he couldn’t move from the neck down, but he was alive.