The Chain of Hope Gala Ball returns to the Natural History Museum on Friday 13 November 2026, black tie, for the charity that operates on children with heart disease abroad.
Magdi Yacoub was born in Egypt in 1935, established the heart transplantation centre at Harefield Hospital in 1980, performed Britain’s first combined heart and lung transplant in 1983, and was knighted in 1992. When he retired from the health service he did not stop operating: he set up Chain of Hope and went on practising paediatric cardiac surgery through it. The charity sends volunteer surgeons and medical teams to operate on children with heart disease in developing and war-torn countries.
The economics are the argument for it. A child born with a correctable heart defect in a country with no cardiac surgery will die of something that a London theatre fixes in an afternoon, and the charity’s work is both to perform those operations and to train local teams to perform them without it. The last Gala Ball raised over £1.8 million, which is a year of that.
The 2026 ball returns to the Natural History Museum on Friday 13 November, black tie, and the charity bills it as its thirtieth. A committee of four co-chairs and a named membership puts it together rather than an agency, and tables and individual tickets are both taken directly by Chain of Hope rather than through a seller. Yacoub also founded a heart foundation in Egypt in 2008, and the two organisations work the same way.