Where the Hell is Biggles?

Front cover to Biggles Pioneer Air Fighter by Capt. W.E. Johns, Dean & Son Edition, c.1963. First published 1954. [1]

It seems that any popular children’s books can be TV and cinema money-earners.  Therefore, one would expect a canon of 96 books, featuring a popular central character, whose name is synonymous with adventure and heroism, to be box office gold.

Yet, the Biggles books by Captain W.E. Johns remain on the shelves of collectors or in second-hand bookshops, having now mostly gone out of print.

There are a number of reasons to explain this, spanning the cultural relevance and quality of the books and their colonial attitudes to race and ethnicity.  Yet, although disregarded, Biggles, with his trademark aviator cap, scarf and goggles remains one of Britain’s most iconic figures, albeit for comedic purposes.  Cardinal Biggles in Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch is one of the oddest and funniest of this re-purposing.

So, is there any hope of redemption for Biggles, or, along with his flying chums Algy, Ginger and Bertie, has he well and truly flown off into the sunset of the British Empire?

Captain James ‘Biggles’ Bigglesworth first appeared in 1932 in a collection of stories called The Camels Are Coming.  His creator William Earle Jones had fought during World War One in the Machine Gun Corps and then in the Royal Flying Corps, later the RAF, where he became a 2nd Lieutenant.  He awarded himself the rank of Captain at the start of his writing career. [2]

Johns had experienced many of the hardships of war and tried to utilise this in his books, establishing Biggles as a daring World War One pilot and then returning him to active duty during World War Two with such stirring titles as Biggles Defies the Swastika (1941).  After the war, Biggles becomes a flying detective for Scotland Yard, as head of the Special Air Police. Here he fights crime and solves mysteries during the Cold War, including several encounters with his old World War One nemesis, Erich von Stalhein.

Johns died in 1968, whilst writing Biggles’ retirement story Biggles Does Some Homework, eventually published as an incomplete novel in 1997.

I own a small collection of Biggles books.  A tell-tale glimpse into my own childhood. With their striking dust jackets (Biggles Takes a Hand from 1963 being a particular favourite) they are eminently collectible, and bargains can be found.  However, some can be expensive.  In 2018, a rare first edition of The Camels Are Coming sold for £1,800, three times above its auction estimate.  Just to be clear, I am not in that league.

These books should be read as period pieces, reflecting a specific ‘hero-centric’ point of view in regard to war, and an unsettling colonial attitude towards other countries, races, and changes in society.  As Adam Nicol writes in his essay Uncivil Aviation, “Johns remains a writer caught out of time and out of place”. 

The early Biggles books set during World War One introduce a world of British Tommies fighting ‘the Boche’.  Whilst Johns in his introduction to these books talks of how boys were turned into “grey-faced men”, the extensive glossary of terms, including Archie, Flaming Onions and Cooper Bombs [3] show a depiction of war that ultimately comes down to the actual hardware.  In the forward to Biggles of 266 (1956), Johns even describes this time as “they were great days”.

At the start of his career Biggles is a young and at times, hot-headed pilot.  In Biggles of Camel Squadron (1934), he is described in almost mythic, chivalric terms:

“They beheld a slim, boyish figure, clad in khaki slacks and a tunic soiled with innumerable oil stains … Could this be the famous Captain Bigglesworth they had heard so much about; the officer who had the reputation of being one of the deadliest air-fighters on the Western Front; the man who had crossed swords with some of the enemy champions? 

There are times when it is clear that Johns is writing more for young adults, rather than children, as the red mist often descends for Biggles and impetuousness often becomes a “death-wish” and “wanting to kill the Hun”.

Following a doomed affair with foreign spy Marie Janis[4] in the 1932 short story Affaire de Coeur, Biggles starts drinking excessively.  When Biggles later gets shot during an aerial dogfight, he shouts, “I’m down! I’m down!”  Clearly, both physically and mentally.  This is not your typical children’s fayre.

Romance, in fact any female involvement whatsoever, never appears in Biggles’ adventures.  Clearly, not the done thing to include in a ‘boys’ own’ type story.  They’d rather read about those Flaming Onions.

Yet, in these early stories, with the often rash and dangerous Biggles, and interactions with Mata Hari type spies, there is some degree of character and humour.  Sadly missing in the later, more procedural books. 

The 1934 short story The Turkey sees Biggles suddenly flying off, determined to kidnap a large turkey for the mess Christmas dinner and then having to contend with having the still very much alive bird in the small cockpit of his Camel.  All this whilst trying to take out some Fokker in the air.

Whilst an amusing story, it emphasizes the argument that Johns presents “war as a game” and ultimately the “glorification of war is served to enhance the heroic reputation of his [Biggles’] character.”[5]

Whilst we do see the dangers of aerial warfare, its effects on the pilots, and acknowledgment of their tremendous skill in handling these basic machines, this is still a world belonging to the officer class and derring-do.  We occasionally see down to the trenches of the poor bloody infantry, but never truly encounter the horrors that took place there.  Work such as War Horse, 1917 and They Shall Not Grow Old have provided modern audiences with different forms of storytelling about World War One that are more immersive and immediate.  The world of Biggles appears just too remote.

Nottingham Puppet Festival event for War Horse outside Theatre Royal Nottingham, March 2018.  Image courtesy of Alan Fletcher.

Empire and colonialism is embedded throughout the Biggles books, confirming the Association for Art History 2019 conference on how “Empire persists and proliferates”, impacting on how history can be perceived.  Through language, attitude and stereotypes, the world of Biggles portrays an outmoded culture and perception of others that simply no longer fits with a multi-cultural society, both then and now.

Indigenous peoples are often reduced to “natives” or “savages”, what Nicol describes in Biggles in Australia (1955) as “undisguised and crude racism”.

Racist slurs are continually spoken to Zahar in Another Job for Biggles (1951), a character who actually befriends and assists Biggles and his team but remains subjugated and inferior, never equal.  But then, as described in this book, “all Arabs dress alike” and are referred to as “a wild looking lot”.

Another Job for Biggles also has a Reefer Madness style zealotry about the effects of drugs on society.  A concern at any time, but the result here is one of the old order flailing against the new.  As Biggles’ boss, Air Commodore Raymond states:

“Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to spot a man under the influence of the stuff, so we’ve been able to keep the racket under control; but make no mistake; if marijuana ever got into common use, civilisation as we know it would just fall to pieces.”

The Boy Biggles was one of Johns’ final books, written in 1968.  A set of short stories, the book tells of Biggles’ childhood growing up in India, at the height of Empire rule.  Twenty years after becoming an independent state and a time when Indian culture was coming to the fore, Johns writes of Biggles as “sahib”, a thirteen-year-old white saviour, to whom villagers fall on their knees to him, “calling down the blessings of heaven”.

A clear example of Johns out of step with the time, dangerously celebrating an Empirical past and yearning to retain his classic British hero at a time when the counterculture was on the rise.

Perhaps this was a reaction to Biggles being removed from libraries and seen as outmoded.  As the Daily Express unsurprisingly states, Biggles now had to face attacks from “the politically correct brigade”.

As a counterpoint to this racist charge, and certainly not making Biggles the Brexit poster-boy, Michael Goodrum argues how Biggles “routinely positions European cooperation as desirable and necessary”.  This is particularly represented by his relationship with recurring character Marcel Brissac of the French Police, but Goodrum ultimately states that “much else contained within these books is questionable.”

In 2019, spoof movie news site Studio Exec announced Guy Ritchie would be directing a new Biggles movie, with Robert Downey Jnr playing the ace fighter pilot, entitled Biggles and the Darkie Menace.

This is perhaps how the industry perceives Biggles as a commodity, one where any true adaptation has to deal with the books’ difficult past. A 1986 Biggles film tried to circumvent this by attempting to ride the Back to the Future success and creating a whole new Biggles story involving time-travel.  However, Biggles Adventure in Time [6] was neither a critical nor commercial success.  It only remains notable for featuring Peter Cushing in his last screen role as Raymond.

In evaluating Biggles now and his relevance for a modern audience, it is simply easier to quote the man himself.  In Biggles Takes it Rough (1963), he becomes exasperated by a Canadian’s desire to solve problems with his gun.  With a pained expression, Biggles simply states, “We don’t do that sort of thing here.”

[1]Blog title ripped off from lyrics from Jethro Tull’s 1972 album Thick as a Brick

“So! Where the hell was Biggles, when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you through?
They're all resting down in Cornwall, writing up their memoirs,
For a paper-back edition of the Boy Scout manual.”

[2] A useful summary of W.E. Johns’ life and career can be found at https://www.rh7.org/factshts/wejohns.pdf

[3] Respectively, anti-aircraft gunfire, later known as ‘flak’; German missiles used during World War One; special, heavy bombs, carried by single-seat fighters under their wings.

[4] Just to emphasize her ‘funny foreign-ness’, Johns has Janis infuriatingly pronounce the pilot’s name as “Beegles”.

[5]  Harris, B., Dunning, D., Pugh, D. and Winspeare, L. (2017) Biggles Sorts It Out! Captain W.E. Johns and the Reinvention of the Heroic Ideal for British Boys. In: Larsen, R. and Whitehead, I. (Eds.) Popular Experience and Cultural Representation of the Great War, 1914-1918. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 101-107.

[6] As a student in Reading in the mid-80s, this film became popular as locals were recruited as extras to play soldiers in the trenches, cheering on Biggles as he flies overhead. I dutifully saw the film at the cinema, resulting in not seeing anyone I recognised, when I could have been watching something like Blue Velvet instead.