I used to love the Biggles books and I quite agree with this article: Why the world needs Biggles more than ever - Telegraph
Read quite a few Biggles books in my early teens, In fact I still have nineteen copies in my bookcase, one in particular, 'Biggles Goes To School' was recently offered on the net for £50. But most of the old copies are going for just a few pounds. Sorry to say it seems this type of adventure story has been taken over by the 'X'Box and other computer games, this generation don't know what they are missing. Most can be obtained here..... www.stellabooks.com
It was Biggles who not only got me into aeroplanes (metaphorically and occasionally physically), but also taught me the importance of qualities such as courage, loyalty, decency, justice. If his detractors had read his books a bit more carefully they would have seen that he was more politically correct than he is given credit for. For instance, refering to women wearing fur coats as "wearing animal skins, like people used to years ago when they had nothing else to wear". This was a radical thing to say in the 1950's. I have the biography of WE Johns, by Beresford and Ellis (a revision of the one mentioned in the article above). It has to be said that Johns did not always practice what he preached. He was never a Captain for a start. And he lived most of his life with a woman who was not his wife. But he supported his wife financially until she died, which in those days he was under no obligation to do. And even Beresford and Ellis omit something I heard at a Cross and Cockade [WW1] evening the other day, which was that Johns spent some time in hospital in WW1 suffering with syphilis and gonnorhea at the same time! But he was badly mentally scarred by the war. On one occassion as a machine-gunner in the trenches in Salonika, before joining the RFC, he was the only survivor of his unit. And then he was unemployed and on the scrapheap after the war. His poor wife must have thought that though her husband survived the war physically, the man she married never came back: theirs was one of many marriages that failed because the husband could not settle down after the war. Adrian
