Biggles Saves the World

How Biggles saved western civilization and told a generation of young men how a true hero behaves.

As heroes go, Biggles has it all for me. Scrupulously honest, tough and a highly skilled pilot. For the ladies, a man who fell in love only once, but he loved her for the rest of his life. He had great longevity learning to fly before WWI, only showing his age at all in the seventies, when he would have been a similar age to the century.

Our hero's first love was for flying, it didn't matter what he flew, he loved it and it showed in every story. He travelled around the world from Antarctica to the Baltic and all in between, fighting anyone who would rightly be opposed by the forces of good.

The author W.E. Johns was in the forerunner to the RAF, the Royal Flying Corps, where he flew against the Germans in World War I. He was captured by them, tried and sentenced to death by firing squad. he made a couple of bids to escape from the German's care and was eventually released when the war ended.

Johns' was appalled at the lack of public awareness of aviation, he knew that the next war would be determined by air power and so he set about writing to inspire young men (and later women) to learn to fly and fly for the RAF. To this end he created Biggles and his friends.

W.E Johns edited flying magazines, wrote stories for them in his own name and under a pseudonym. Finally he promoted himself to Captain and wrote the first Biggles book. It was a runaway success and boys clamoured for more. Fortunately he was the kind of author who could produce great numbers of books - 168 of them! Biggles stories appeared in comic books, anthologies, in his own collections and full length books. These stories inspired many, many young boys to become pilots. They hung around airfields to cadge rides and as soon as they were old enough, they joined "The best flying club in the world", the RAF.

During WWII a group of RAF pilots were asked what got them interested in flying, they answered in unison "BIGGLES!" These are the pilots who stopped Hitler in the summer of 1940, these are the boys that served Hitler his first and greatest defeat in the air. It is no exaggeration to say that these boys, saved civilisation.

He wrote for girls too. The Air Ministry was having trouble getting young women to join the WAAF and asked Johns to write a book for girls. The result was the 'embryonic feminist' Worrals. Within weeks, there was no further need to advertise to recruit women, they were coming from everywhere.

Before Johns' began his campaign to promote air power, the general public and the politicians were thinking about defence in first world war terms. After he began to write awareness grew, money spent and machines like the Spitfire and the Hurricane were produced.

Biggles was a world wide success, his character had humour, courage, integrity, inventiveness and great skill. Through these books shone the attributes I and a couple of generations grew to admire and respect. Biggles' attributes were those that boys could and should aspire to and to value in others.

There are Baby Boomers around the world who, like me have a hero who can appeal across generational divides and one who can be counted on to inspire to action. 

W.E. Johns not only saved Britain from invasion by providing the skilled force to do it, he has given us a hero worth acknowledging as worthy of the name.