Biggles of the Royal Flying Corps ~ An Introduction (Revised Book Review)

Book Review

Very briefly, there is a wonderful bookshop in my local town just up the hill ~ Winchcombe. It opens by appointment or at set times and specialises in books from the past, books that are antiquarian, whole sets that cause one to stop on the spot.

I happened to glance at one hardback, this one:

Front Cover ~ BIGGLES of the Royal Flying Corps by Captain W.E. Johns (1978 Edition)

Back Cover ~ BIGGLES of the Royal Flying Corps by Captain W.E. Johns (1978 Edition)

I’d enjoyed reading the Biggles stories as a boy in the early 1960s when they came out each Saturday in picture format; and very soon I moved on to the Second World War. Then, suddenly, the predecessor to the Royal Air Force faded into memory.

Finding this title last weekend, well, what a find. Why so? Because the accounts disengaged me from 1935 to the present, and caused me to recalibrate and in doing so, what a world I find awaiting me between 1912 - 1918. Not only sophisticated biplanes, but Airships, Balloons and Blimps, the first anti-aircraft batteries, the first searchlight batteries, the first London Blitz and entire industries that are now an historical note only.

In short, I have been pulled up with a jolt.

This is exactly the antidote to free up my mind again, to not make such stupid mistakes and errors of judgment, and to also get back into the business of enjoying life despite the restrictions we all labour under, wherever we are in this beautiful planet.

Reading this book over the last week has enabled me to understand a little more of the American Boeing Stearman Kaydett Biplane in which my uncle learned to fly, before transferring to the larger Harvard monoplane in which he and his friends and fellow student pilots “got their Wings”, and, for the short time that they remained in Alabama before shipping back to Britain in May 1942 to proceed to their squadrons, permitted to wear the coveted USAAF Wings, eventually in the equally coveted and highly respected SNCO rank ~ Sergeant-Pilot.

Please do not think I equate my Uncle to Captain Johns. I think Ken would have something to say about that by way of gentle rebuke along the lines of thanks Ken, but get a grip lad.

For Captain Johns has opened up a whole new world to me of what it is like to fly a biplane. They are beautiful, deep down I knew this, but now their beauty and engineering is enabling me to appreciate that they were, after all, state of the art in their day.

Captain Johns’ authorship is also enabling me to finally grasp a much clearer and very important understanding of the Royal Flying Corps and of the very brave people who served in it between 1912-1918.

23 January 2023
All Rights Reserved

LIVERPOOL

© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2023

My Aviation Website www.eyestotheskies.uk carries a later and extended review, and which can be found here.

I GREW UP with the Portrait below. I’ve mentioned it many times in other parts of the website.

Only now, 81 years on, do I really begin to appreciate this portrait of of Kenneth Ernest Webb (1921-1943) and from an angle I just had not expected … my father’s brother, a sergeant-pilot and skipper of Handley Page Halifax Mark V DK165 MP-E.

This image is taken at Craig Field Alabama as a trainee pilot in a Boeing Stearman Kaydett Bi-plane of the United States Army Air Corps.

Life is Good