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Title: By Jove, Biggles! : the life of Captain W.E. Johns by Peter Berresford Ellis ISBN: 0-491-02775-3 Publisher: W.H. Allen Pub. Date: 1981 Format: Unknown Binding

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: Biggles: Chameleon or Continuity Checks ?
Comment: Originally published by WH Allen in 1981, as By Jove, Biggles !, a new semi-revised version was brought out for the Johns centenary in 1993. This hardback edition from Veloce has 314 pages and stitched binding. There is an index and a bibliography. Probably unintentionally following the lead of Johns (who also wrote under pseudonyms: William Earle, Jon Early, Flight Lieutenant, and perhaps "Vigilant"), it seems his two biographers are also prone to multiple identities/genders, writing variously as: Peter Ellis = Peter Tremayne = Peter MacAlan & as Piers Williams = Jenny Schofield.

The book is both a biography of Johns' and an analysis/rear-guard defence of some aspects of Johns' fiction. Much of the primary source material for the biography is drawn from Johns' own published autobiographical anecdotes circa the 1930s - 1960s. The book is liberally laced with excerpts from Johns' editorials, interviews and commentaries, conveniently mustered here all in the one volume. Other material is drawn from relatives of Johns and independent sources. Unfortunately the various informants are sometimes in disagreement. Intermittently the dividing line between the biographical fact and the fiction in Johns' own memoirs becomes indistinguishable. The biographers include both versions of an actual incident in which Johns & TE Lawrence met, but thereupon later each wrote highly contradictory accounts. This underlines the danger in accepting too readily an author's own autobiographical accounts, when these are reworked for posterity and public consumption 15 to 20 years after the original events. (I do not believe the nun episode, pull the other leg please.)

While I have no knowledge of the co-authors' working routine when producing this work, I am left with a distinct impression that the contradictions evident in some of their views expressed at different places in the book could be explained by the co-authors not quite having both their clocks synchronised. This again somewhat echoes Johns' own idiosyncracies, whereby some of the Semitic stereotypes appearing in Johns' work in the mid-1930s either disappeared in the face of the holocaust, never to re-surface after 1939; or, in the case of racial slurs which continued to appear until the mid 1950s were finally rectified in sanitised reprints published after Johns' death. The original text of Biggles in Australia is never mentioned in this context, although Biggles and the Black Raider is examined. It remains unclear to what extent Johns (& Biggles) led, or trailed, or merely reflected attitudes within the English intelligentsia current at any particular point in time. The biographers have nothing to say in regards to Johns' (Biggles') persistent bigoted vilifications of all things Japanese. Somebody should have told Johns (1) English does not have an indigenous script, Japanese uses three distinct scripts, two of which are indigenous (2) cultured pearls are indistinguishable from natural pearls (3) Japanese saw technology surpasses European saw technology (at a time when Europeans were still living in thatched huts).

The biographers allow a few factual mistakes to creep into their text, more through carelessness than ignorance. Still I don't think it commendable that these should be apparent even to a mere fan, while at the same time getting past both the authors and their proof-reader/s. Among the illustrations facing p161 is a photograph of the book "Biggles" of the Camel Squadron, with the dustjacket depicting German biplanes under attack by Sopwith Camels. I find it bizarre, although telling, that the authors should allow an illustration in which a swastika has been painted on the fuselage of a 1918 German warplane to make it into the final publication.

The organisation of this edition varies from the original printing, with some of the material relating to the 1970s and 1980s controversy over political correctness in Johns' work being relegated from the front of the first edition to the back of the second edition. It is to be regretted that the co-authors did not see fit to go to the trouble to re-write the treatment of Mossyface and other earley (!) works in the original text of the book, instead leaving the subsequently discredited discussion from the first edition unchanged for the second edition. Ironically, in the second edition it is only after one reads the Afterword at the end of the book that one learns what one read in the middle of the book was inaccurate.

In assessing this book it would be helpful to know who sponsored its production.

The book would be appreciated by anyone with an interest in Johns, Biggles, Worrals & Co. But for a scholarly analysis of Biggles et alia as a cultural phenomenon mirroring British mores of the mid 20th century I think we must hope some other writer (or PhD English literature or sociology student) takes up the challenge. I look forward to theses on (a) the theme of cross-dressing in Biggles, Worrals and Steeley, (b) morbidity, mortality and the epidemiology of lung cancer and emphysema among Biggles readers, (c) cinema archetypes and the characters in the books of Johns, & (d) a ghost writing whodunnit - the problem with "Biggles Works it Out".