BIGGLES: NO FRIEND OF RECONCILIATION

6 December 2017
Are boys still moved by Group Captain James Bigglesworth? Probably not, as none of W.E.
Johns' titles are available in my municipal library. As the council is infested with Greens, that
shouldn't surprise, given the aviator's derring-do in putting down an Aboriginal revolt.
I grew to maturity on Biggles books. Today the prose of Captain W.E. Johns seems a bit clunky
but I never minded this sort of thing:
“I would like a straight answer to a straight question,” he said.
“Have I ever done anything to suggest my answer would not be straight?” asked Biggles
evenly.
“No”
“Then why bring that up?”
In the later Biggles books, Captain W.E. Johns began inserting a preface.
In the First World War, Italy and Japan were our allies. In the Second World War, they
fought against us. And so on. The reader must therefore adjust himself to the period
concerned so that when the expression “The War” is used, he will understand which war is
meant.
When I curled up somewhere with Biggles Defies the Swastika while my mother and sister did the
washing up, there was no ambiguity about the allies and enemies. Count Erich von Stalhein was
not one of ours. But later the Boche, Tuaregs and Polynesian cannibals were quite likely to write
protest letters to The Times about discrimination and hate speech. Von Stalhein came from East
Germany, luckily for the narrative. Turn now to Biggles Buries the Hatchet, Chapter One, “A
Visitor Brings News”.
“Did he give his name?”
“Yes. Fritz Loewenhardt. Does that mean anything to you?”
‘Not a thing except it has a solid German ring about it.”
Biggles: “From East or West?”
“From East Berlin.”
A shadow of disapproval crossed Biggles’ face.
The visitor was Von Stalhein’s emissary. Von Stalhein had decided to join the Free World and
had been locked up by the East Germans. Biggles to the rescue…
Everyone waited, eyes on Von Stalhein.
‘Are you asking me to believe you took the appalling risk of coming here to rescue me purely
out of… shall I say sympathy or affection?’
“To you such a motive must appear strange,” said Biggles slowly. “First, strange though it
may seem, it may have been something like that, or I would not have come here. I shall
expect you to prove your gratitude by refraining from working against us in the future.”
“That remark was quite unnecessary,” stated Von Stalhein. “Your opinion of me may not be
very high but I would hardly be as base as that.”
Biggles most endearing trait was his unflappability. From Biggles and the Gun Runners:
‘The great thing in life is to keep your sense of humour,’ said Biggles, though getting his
[four-engined airliner] Constellation shot down over Southern Sudan by a trigger happy
pilot  of the Congolese Air Force was no laughing matter.
Biggles in his later years turned his hand to lower-grade detective work, like recovering a
gentleman farmers’ disappearing bulls. As Biggles puts it, “This racket is not being run by a few
country yokels. The crooks are highly organised - and dangerous.”</div></div
Just as dangerous was Biggles’ own drift to sententiousness. That story ends, “Up to a point it had
worked but the crooks made the mistake, as often made by criminals emboldened by success, of
repeating what may have seemed an easy way of making money.”
Although Biggles’ Britain did harbour a few crooks, it was a land where press barons knew how
to behave. In Biggles and the Black Peril he thwarts a Russian plot to raid England with a fleet of
30 giant flying boats landing at nine different bases on the English coast. The British Air Ministry
‘wasted no time’ and destroyed all but two of the fictional Soviet superplanes, but not a word of
this triumph of British arms and daring ever made it into the newspapers. “The Ministry had
denied any knowledge of the matter to the press, as it was bound to without running the risk of
starting a war … The newspapers have guessed there is a lot more behind it, of course, but in the
national interest they are allowing the thing to drop.”
Readers need to be alert for bogus versions of Biggles stories, such as
Suddenly they were airborne. Algy breathed a sigh of relief and eased himself out of the co-
pilot’s seat.
“It’s so hot in here,” Algy declared evenly. He began to unzip his flying jacket and soon
stood naked in the faint glow of the altimeter.
Ginger blushed hotly.
Algy returned his blush curtly.
Biggles also turned red and blushed and threw the twin-engined Jupiter into a tight turn over
the airfield.
“Does my body offend you?” queried Algy sharply.
Suddenly out of the clouds directly ahead of them, Ginger glimpsed the red flash of the
Heinkel fighter.
“Get your clothes on, Algy,” murmured Biggles curtly. But it was too late.
“My God, we’re done for!” screamed Ginger.
In case you hadn’t guessed, that’s a Monty Python parody, but in terms of cadence, dialogue and
aviation lingo it is indistinguishable from its inspiration.
Captain William Earl Johns (he was never a Captain, only Flying Officer) penned his more
action-packed yarns in the tranquillity of a Scottish farm. An interviewer wrote, “After a good
breakfast, he spends the rest of the day in the open air, often with a picnic lunch, even in winter.”
Less efficient at cheating death than his Biggles, he died in 1968 at 75, mid-way through his final
story, Biggles does some Homework, which shows Biggles at last preparing to retire, and meeting
his mixed-race replacement.
Johns was a real warrior, not an armchair one. He started with the army in the Great War,
including the trenches of Gallipoli and in Macedonia. He transferred while still a teenager to the
Royal Flying Corps and flew two-seater DH4s on photographic and bombing raids into Germany.
He was shot down, survived the crash by a miracle and was put in prison camps with a death
sentence hanging over his head, according to one biographer. He escaped twice and spent the rest
of the war in a punishment camp. Thereafter he was with the RAF till 1927, publishing his first
Biggles book in 1932. He re-enlisted with the RAF in 1939, and served in non-combat roles. Post-
war he joined the Air Police Unit at Scotland Yard. He drew on each slice of his career for a
torrent of at least 150 Biggles and other titles.
All this is just preamble to my real story, discovering a copy of Biggles in Australia last week
while fossicking in Victoria’s State Library, Latrobe Street. Who knew about such a title?
The ten libraries in my Moonee Valley and Moreland districts - both bastions of the Greens -
don’t have a single Biggles book, let alone this one about Australia. Statewide, libraries still have
about 200 Biggles titles, but no Biggles in Australia. However, five libraries have it included in an
omnibus book Biggles’ Dangerous Missions that includes three other Biggles titles. The libraries
involved, which are either unwitting or hideously racist - the former, surely - are Bayside,
Whitehorse, Goldfields, Mildura and Latrobe Library out Morwell way. Another version cited
carries the warning, unusually for a kids’ book, For Mature Readers. The librarians will be in
serious trouble if councillors find this book is on the shelves.
Biggles in Australia, published in 1955, must once have been quite popular, at least outside
Australia. Reginald Smythe, in his authoritative 1993 guide for youngsters, rates the book as
‘Very Good Indeed’. The National Library also has an Angus & Robertson 1981 copy featuring
‘music by Patrick Cook’. This had me stumped. Unlike Keating, the Musical, Biggles’
misadventures in Australia have never been converted to a melodic treat. In fact, Patrick Cook did
satirical illustrations for this version.
So let’s discover what Biggles in Australia is about. Warnings: (a) This article spoils the plot and
(b) includes racist language which I do not endorse in any way and cite only out of literary
necessity. The tone is set by the frontispiece illustration, showing an Aboriginal in loincloth
hurling a weird spear at Biggles. Captain Johns refers in the text to a three-barbed spear and the
artist1 has translated this into a Neptune trident, hardly daywear for a kangaroo hunter.
Another illustration shows Aborigines dancing around a campfire, ‘shaking their spears, yelling
and stamping’. A third is innocuous but features the author’s curious phrasing: “’You’re in a great
hurry,’ bantered Biggles” [to Von Stalhein, no less].
The book opens conventionally (for the Biggles genre) with Biggles & Co asleep in their Otter
amphibian in a lagoon off the Kimberley coast. They come under attack from a school of giant
squids on holiday from their deep-sea habitat. One wraps its 20-foot tentacles around the Otter but
is fended off with a bullet to the tea-plate-sized eye. This chapter is aptly titled, “An
Uncomfortable Night.”
The plot of Biggles in Australia involves a posse of Iron Curtain thugs, led by von Stalhein,
setting up a communist fifth column in Australia. The spy ring is centred on a ‘trouble-making
agitator’ who is a ‘red hot Communist of the loud-mouthed type’, namely an electrician from
Perth called Adamsen. This pricked my interest, as most of Perth’s red-hot Communist agitators
dropped in on my family home in Willagee in the 1950s and I certainly recall some loud
arguments about implementation of the revolutionary struggle.
Von Stalhein’s targets cover a broad field, including the Montebello nuclear tests, uranium
deposits, Woomera rocket testing, fomenting strikes and creation of a network of Red spies
‘against the time when they will be needed’.
But Von Stalhein’s most contentious task is to arm disaffected Aborigines in northern Australia
with rifles and grenades and set them off on a Kenyan Mau-Mau type uprising against white
civilisation. In Biggles’ concluding words, after thwarting his arch-enemy:
The plan was to spread a network of agents and operatives all over the continent both to spy
on secret experimental work with atomic and guided missiles, and undermine the country’s
economy by the infiltration of agitators into the native settlements as had been done
elsewhere. When the trouble started, certain selected blacks were to be provided with
firearms. Behind the background of disorder [foreign] scientists [arriving by lugger] were to
explore the outback for minerals useful in nuclear research.
During the book, more detail has been suggested:
Biggles: “[Air Controller] West told me this top corner of Australia used to be called the
triangle of death on account of the ferocity of the natives. Even today, with native reserves
and all that, they’re not to be trusted. That goes for the half-civilised blacks who work up the
Daly for the white planters … You’ll call me an alarmist, I know, but it occurred to me that
this is just how the trouble began in Malaya and Kenya.”
Bill [policeman] was staring. “Do you mean Mau-Mau, and that sort of thing?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
Bill: “I still don’t see how it could happen here.”
“Neither, I imagine, could the settlers who took their wives and kids to outlying farms in
Kenya, and now never move without a gun in each hand … Last night, after that wop had
flung a spear at me, the idea suddenly came to me that the set-up in the sparsely populated
1
The illustrations are attributed to ‘Studio Stead”. There’s still a Yorkshire architect firm of that name
that might have taken on the job.
 areas of Australia is exactly the same as in East Africa … It only needs one or two people to
walk about telling the natives that white men are a lot of thieves who have swindled them out
of their land and turned them into slaves, and the next thing is murder … This dirty business
is all part of the Cold War. It has worked in Malaya, Kenya, Indonesia, Burma and all over
the Middle East, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t happen here.” Bill’s expression had changed.
“I never looked at it like that,” he admitted soberly.
The policeman estimates there are 50,000 full-bloods and ‘a lot of mixed breeds’ - enough to ‘do
a lot of mischief’.
Sure enough, the blacks soon after club and spear a prospector to death for his rifle. “Now,
perhaps, you see what I mean,” Biggles concludes.
The prospector had been generous to the ungrateful naked warriors.
Biggles: “That cuts no ice with blacks when the savage inside ‘em bursts through the thin
skin of friendliness they pick up from contact with whites. More than one doctor has been
murdered by the man he’s just cured…If I know anything about natives, that bunch is all
keyed up to jump. They themselves, with their animal brains, don’t know yet which way
they’ll go.”
Towards the book’s climax, policeman Bill addresses a band:
“What yabber-yabber belong you? You been savvy what happen longa here?”
The blacks remained like graven images, their brutish eyes, unwinking, on the policeman …
While Bill’s eyes were on them, like animals, they hesitated to do anything; but the instant he
turned, they acted. With shrill whistles and strange cries they began to fan out.
Ginger deals with the threat by revving the great engines of their Halifax bomber transport to send
a wall of slipstream dirt their way.
The northern natives, author Johns says to my mystification, comprise ‘Peedongs’ in the scrub
country and ‘Myalls’ in the jungle. Bill says, “They’re all pretty wild, but the Arnhem Landers are
the worst. Until recently, it was almost certain death to go near them.” After the team captures one
black and ‘two half-breeds’ at rifle-point, “there were a few critical moments with the blacks
outside … they stood their ground, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as their primitive brains strove
to keep pace with these unusual events.”
Says the party’s civilian pilot, Cozens, “No white man in his right mind would trust some of these
black fellows behind him. They don’t know what they’re doing half the time. People who find
excuses for them say they act on impulse. The sight of a gun is enough to make ‘em want to shoot
somebody and they can’t resist the temptation. They don’t care who they shoot.”
Ginger says, “Didn’t I read something about an expedition going into Arnhem Land to look
for a white woman who was supposed to have been captured by the blacks - after a shipwreck
on the coast, or something?” (This seems to derive from Eliza Fraser, from a Queensland
shipwreck in 1836, who wrote of being captured by the Badtjala people. Fraser Island is
named after her).
Later, minus Biggles who is in Darwin, the party flies in to the Daly Flats settlement, finding it
liberally strewn with corpses of whites and their black ‘houseboys’, all speared or shot. It
appeared that a policeman had been shot first, from behind, ‘and the sight of blood was all that
was necessary to send them crazy. They’re like that.’
Ginger’s party at the hut is then ambushed by ‘scores of the devils’ who are in a frenzy and ‘mad
to kill’. The party responds with bullets in a scenario reminiscent of Rorke’s Drift or your average
climax to an old Western movie. The affray gets it own chapter headed, ‘The Battle of Daly
Flats’.
The battle begins with the natives doing a war dance outside. The pilot Cozens tells Ginger,
“Shoot at anything that moves.” The natives set Cozen’s plane on fire, cutting off any retreat.
Ginger is perplexed by the horror of their predicament, ‘in a country he had imagined to be as safe
as England. But then, he reflected, the people in Kenya must have felt like that before the Mau-
Mau trouble started.’ Their suspicions are confirmed on finding a locked room filled with cheap
rifles for distribution to the dark insurgents.
Team-mate Bertie worries that Biggles may arrive unwittingly and ‘step right into the custard’ -
this being as close as W.E. Johns gets to use of profanity. But the first visitors to approach the
scene are Von Stalhein’s emissaries, including two blacks carrying parcels on their heads,
African-style. Ginger, ever gallant, shouts to warn his party, using that resounding cliché, “The
blacks are on the warpath!”
W.E. Johns prose gets surprisingly flaccid as the battle rages, as if he’s nodding off after port
before bedtime.
Cozens must have seen something that aroused his suspicions; or it may have been the very
absence of movement that told him what was about to happen; at all events, from the open
door towards which they had all moved, he suddenly shouted: ‘Look out!’
He was too late. In an instant the air was full of flying spears, thrown by blacks who had
appeared from nowhere, as the saying is.
Ginger’s party lets fly with volleys of bullets, downing two or three blacks. Von Stalhein’s second
in command cops it with a spear in his back through to his heart, but Ginger and two helpers each
put a bullet in the assailant. We aren’t told how many others they fell, only that ‘There’s about a
score left’.
The remote Daly River settlement now gets more like Bourke Street Mall at lunchtime, for
Biggles is about to turn up with a colonel and three offsiders. Ginger’s party fling tear gas
grenades - conveniently found in the house – to enable Biggles to land.
’The blacks have gone mad,’ Ginger told him tersely. ‘Hark at ‘em! They’ve killed I don’t
know how many people.’
But the blacks ‘quietly faded away into their jungle retreats’ and it turns out Von Stalhein per se
was not with his troops, thus living to fight another day in the next Biggles adventure. The list of
communist would-be fifth columnists is discovered ‘and the entire plot exposed, although for
security reasons the soft pedal was kept on the story.’
Biggles’ troupe reboards their Halifax and make a leisurely return to London. Their assistant, the
pilot Cozens, ‘soon got another job and is now flying a Quantas [sic] Constellation.’
The book’s last para concludes
So, taking things all round, the only people who came to any harm from Biggles’s visit to
Australia were those whose sinister conspiracy had taken him there. Which was as it should
be.
I’ve just now discovered that the book was first published as a ten-part serial in a British kids’
magazine from February to May 1955. That accounts for its see-sawing chapter endings.
As a libertarian I don’t want librarians burning the book, but maybe they should keep it in a
locked cabinet and release it only to adults. The adults might be further limited only to those who
have memorised an Acknowledgement to Traditional Owners.