Biggles

by John Pearson

  BIGGLES

  The Authorized

  Biography

  JOHN PEARSON

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  1 An Indian Boyhood

  2 Biggles Learns to Fly

  3 Women and War

  4 Peace

  5 Flying High

  6 Gone to Timbuctoo

  7 The Great Race

  8 The Fuehrer’s Lady

  9 Second Time Round

  10 Biggles and the Mafia

  11 The Missing Missile

  POSTSCRIPT

  Introduction

  At first we knew him simply as the new tenant of Ferndene Cottage, an unlovely little red-brick house standing four-square behind its overgrown privet hedge on the far side of the London Road from where we live.

  The cottage had stood empty for some time, so we were naturally inquisitive about the new arrival, but it was some time before we learned the identity of the red-faced, rather portly little man with the leather-patched tweed jacket who would emerge from Ferndene Cottage at 8.30 punctually each morning, taking his pug-dog for a walk. In Camberley we havea lot of pug-dogs and a lot of retired army people. They seem to go together, so we assumed our newest neighbour with his jaunty walk and weather-beaten countenance must be one of them.

  It was the vicar, our walking social register, who finally put us right.

  ‘And how are you getting on with our celebrated new neighbour?’ he asked my wife.

  She must have looked surprised, for he went on, Wing-Commander Bigglesworth. Your husband must have read of his adventures when he was a boy — you know, Biggles, the great schoolboy hero of the R.A.F. I’m quite determined to persuade him to open the village fête. He should be quite a draw.’

  But Biggles did not open the vicar’s fête — nor anything else in Camberley that year. Instead, he seemed distinctly anxious to keep himself to himself, and while we were all quite proud to have a genuine celebrity in our midst, we soon accepted him as a recluse, our interest waned, and that was that. And then, one wet November evening, I was walking home and passed him near the church. He was carrying a twelve-bore shotgun and had half a dozen pigeons slung across his shoulder.

  ‘Good shooting, Wing-Commander!’ I called out. At first he seemed surprised to be addressed like this, but he stopped and instantly eased up when I said something about how hard I always found it to shoot wood-pigeon.

  ‘Simple enough, when you’ve got the knack,’ he said. ‘I only do it to keep my eye in, don’t you know?’ There was a slightly awkward pause and he added, ‘I suppose your wife couldn’t make use of them, could she? My housekeeper can’t be bothered with them, and they generally end up in the dustbin.’

  I thanked him, but on the condition that he came and helped us eat them. He seemed quite pleased at the idea and two nights later he arrived for dinner. And so began a friendship that endured until his death, some three years later.

  The truth, as I soon discovered, was that around this time he had grown bored with his retirement and was really rather lonely. He had retired to the country on his doctor’s orders, but it didn’t really suit him. He owned an elderly MG, in which he would drive to London once or twice a week. As well as shooting, he would fish a little. ‘Used to do it as a boy,’ he told us. ‘Now that I can’t play golf it keeps me out of mischief I suppose.’

  I couldn’t think what mischief he was likely to get up to — certainly not with his old housekeeper, Mrs Roberts. She was a frail-looking, gap-toothed, rather ghostly lady. When my wife got to know her she would often grumble on about the Wing-Commander’s habits — his untidiness, his fussiness about his food, his cigarettes and his uncertain temper. But with us he was always kindness itself and soon became a regular visitor.

  Although he often brought us pigeon — and partridges and pheasants, now that the season had begun — what he really liked to eat was steak, and what my wife called ‘nursery food’ — fishcakes and shepherd’s pie and sausages and mash. His favourite food of all was toad-in-the-hole, particularly the crispy bits around the edges of the dish. Apart from a couple of pink gins before dinner, he would drink very little. What he apparently enjoyed most of all in life now was talking, particularly with the children present. At first I never knew quite how many of his tales were true and how much was pure fantasy, but he was certainly a splendid raconteur when in the mood, and after dinner he would sit for hours, smoking his disgusting pipe and reminiscing about his life. Whenever this occurred it was impossible to get the children off to bed.

  All this was rather strange, for to the world at large, Biggles — as I have to call him — remained secretive to a degree about his life. I remember seeing him one morning chasing two news reporters down the garden path of Ferndene Cottage with his twelve-bore. All they had wanted was an interview to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of his legendary old squadron, No. 266 of the Royal Flying Corps, but for Biggles it had been unforgivable of them to have tried to beard him in retirement in this way.

  ‘Gutter journalists,’ he called them, when he told us all about them later, ‘prying into people’s private lives. They’d all be horsewhipped if I had my way with them.’ But he said this with a twinkle in his eye, and certainly exhibited no inhibitions about telling us the details of his private life — quite the contrary.

  He enjoyed these evening reminiscences by the fire; they offered him at least some relief from the boredom of his life in Camberley. His present state of health depressed him, for like many very active men who had always taken perfect health for granted, Biggles found it hard to cope with ill health when it came. His back used to trouble him a lot and he was slightly diabetic. His eyes bothered him as well.

  ‘Doing my best to fight off the Grim Reaper!’ was the invariable reply if one asked how he was — but once he was embarked upon his stories of the past he seemed to forget all his present troubles. He even managed to look different, for as he talked he was re-living scenes from a life he had obviously enjoyed. His hazel eyes used to gleam and he had an air of such gusto and absorption in his tale, that it was just as if a younger, more adventurous self had taken over.

  As far as we could judge, Biggles held little back. He frequently referred to his outlandish family, his childhood in India, his schooldays and his earliest experiences in the air. My children were avid readers of the Biggles books, and would interrogate him mercilessly, making him go over particular adventures, asking for extra details and making him repeat the circumstances of some favourite incident. And so, from these winter sessions round the fire, I learned the outlines of the story of his life. Much was familiar already from the writings of Captain W. E. Johns, and this I have tended to compress or refer to in passing in the narrative that follows. But there was much that seemed totally unknown and it is this completely new material that I have concentrated on in my attempt to write the biography of this most remarkable and kindly man of action.

  Where Biggles’ own version of events differed from those of Captain Johns, I have naturally deferred to Biggles. I found that Johns had used his ‘author’s licence’somewhat freely to adapt the adventures of his hero to suit his young readership, and had at times skilfully changed the circumstances to fit his tales. In the interests of good storytelling, Biggles approved of this at the time.

  1

  An Indian Boyhood

  ‘I’m a Victorian and proud of it,’ Biggles used to say, ‘born in May 1899,’ — and in a number of important ways Biggles remained a genuine Victorian all his life. He was what one might call ‘old-fashioned’, in his somewhat strait-laced attitude to life, the emphasis he always placed on ‘manners’ with the young, and his views on morality. Also, his whole life as an adventurer and pioneer air pilot had more in common with the career
s of the tough empire-builders of the old Queen-Empress than with the ‘softies’, as he called them, among the young men of today, who incurred his wrath.

  His family traditions also helped make him what he was. The name Bigglesworth, as he took great pains to explain when asked about it, started as an attempt to anglicise the Flemish, Beiggelschwarz, for one of Biggles’ far-off paternal ancestors had been a Dutchman of this name who settled in Aberdeen at the beginning of the eighteenth century, set up as a naval factor and married a local girl. She was a MacGregor — Biggles was always rather proud of that — so that from the start the Bigglesworths were an unusual mixture of wild Highlanders and dour Flemings from the flattest countryside in Europe. The mixed strain soon produced a number of unusual characters, wild self-denying men with a savage knack of embarking on lost causes. ‘The nineteenth-century Bigglesworths,’ Biggles once remarked, ‘were generally considered slightly mad.’ One of his great-great-uncles was a missionary in India who lost his faith and ended as a fakir on a bed of nails in Rajasthan. Another was an explorer who set out to find the source of the Nile in a canoe. A third was last seen in Brazil, searching for a golden city. ‘The Bigglesworths,’ he said, with something like a note of sadness in his voice, ‘tended to be losers.’

  One of the few who wasn’t, and the only Bigglesworth to reach the history books, was Biggles’ celebrated uncle, Brigadier General ‘Bonzo’ Bigglesworth, who battled as a subaltern at Majuba Hill, helped save the day at Omdurman, deposited an arm at Mafeking, and left the army in disgust when the Boer War ended. He bought a small estate in Norfolk — a run-down country house with a few acres of indifferent farmland and the shooting rights across a stretch of woodland — and there he stayed until his death in 1925. ‘The ideal unimproving landlord’, as Biggles called him.

  As a boy, home from India, Biggles often stayed with him, and he spoke affectionately of the old one-armed fire-eater he remembered. ‘Treated me like a son and I was a good deal fonder of him than my real father,’ he confessed. And, by all accounts, Biggles and the General had a lot in common.

  The old man was an enthusiastic and alarming motorist whose red de Dion was for many years the terror of the Norfolk lanes. He also had the perpetual schoolboy’s love of gadgetry, and his best-known inventions were an explosive kite for siege warfare, an inflatable saddle, which he fondly hoped would revolutionise amphibious operations in the field, and ‘the Bigglesworth Terrestrial Torpedo’.

  This alarming weapon, powered by a small Steadman petrol engine, could carry several hundredweight of high explosive for over half a mile at a speed of twenty miles an hour. One of Biggles’ early memories of holidays in Norfolk was of a field test in which the torpedo went off course, all but demolishing the stable block. The General was apparently delighted at this proof of its effectiveness and never ceased to blame ‘those flaming blockheads in Whitehall’ for not adopting it when the Great War broke out. ‘Could have shortened it by several years,’ he claimed. Biggles used to laugh about this, and his uncle’s antics, but I always thought he probably inherited something of the General’s attitude to ‘bureaucrats and damn-fool politicians’ from those early days.

  By all accounts, Biggles’ father, John Henry Bigglesworth, was utterly unlike his elder brother and Biggles rarely talked about him, except with bitterness. A sober, quiet, studious man, he settled early for a life as an administrator with the Indian Civil Service, rather than compete with his famous brother’s reputation by entering the cavalry. He was romantically good-looking, if a trifle dull, and six months after his arrival Calcutta witnessed the one exciting gesture of his life, when he eloped with the daughter of the Governor of Bengal, nineteen-year-old Catherine Lacey.

  ‘Hideous mistake’ was Biggles’ verdict on the marriage on the one occasion when he brought himself to mention it to us. Grandpapa Lord Lacey was an exacting martinet, remembered — if at all, these days — for the speed with which he put down the Jumna Riots of 1884, and he attempted much the same tactics with his wayward daughter. Here he was less successful. For Catherine Lacey proved of sterner stuff than the malleable Bengalis, claimed that she was pregnant, and insisted on her right to wed the now appalled John Henry Bigglesworth. Lord Lacey never saw his daughter again, and the offending newly-weds were speedily despatched to Garhwal, a dreary district, south of West Bengal. Eight months later, in January 1894, their first child, Biggles’ elder brother, Charles, was born.

  John Henry Bigglesworth’s career never recovered from the blunder of his marriage. He seems to have attempted to make the best of things in the approved, long-suffering Scottish manner, and was to be a conscientious Assistant Commissioner, governing an area half the size of Wales. But with that influential unforgiving father-in-law in Bengal, he had no chance of getting any further. The Indians he ruled respected him. His wife, alas, did not. Her elopement had been an escape from the boredom of Calcutta. How much more boring was her life now as the wife of a meticulously-minded government official stuck in a bungalow in Garhwal.

  I soon realised, from chance remarks that Biggles dropped, that there must have been something that went terribly wrong early in his childhood. (Indeed, attentive readers of the Biggles’ books might have guessed as much.) But it was some time before I found out exactly what had happened.

  Biggles was always reticent about his parents, but it was not hard to get the outlines of what was clearly a most wretched marriage — that imperious, impossible mother with her ‘vapours’ and her sulks and rages, the disappointed father who increasingly took refuge in his work, and young James Bigglesworth bearing the brunt of much domestic misery.

  Clearly, he adored his mother, but as so often is the case with adoring second sons, she preferred his elder brother, Charles. For Charles, just five years older, was everything that James was not — big-boned, athletic, and a hearty, cheerful boy whose easy manner and good looks earned him friends everywhere. In painful contrast, James was undersized and shy. (Biggles showed us a few photographs surviving from this period of a white-faced, skinny little boy with straggly fair hair and melancholy eyes.) Then when his brother Charles was away in England at his boarding school, this vulnerable small boy was hit by the tragedy that changed his life. The Bigglesworths became involved in scandal.

  His mother had just reached those dangerous female crossroads of the early thirties when she met her fate — in the rolling eyes and eager haunches of Captain the Honourable ‘Banger’ Thomas of the 45th Rawalpindi Horse. The Captain was undoubtedly a bounder and probably a cad. All that Biggles could remember of him was his waxed moustache, his gleaming riding-boots, and the stench of the Trichinopoly cigars he always smoked. (All his life, Biggles seems to have believed that a liking for cigars was a tell-tale symptom of a man who could not be trusted with a woman.) But for all his faults — or possibly because of them — the Captain had no difficulty captivating the sprightly Mrs Bigglesworth.

  One can picture all too easily the hackneyed stages of this tropical romance — hot nights on the verandah with the cloying scent of frangipani in the air and languid evenings at the Polo Club with nothing but the mournful rhythm of the punkah to distract the lovers. Then, the whispered gossip in the bored society around the Club, the gathering suspicions of the neglected husband, the jealousies, denials, desperate affirmations, all of which culminated in that moment of high melodrama when, for the second time in Catherine Lacey’s life, she bolted.

  Biggles was eleven, and his brother Charles, in England, was about to enter Sandhurst. Everybody’s sympathy went out to the abandoned husband, and no one seems to have given much attention to the small boy who was suddenly without the mother he adored. But when all possible allowances are made for John Henry Bigglesworth’s hurt feelings, the fact remains that he behaved quite dreadfully towards his son. Even in old age, Biggles could not quite forgive him. ‘He told me she had died, and never spoke of her again.’

  This was a crucial point in Biggles’ life, and he would bear the
scars of it forever. His grief was pitiable, and for several months was so extreme that he fell seriously ill. (This was the source of that mysterious illness Captain Johns refers to in his brief, carefully censored references to this period. Not unnaturally Biggles never wished the facts to be revealed while he was alive.) The boy’s life was actually despaired of for some while, and when he did recover, he remained extremely delicate, always prone to malarial fevers, stomach upsets and prostrating headaches.

  He finally grew out of them, of course, and the natural toughness of the Bigglesworth stock ultimately kept him free of illness till his seventies. But in the long run, the most serious effect of his mother’s disappearance was on his emotional development. He once admitted — in one of his rare, unguarded moments — that he was obsessed by the memory of his mother. He was intelligent enough to sense that there was far more to her ‘death’ than the adults told him, but never dared to ask his father for the truth. He said he always felt she was alive and used to dream of finding her and being reunited with her in some far-off place. But he was also naturally tormented by the certainty that she had abandoned him. He had no way of knowing what had really happened. At times he blamed himself, but nothing could alter his belief that this one woman he had really loved had callously betrayed him. Throughout his life Biggles would always be a wary man where women were concerned.

  It was his mother’s disappearance that also helped to turn young Biggles to adventure early on in life — if only to escape the boredom and the loneliness of life at home. Had his mother been there, this could not have happened, but with his father finding his relief in overwork — and possibly in drink, according to one hint Biggles dropped — he was left more or less to his own devices, and before long was escaping into the rich, exciting world beyond the narrow confines of the Club, the schoolroom, and the houses of his father’s European friends. He soon found his way around the maze of little streets that made up the Indian quarter of the town, and grew to love its noise and smells and teeming sense of life, so different from the dull security of home. Then he explored the countryside, with its dusty villages and ancient tracks that led to the forests and the hills. Here, for the first time, in the middle of this great sub-continent, he sensed the vastness of the world, and used to envy the kite-birds sailing so effortlessly in the pale blue skies above him. He would go off for days alone, searching for he knew not what, and finally return exhausted to his father’s bungalow. His father rarely noticed his absence.