of their own copy-book.”’10 In another, Biggles notes an ‘Albatros, wrapped in a sheet of flame…the doomed pilot leaping into space even as he passed’.11
It is not only Germans who die. Getting killed is presented as almost inevitable. An important and enduring message, one the young readers took to heart, was that there was no point dwelling on it. ‘One of the most characteristic features of the Great War,’ Johns wrote in the Foreword to Biggles in France, ‘was the manner in which humour and tragedy so often went hand in hand. At noon a practical joke might set the officers’ mess rocking with mirth. By sunset, or perhaps within the hour, the perpetrator of it would be gone for ever, fallen to an unmarked grave in the shellholes of No Mans Land.’12
The Biggles stories are practically documentary in their starkness, as good a guide to the air war over the trenches as the non-fictional memoirs. Their audiences were absorbed and inspired by them. They changed lives. Reading them reinforced Pete Brothers’s decision to seek a short-service commission in the RAF. He found them ‘beautiful stories that enthralled me and excited me and made me want to emulate them’. At the Lancashire Aeroclub before taking up a short-service commission in January 1936, he had been pleased to find his instructor had been a Sopwith Camel pilot in the war.13
Cinematic portrayals of the air were equally frank. The most successful was Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn, David Niven and Basil Rathbone, which came out in 1938. The 59th Squadron is based on a sticky sector of the Western Front. Sixteen men have gone in a fortnight. Replacements arrive, fresh from a few weeks at flying school. Orders to send them up against hardened Germans come by telephone from senior officers, comfortably quartered miles behind the lines. New names are chalked up on the duty blackboard to be wiped off within an hour. Kit-bags are returned home without ever being unpacked. The Daily Express praised the film’s ‘lack of false sentiment or mock heroics’ and called it ‘one of the best and bitterest melodramas about men and planes’. It was a box-office hit and was seen, often several times, by hundreds of the pilots who fought in 1940. No one was put off. It was the glamour, camaraderie and romance of flying that pulled them back to the local fleapits, not the message of waste and futility. By this time every young man in Britain was facing a prospect of early extinction. Dying in the air might be awful, but it was better than dying on the ground.
With the expansion programme, thousands of young men were now being given a choice in how they would fight the next war. Before it began, the RAF recruited annually about 300 pilots and 1,600 airmen. Between 1935 and 1938 the average RAF intake was 4,500 and 40,000 airmen and apprentices. Air Ministry officials appealed directly to schools for recruits and advertised in the flying magazines and popular newspapers the young men they were looking for might be expected to read. One that appeared on the front page of the Daily Express, adorned by a drawing of three Hurricanes, promised ‘the life is one that will appeal to all men who wish to adopt an interesting and progressive career…leave is on a generous scale…applicants must be physically fit and single but no previous flying experience is necessary’. Pay, in cash and kind, was set at between £340 and £520 a year. A £300 gratuity was payable after four years’ service, or £500 after six years. Age limits were set between seventeen and a half and twenty-eight. The educational qualification was school certificate standards, although ‘an actual certificate is not necessary’.
Pat Hancock, a mechanically minded eighteen-year-old from Croydon, was at Wimbledon Technical College when he saw an advertisement in the Daily Express. ‘The ministry – bless it – was offering commissions to suitable young gentlemen – four years, and at the end if you survived you got a magnificent lump sum of £300, which was really a lot in those days. I pounced on it and sweet talked my father and mother into allowing me to apply.’14
Parental permission was needed if the applicant was under twenty-one, and many pilots seem to have faced, at first at least, family opposition. Flying was undeniably dangerous. In an era when men chose a profession, trade or occupation and tended to stick with it for the rest of their working life, it offered a very uncertain career. Despite popular enthusiasm, commercial aviation had been slow to expand. Air travel was confined to the rich. RFC pilots who hoped to make their livings flying in peacetime were mostly disappointed. Arguments were needed to overcome the objections. Billy Drake misunderstood the terms and thought the RAF would pay him an annuity of £300, a detail which persuaded his parents to grant their approval.
Geoffrey Page’s distant and authoritarian father summoned him to his London club when he heard of his plans to apply for Cranwell. Flying was the family business. Page’s uncle ran Handley Page, a leading British aircraft manufacturer. Over tea his father told him he had ‘spoken to your uncle at length about your desire to be a pilot and he has advised me strongly against it. Pilots, he tells me, are two a penny. Hundreds are chasing a handful of jobs.’ He refused to pay for the ‘stupidity’ of pursuing an RAF career. Page’s mother pleaded with him not to take up flying. Page rarely saw his father and resented the intervention strongly. Later he decided it had been motivated by concern. His father had lost a younger brother in the war, shot down and killed over the North Sea while serving in the Royal Navy Air Service.15 Page eventually made his own way into the RAF, via the London University Air Squadron.
The RAF set out to be meritocratic in its search for recruits, and Tedder, as director of training, decided to cast the net wide in the search for the best candidates. The requirement to have reached school certificate level meant boys from poor families who could not afford to keep their children on until sixteen were theoretically excluded. The rules were not always strictly imposed and officials occasionally used their discretion.
Bob Doe’s father was a gardener on the Surrey estate of the editor of the News of the World. Doe left school at fourteen without passing any exams and got a job as an office boy at the paper’s headquarters in Bouverie Street. One lunchtime he walked over to the Air Ministry headquarters in Kingsway and announced he wanted a short-service commission. ‘I was passed from office to office. They were very disapproving when they found I’d passed no exams. Then I found myself in front of this elderly chap with lots of braid on his uniform and he seemed to like me.’16 When he discovered that Doe had already joined the RAFVR and done seventy-five hours’ flying, any lack of formal education was forgotten. Doe sat the entrance exam, and with some coaching from his Air Ministry sponsor, got through. Doe’s case was exceptional. Most entrants had passed their school certificate and had gone to fee-paying or grammar schools.
One obvious source for the sort of healthy, uncomplicated, modern-minded young men the RAF was seeking was the Empire. Senior officers were sent overseas to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa to supervise selection. The decision to leave home to cross the world at a time when war seemed to be stirring again in Europe was a dramatic one. Yet the populations of the colonies felt strong sentiments of loyalty and respect towards Britain. The RAF appeal offered broader horizons to ambitious and adventurous young airmen as well as touching a sense of obligation. The response was enthusiastic. On catching their first sight of the mother country, many of them wondered whether they had made the right choice. Alan Deere left Auckland in September 1937 aboard the SS Rangitane and arrived at Tilbury docks at the start of an English winter. ‘The cold discomfort of the railway carriage and the flat, treeless acres of southern Essex were depressing reminders of the warmth and sunshine of far-off New Zealand. We stared in amazement at the grim rows of East End houses, pouring their smoke into the clouded atmosphere, and were appalled by the bustle and grime of Liverpool Street Station, so different from the luxurious gateway to the London of our dreams.’17
Despite the relative elasticity of the RAF approach, the selection process was thorough and demanding. After the written test and a strict medical, candidates were summoned to a board and questioned by a panel of officers. The examiners were looking for some technical knowledge and evidence of keenness. Enthusiasm for sports was usually taken as strong proof of the latter. At first, short-service entrants were sent off immediately to an RAF flying training centre, but the existing facilities could not cope with the wave of new recruits and Tedder decided to pay civilian flying schools to give ab initio instruction.
The new boys learned in two-seaters, Avro Tutors and