successfully conveyed the way many flyers, with their strange mixture of flippancy and
idealism, behaved during the First World War. When Johns had exhausted his war
experiences, he turned his knowledge of aviation to producing more conventional
adventure plots, dealing with the adventures of Biggles and his war-time companions
as, for example, they foil criminals or search for treasure in the Brazilian jungle. But
although Johns wrote primarily to give entertainment to his young readers, like earlier
writers of adventure stories he was always conscious of the need to educate them too—‘I
teach a boy to be a man’, he said, ‘I teach sportsmanship according to the British idea...
I teach that decent behaviour wins in the end as a natural order of things. I teach the spirit
of team work, loyalty to the Crown, the Empire and to rightful authority’ (quoted in
Trease 1965:80). By the time of his death Johns had written over a hundred books about
Biggles, who remains popular.
The events of the First and Second World Wars influenced more than the technical
content of adventure stories, however. The massive loss of life, eclipsing anything seen
in the nineteenth century, clearly affected society’s attitude to wars in general, and, after
the shocks of the Somme and Gallipoli, Dunkirk and Singapore, many found it
increasingly difficult to believe in the incontestable superiority of British arms. The
growth of international organisations, such as the United Nations, and radio and
television’s revelation of the world as a global village, together with the swift liquidation
of the British Empire from 1947 onwards also removed the imperial basis of many
enterprises. The ideology of an expanding and self-confident British empire, which had
underpinned the rise of the nineteenth-century adventure story, was gradually eroded,
and its replacement by a troubled, multiracial and democratic humanism sought new
forms of story-telling.
Despite the popularity of such writers as Westerman and Johns, even in the 1930s
some writers had found it impossible to produce stories with the same formulaic
confidence as their Victorian predecessors. Geoffrey Trease, for example, in such
historical tales as Bows Against the Barons (1934) had tried to write more realistically
about ‘Merrie England’ and portrayed Robin Hood’s battles against the aristocracy as
tragically doomed. Arthur Ransome (1884–1967) developed the tradition of the realistic
adventure story created by Jefferies and Hardy by writing about the adventures that
ordinary middle-class children might credibly experience, especially when sailing, in
such books as Swallows and Amazons (1930). Katherine Hull (1921–1977) and Pamela
Whitlock (1920–1982) followed suit with The Far Distant Oxus, in 1937, a story set on
Exmoor.
The historical story took on a new lease of life in the 1950s, perhaps inspired by
Trease’s pioneering work. Gillian Avery, Hester Burton, Cynthia Harnett, Kathleen
Peyton, Rosemary Sutcliff and Barbara Willard all produced interesting and often
distinguished work, frequently taking different perspectives on history from earlier
writers, and engaging with the lives of the underprivileged, for example, rather than the
great and well-born. Rosemary Sutcliff (1920–1992) chose a disabled hero in her Bronze
Age Warrior Scarlet (1958), and Leon Garfield portrayed the life of an eighteenth-century
pickpocket in Smith (1967). More recently Jan Needle has produced a powerful account
of the navy in Nelson’s time from the point of view of two pressed sailors in his dark A
Fine Boy for Killing (1979).
332 SHAPING BOYHOOD: EMPIRE BUILDERS AND ADVENTURERS