Abstract
The Camels Are Coming (1932) charts Lawrence of Arabia’s flight into the RAF in 1922 under the disapproving eye of recruitment officer, W. E. Johns. Whereas Lawrence transferred the heroic status previously reserved for the robes of an Arab prince onto the technocratic overalls of the aircraft engineer, Johns promoted mass air travel as the first editor of Popular Flying, in which First World War flying ace, Captain James Bigglesworth was first introduced to the general public. Through studies of The Mint (Lawrence’s day-book of RAF life published posthumously in 1955), Johns’s editorials, and The Camels Are Coming (Johns’s first collection of Biggles short stories), this chapter explores their conflicting representations of airmindedness. It argues they are at least as forward-looking as they are backward-looking in assessing the potentialities of winged flight.
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Machin, S. (2020). ‘The Camels Are Coming’: W. E. Johns, Biggles, and T. E. Lawrence’s Flight into the Air Force. In: McCluskey, M., Seaber, L. (eds) Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_14
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