THE TWO BOOKS W.E. JOHNS SIGNED TO
GEOFFREY DORMAN
I bought “Short Sorties” and “Biggles in the Blue” together
as a pair, via eBay, from the Aviation Bookshop in Tunbridge Wells.
In “Short Sorties” Johns has signed “To Geoffrey
Dorman from Bill Johns – with warmest regards”.
Johns was known as “Bill” to his friends.
In “Biggles in the Blue” Johns has signed “With happy
memories, one old timer to another – To Geoff from the author July 1954 W. E.
Johns”
In this book, Johns has even taken the time to add a
little sketch of a bi-plane flying through clouds.
So who was Geoffrey Dorman?
Geoffrey
Charles Herbert Dorman (July 7th, 1894 - 1968) was born in
London. A Second Lieutenant in the
Royal Engineers, he gained his "ticket" at the Military School
(Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, England) on 2nd June 1915, on a Maurice
Farman Biplane.
On 16th
November 1916, Lieutenant Geoffrey Dorman took off from Shoreham in a Royal
Aircraft Factory F.E.2b with the intention of heading West along the South
Coast to the airfield at Gosport (Hampshire, England). Not long into the
flight, however, a dense sea fog formed and as his engine was also
"misbehaving", Lieutenant Dorman decided "it would be best to
try and land". Spotting a suitable area of farmland, He put his aircraft
down near the West Sussex village of Tangmere.
Evidently
aware of what he had stumbled across, his subsequent report on the incident
included a suggestion that the site would be eminently suitable for an aerodrome.
Within twelve months, construction had started - and so was born the legend of
R.A.F. Tangmere.
Geoffrey
Dorman became a well-known writer specialising in aviation. His publications
include: Fifty years Fly Past (1951) and Shattering
Silence (1955). Fifty Years Fly
Past is basically a review of the first fifty years of aviation. The book is most interesting because Geoffrey
Dorman was intimately involved and had met many of the people he wrote about.
There is a
brief write up about the author on the back of the first edition of Fifty Years
Fly Past as can be seen below. Note his
claim to fame of being spanked by Wilbur Wright!
Wilbur Wright
was one of the two Wright brothers, who were effectively, the fathers of
aviation. Wilbur died in 1912, whereas his
brother, Orville Wright, died in 1948 and lived to see the huge advances made in
aviation in that first half-century. (You
can read more about the Wright brothers here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers)
SHORT SORTIES (1950)
BIGGLES AND IN THE BLUE
RETURN TO THE MAIN W.E. JOHNS PAGE