The Biggles and associated WE Johns fandom has a wonderfully dedicated set of fans who can tell you absolutely everything about things like when things were published and what edition your book is :-D. And as for the aversion to the word 'said', this is entirely responsible for the fact that my son uses the word 'ejaculated' as a normal dialogue tag when writing stories in class...

And completely agree about The Gleam in the North, it's a gorgeous book in many ways, really odd in others, and not really anything that makes sense as a sequel to FotH, but it does make me cry when I read it too.